“May your year be filled with moments of awe, reasons to smile, lessons that come gently, and adventures you’ll never forget.” ~ Lori Deschene
up top
Shero and I made a few deliveries to West Liberty today. It’s always good to see our people, even though there’s never enough time for real and proper visits. Still, we enjoyed the friends and family we had the chance to see, and finished our day coming back by way of the Cave Run Dam. Back in November, I was researching the Licking Valley Courier from the 1960s and came across many articles devoted to Cave Run–on the northern edge of Morgan County–and Paint Creek–on the southeastern edge of Morgan County. The Army Corps of Engineers was quite eager to follow the TVA model of damming mountain rivers for flood control and water reserves. There was plenty of pushback to this government initiative, and rightly so, as it displaced hundreds of families from their long-held mountain homesteads, destroyed untold ancient artifacts and natural geological features, and became a holding pond for contaminated waters from strip-mining runoff. To my knowledge, the proposed damming of Red River Gorge was the only proposal that did not come to fruition. Every once in a while, some numbskull will propose it again, but it keeps being shut down, thankfully. I’m not a fan of man-made dams anywhere, as they disrupt the natural order of fish and wildlife and can become petrie dishes for contaminants. They’re helpful for recreation, and some areas reap financial benefits from that, but overall, Eastern Kentucky’s profits from lake recreation have not been enough to sustain the region enough to make up for the people and land that were displaced. I’m sure the Army Corps of Engineers would disagree, citing flood-control advantages. Those advantages only help those downstream of the dams. As the climate warms and extreme flooding is increasing (I’m looking at you, Letcher, Knott, Perry, and Breathitt Counties for starters), the dams don’t matter. In any case, the dam was quite low today in anticipation of the spring rains, and back in the early to mid-1980s, near the Morgan County line, you could see the old road when the lake got this low. I haven’t seen the old road in several years now that it is sufficiently covered by sludge. That sludge is a bit like asbestos: it’s not harmful so long as it’s undisturbed, i.e., it doesn’t go airborne. I was four years old when Cave Run was completed, and I don’t remember the terrain before it was filled with water. I would have liked to have known the land. But ya know what? What’s done is done, and the water is beautiful, too. Hero fished more times on Cave Run than he could ever count. My homies and I frequented the waters more times than I remember, either. One outstanding memory was when a bunch of us were at the bridge at Poppin Rock at the foot of Debbie Hill, and Kim’s ex-husband, Dave, and a few other boys jumped off it repeatedly. The water was still low enough at that time (1983) that Dave hit the bottom of the lake bed on a couple of his jumps. That’s when I decided not to try it. Good memories though. Cave Run makes for a beautiful drive, and we enjoyed stopping atop the dam for a few minutes to take it all in.
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