If you can get your hands on a good relief map of the central Appalachian region, and in our particular case the Winston-Salem quadrangle at the 1:250,000 scale, you can get a sense of the magnitude of the awesome array of mountains and valleys we call home. This is a good place to start, to begin your understanding of Appalachia. Any current view of our rounded ridges and dark hollows tends to stir the heart; and it is the antiquity of these mountains that draw us to them. But they were not always so serene…
Our earth has gone through some unimaginable changes. As millennia passed the tectonic plates ground together or ripped apart and the land reacted; folded and crushed and upthrust, blasted with magma from the core, our Appalachian Mountains once looked much different than they do today. If you want an approximation of where we started take a look at the Teton Range; but remember, our Appalachians were higher—perhaps five miles tall at one time—and the passing time, with the gentle rain and breeze brought them down.
Time manifests itself in many ways. Rocks become soil, timber lives and dies, animal and bird species change from one hollow to the next, from one year to the next. The river cuts and takes away, or carries and deposits, all in the same breath. Long before human eyes fell on this land it was covered with vegetation we cannot imagine and animals we know only from their fossils. Our rivers, so serene and gentle, were once raging cataracts blasting down the cliffs and grinding sand from granite. The weather and the climate (two different things, in case you did not know), always different, year to year, decade to decade, eon to eon. Change; destruction; renewal: over and over and over. And all powered by the energy machine of life, the Sun.
What we know of the Appalachian land is but a glimpse of a sliver of time, through the writings of the first European settlers, a period of only the last 400 years. In geologic terms this is not even the single beat of a heart. The true story is written in the rock, in the outcrops on the tops of the mountains; the cooling lava, the layers standing upright, the minerals compacted between those layers. We are moving in time, we and the land; and this makes the land a living thing, just as we are also living.
In God’s infinite wisdom this place came to be; and our people came to find it.
