I think I first saw the Blackwater Canyon and Falls when I was about 8 or 9 years old. I was living in Buckhannon then, and my family and a small herd of their bridge club friends decided serendipitously to drive up to Blackwater Falls for Sunday lunch. Church was left in the dust. This happened quite a bit with these folks. Always a whim that would result in a caravan headed off to God-only-knows-where. People used to do things like that in those days.

I remember this trip mostly in images and sensations. Dining at the lodge at a big round table with a scenic view of the canyon. Something that was very tasty that seemed to go with the view. Like I was ingesting the scenery. I may have been a little sleepy, I don’t know. But ever since then there is always a fleeting hint of that tempting flavor on my lips when I am roaming around the canyon. Funny, I think maybe it was fried chicken or french fries.

Anyway, after walking back up from the falls, I have a consciousness of people straggling a few at a time out onto a rock somewhere which seemed to project itself over the chasm. My father held my hand, I believe. My gestalt of that moment is of a late spring day and everywhere the canyon is clean swept clear and the plunging timbered slopes and brindled gray rock faces seem almost lucent, ready to jump out at me. In the far distance, specks of turkey vultures heave and ride up on swells of wind which seem to billow from the guts of the canyon. And a pervasive, ineffable silence over everything. An inviting and unsearchable emptiness which envelops even the hissing river below.

In another place, on a June morning about four decades ago the legendary walker, Colin Fletcher, stood on the lip of the Grand Canyon many months before he decided to take his first cautious step down into his solo "walk through time". He wrote later of this split second of first encounter that he "¼heard the silence; felt it like something solid, face to face.* A silence in which the squawk of a Blue Jay was sacrilege. A silence so profound that the whole colossal chaos of rock and space and color seemed to have sunk beneath it and to lie there cut off, timeless." I think that it was the same thing for him as it was for me at the Blackwater on that day when I was nine years old. A geography you settle down into, almost without realizing it, which after a while becomes a permanent expansion of your boundaries.

This silence was Fletcher’s most loyal companion throughout his whole journey along the mid-escarpment of the canyon, from one end to the other. I doubt that I will ever match Colin Fletcher’s feat . But I did walk the old road through the Black Water Gorge for the first time last May during the Conservancy’s Spring Review with a bunch of other travelers and a very well informed leader (I wish I could remember his name now.) I took in the easy going observations he made along the way about the geology, biota, and cultural history (the beehive of coke ovens, especially fascinating), like a hungry, hibernation starved bear. We passed by Pendleton Creek and other cascades tumbling end over end from the upper layers of the canyon. We lazed around by one of the falls and gorged on the lunch prepared by Sirianni’s. We had juicy, irreverent West Virginia trail conversations, and I had a very searching parley with a young woman from Washington, D.C., a computer programmer, who was seriously writing nature literature, bringing a balance to her information age career. I learned about limestone slickensides. And, of course, there was the ever present background rush of the Blackwater through the woods, which every now and then came into view when the trail sidled up near it.

A real decent kind of happiness, as poet Robert Creeley would say.

I have poked around the canyon backpacking and skiing and hurrying down for a look at the falls for more years than I care to admit. But I had never hiked through the canyon. This was a first, and it completed a larger picture of the canyon’s environs for me. I plan to repeat the trip quite soon.

Now although I am pretty sure that I will always fall far short of achieving the off the charts high of Fletcher’s Grand Canyon penetration, I think, as I have suggested, that I can pretty nearly match his experience when it comes to rim gazing around the Blackwater. You name it. Lindy Point, the lawn in back of the Lodge, and any number of jutting overhangs around the perimeter of the canyon where you can work your way out to. Places where I have plopped down my buttocks for a discourse with the SILENCE.

Now here is one way I have found that I can really get the canyon into my system: I pick a crag with a hearty outlook. I stroll out there very early in the morning or late in the evening to avoid too many gawkers and lens clickers and anyone else who might think that I’ve done gone roun’ the bend. I bring along my Taos leather drum. I carry it carefully and very respectfully. I find a place on the rocks where it looks like I can root myself and then settle myself down. I light my smudge stick and wave the smoke over my body and over the drum. I begin with the Heart Beat. daDah¼ daDah¼daDah¼ daDah. Subdued and steady and slow and always in time. I send it out into the gape and space below me where the river threads its way along like a thin dark vein. I keep the beat. I get louder, and the echo of the drum resonates everywhere until it is the very heartbeat of the canyon that I hear. Nothing else. I and the canyon and the drum are of one throb, one rise and fall.

Then I am in motion. I am lifting. Floating over the deep fissure, staring down into its beckoning deeps. I shift in an instant to the Eagle Beat. DahDahDahDahDahDahDahDahDah! in rapid staccato. I am spiraling into the center of 4-5 million years of history¼¼.

Now segue to the lodge a few minutes before the conservancy banquet last spring. On the back lawn chatting with some folks while we are taking in the canyon from the corners of our eyes. Beyond us, above the clearing, vortices of insects hover, probably Midges, pulsing in the glint of the sunset, and get sliced clean though every now and then by squadrons of swallows. The shimmering bugs seem to be rising on drafts right out of the abyssal yawn of the darkening canyon.

This whole place is just ripe with eternal, untethered longings.

Blackwater Canyon is a thing midway in the cosmos. At least on a par with, or perhaps a bit more heady than other eastern cuts like, say, the Cheat River Canyon, the New River Gorge, Pine River Canyon, and Ausable Chasm. It is not Yosemite, the aforementioned Grand Canyon, or the Quadisha Gorge in Lebanon. But what makes the Blackwater Canyon unique, I have always thought, is an indefinable quality, which at the same time, defines it. And that is that it is a domain of upwelling. There are certain terrains which seem to emanate this rush of spirit and energy from the core. Historically, people have always recognized these special provinces of animate contact. And the Blackwater Canyon is one of them, I believe. It is a palpable feeling. The Blackwater is a balance point on the earth, an Axis Mundi, around which we somehow must keep whirling to know that we are alive.

It is a vital organ.

But taking flight like this in a region of such overwhelming grace will soon become a difficult, if not an impossible, thing to pull off when half or more of the timber is gone and then very possibly is replaced by an upper class shantytown of condominiums on the 3000 acre South Rim. An intrusion, which to me, and obviously to most other Conservancy members, that will more or less blast away, like a well aimed mortar, the whole central aesthetic spine of the canyon, and most likely some more of the vestiges of rare and endangered species along with it,. This is not just purist whining - a moldering archdruid trying to hold onto some fragile and furtive innocence of the past. Not when it comes to the Blackwater Canyon. I’m way beyond that stuff. This is dread. It’s about losing stone and substance, a hunk of the blood and bone of what makes life worth the living of it in West Virginia. And if this maiming is allowed to occur, others like it are will surely follow. It will only be a matter of time.

Which now gets me to the Conservancy’s grand dream of a Blackwater Canyon National Park.

It would be difficult here for me to add anything substantial to the factual case which has already been stunningly presented in the Voice. The article in the August edition [see The Highlands Voice, August 1999] by Jason Halbert of Heartwood’s Appalachian Restoration Campaign about what is at stake in terms of land use values and how the National Park could be configured was especially convincing and informative. But if I might be allowed a little copy space, for whatever it might be worth, I would like to throw in my two cents on what seems to me may be the currents of some broader meanings which run through this effort.

In addition to the outstanding recreational, economic, and biospheric benefits which would most certainly accrue as a result of establishing a national park, I think that there is a more encompassing intangible framework which contains all of this – and is perhaps the unconscious drive which keeps so many people going full tilt on this project: It is a mythic thing.

One of the functions of myth is to keep us grounded, in check, to remind us not to take the gifts of the planet for granted. Because it seems that the human brain, after the invention of tool use, has taken on some real runaway habits, causing all sorts trouble. Without a publicly declared reverence for places like the Blackwater, without leaping into their deep mythic spaces, we seem to become Sorcerer’s Apprentices, really letting things go amok in short order.

To wit, the Alleghenies, and West Virginia in particular, is a region with an incomparable biotic and geological booty, which has been essentially up for grabs for the last 100 years or so. And despite the loud clamoring of timber and coal interests to the contrary, the visual, cultural, medical, and ecological evidence of damage keeps on slowly piling up -- ridge by ridge, stream by steam, valley by valley, until what we may finally be left with is -- in Thomas Wolfe’s words – "a weary unbright cinder". A squalor of soil erosion, fouled streams, and dual lane highways that might as well have been built on the moon.

Everything that is not under State Park protection or the Wilderness and Wild and Scenic Rivers Act’s lock and key is vulnerable to dismantling. And even then, as we have painfully seen in the case of Blackwater Falls State Park, there is no security for adjacent territory, no safe "buffer zones." And maybe the acceptable tolerance levels for environmental impact have been ratcheted down a few notches due to laws and regulations, but nonetheless the work of subjugation goes on. It will just take a bit longer, that’s all. But then who cares, anyway, if it gives some folks some more time to buy that new truck or satellite dish. Forget the future generations. Who gives a hoot about them anyway?

Given this baleful history then, to me, the initiative to create a Blackwater Canyon National Park, spearheaded by the Conservancy, is one the boldest efforts yet to bring about some kind of balance to wholesale plundering of the Alleghenies.

For if Allegheny Wood Products’ intrusion into sacred canyon land is the ultimate symbolic insult to the landscape, then the Conservancy’s drive to set aside so conspicuous a region as the Blackwater Canyon as a National Park is equally emblematic of the opposite impulse -- to usurp the monstrous ecological fate we have concocted for ourselves in the Twentieth Century. A real potent symbol of a critical course correction, a tonic for a sidetracked mindset, a portal to a new time, a challenge to change ruthless disregard for land and people into thoughtful, spiritually informed caring. A sweeping ahead to draw us into a millennium of economic and cultural sustainability. Creating a Blackwater Canyon National Park is an act of placing us out in front of that curve.

We need beacons. And what better place in the country than in West Virginia where the opposite poles of profiteering individualism and community bond with the meaning of geography and place are so starkly contrasted. That’s why it’s so important to go on with a big head of steam toward this vision. So we can assure the ongoing mythos of this canyon, this domain, this work of art and water and wind, this testing place of raw, unbridled wills, this dialogue with forever. The ripple effect could be enormous.

And this brings me finally to a coda. Specifically, to Robert Frost. In a lecture once he wryly observed that, "The utmost of ambition is to lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of."

Bringing into being a Blackwater Canyon National Park would be just like that, I think -- lodging a good poem.

And it will be damned hard to get rid of.

* Read all about it in The Man Who Walked Through Time by Colin Fletcher. Alfred A. Knopf. New York. 1968