By: Naomi Martin, serving at the Seneca Rocks Discovery Center
I’m currently serving a split position between the Seneca Rocks Discovery Center in the Cheat-Potomac ranger district, and the Greenbrier ranger district with AFNHA.
It’s taken me the two-ish months since I arrived on Labor Day evening in West Virginia to start to get a sense of what this position is, really. But though I feel my job description is something I’m still trying to grow into and maximize for my sites (I’m quite fond of both ranger districts and their respective counties already,) from the first time I tumbled down the road into the Potomac Highlands of West Virginia, I’ve had a very strong sense of the character of this place, and that there are things she has to teach me.
West Virginia, like Virginia, has a strong sense of old-world roots and distinct cultural and geographical characteristics. It’s not a generic place. You have to be affected by her, one way or another.
I’ve broken several hearts in the Seneca Rocks Visitor Center when tourists ask me explicitly about the West-Virginia John Denver connection: the song was more probably written about the western portion of my home state, Virginia, rather than West Virginia. But at this point there isn’t much chance in detangling WV from Country Roads. The tagline for WV’s huge tourism campaign is literally ‘almost heaven.’ But more than that, I understand the deliberately orchestrated synergy between John Denver’s ballad and the feeling that West Virginia stirs in those with open eyes.
This state does feel like she mothers me with her mountains and view sheds. She’s our own Mountain Mama.
My first month in the visitor center was spent doing all those awkward steps you must do to get comfortable in a space and your role in that space- which key, which button, oh-god-did-I-fold-the-flag-right, and trying to absorb from the rangers the answers to the million dollar questions about our hike up to the rocks, the drive to Dolly Sods, the viewshed on Spruce Knob, and the occasional demand for directions to Davis or Canaan Valley.
Most common complaint from absolutely everyone: I can’t get GPS to load!
(Cue self control to not say the smart alec thing that anyone who’s lived in West Virginia for more than a fortnight will be thinking after that comment.)
The Greenbrier ranger district portion of my job description has been harder to quantify.
My Supervisor at the Greenbrier office in Bartow, Jack, told me that he wanted me to develop interpretive signs for the Mower Tract as my major project over at greenbrier. A chunk of land up on Cheat Mountain in Pocahontas County, Mower Tract, named after a mining bigwig’s surname, was the site of major surface mining in the earlier decades of the 20th century. There’s several key points to the conservation work on Cheat that the public must have the ability to learn about going up on Cheat to recreate.
When you’re driving the dirt roads up on the mountain and see the conservation efforts of the Forest Service- dead trees strewn about, bulldozers, raw chunks of earth- it looks like the wrong things are happening. How would the public know that the trees there now aren’t going to allow the ecosystem and animals of the mountain to thrive in another half a century, or that they aren’t actually thriving now, without an explanation?
Indeed, there are those who don’t necessarily approve of the work the Forest Service has undertaken to reverse engineer the reforestation work that the mining companies did fifty years ago. Because the soil was so compacted from decades of service mining, only a couple types of trees and shrubs were subsequently grown, all non-natives with almost no long-term benefits to the ecosystem up on Cheat. But just looking at the mining company planted forests on the mountain, a non-ecologist eye, like mine, certainly wouldn’t know those healthy-looking forests are problematic.
I have a writing and design background, but exactly zero knowledge about impersonal interpretative work. That’s something I learned last month: most Forest Service interpretation actually doesn’t happen in person. Personal interp would be living history, guided tours, campfire talks, and answering folk’s questions out and about on a trail system. Impersonal interpretation, on the other hand, involves informative objects that disseminate information, including signs, museum presentations, and pamphlets.
So as the Discovery Center at Seneca Rocks closes up until the newness of spring, and I settle down with a cup of tea in my little bunk house, I ask myself, where do I get started? What would constitute a successful start this project? And, have I actually ‘done anything’ yet here?
I’ve had all kinds of off-kilter adventures, to be certain:
I’ve dressed up as Woodsy owl, pressed apple cider at Sites Homestead on the property of the Discovery Center, captured one of best sunset picture of my entire life thus far up on Spruce Knob (which I’ll include below, so you might judge for yourself), and took an official tour of Cheat Mountain led by CASRI- Central Appalachian Spruce Restoration Initiative.
I’ve had more than one friend over the years tell me I’m akin to a forest dryad, and it’s true that there’s almost nothing I love more than trees. My latest tree love, thanks to the Greenbrier district and the learning I’ve done there, is red spruce trees, upon whom the good health of many Appalachian ecosystems and several species of animals depend.
Catch me sometime knocking on your neighborhood doors: ma’am, do you have a minute to discuss the importance of planting and preserving red spruce?
Many puzzle pieces to the interpretation that I want to actualize up on Cheat Mountain are in my notes and my images, and the conversations I’ve had with rangers and ecologists and even other AmeriCorps members. Like my cup of tea, it’s a matter of being patient as things steep.
I like hard and fast systems. I like ‘here is what you do and here is how you do it,’ kind of directions. Not knowing the process of Cheat’s interpretation before diving in makes me distinctly uncomfortable. And that’s good. Our comfort zones are compacted soils. What we really need to support our personal and professional growth doesn’t tend to grow there.
So until Spring, cheers to being up close and uncomfortable under the reassuring gaze of Seneca’s rocks.
