Disappearing Destinations

NORTH AMERICA United States Appalachia Summer was clinging to southern West Virginia halfway through September. It was still warm, but the really stagnant days had passed. There was a breeze, and the hardwood trees along the Coal River's banks had already begun their autumn show. Bill Currey and his buddies were moving their five kayaks slowly downriver on an eight-mile stretch in the Kanawha Valley. Beneath a baby-blue sky they bobbed and weaved through some light white water, occasionally pulling over to fish in some of the deep pools that form behind bedrock boulders. Currey, now with a snowy beard, has been plying the Coal River and its tributaries since his boyhood days in St. Albans, thirteen miles from the capital, Charleston. As president of the Coal River Group, a nonprofit focused on cleaning up and promoting the river, he is so thrilled to unveil his river that he's willing to divulge some of its secrets. But not too many. "That's a great fishing float. On an eight-mile trip we were catching, on any given day, about a fish per mile," he says. They reeled in a smallmouth bass, a walleye, and some Kentucky spotted bass. ("When you catch one, they get up on their tails and dance," says Currey.) "I can't be saying any more about fishing there or my buddies'll shoot me." The Coal is made up of three branches-the Big, Little, and Lower Coal rivers-each stretching more than thirty miles. The Big and Little legs have their headwaters up over three thousand feet in the sandstone ridges of the Coal River, Cherry Pond, Guyandotte, and Kayford mountains. The Coal River in all drains about eight hundred square miles of West Virginia's rugged, rolling mountains. When the tributaries from those peaks come together, the river is at first rough and narrow but then opens up into smooth water that would welcome any beginning paddler. All one hundred miles of the river are included on the Walhonde Water Trail. The Walhonde was recently designated as the only river trail entirely within the state boundaries of West Virginia. It's the result of four years of faith and backbreaking labor by the Coal River Group. There are nineteen marked put-in sites along the river, and no matter which section you pick, you're in for a taste of legendary Appalachia. "On the upper ends it's more like a creek where the trees practically envelop it. It's so shady and the water is clear," Currey says. The traffic on the river is so light, and some of the communities so isolated, that river-runners themselves will often become the attraction. "People don't walk outside their back door and see bright-colored kayaks going by every day," says Currey. "So when we do go by some of the more isolated areas, kids will come out and wave from their yards and ask, 'Where'd you get them pretty boats at?' That area is so virgin in so many ways. It kind of blows you away." Appalachia is still marked by such communities, spread out along the Coal River and beyond, where the word "stranger" has no meaning and where English and Scotch-Irish ballads plucked out on a dulcimer, banjo, or fiddle are still heard. Atop heavily misted peaks, purple monkshood and trumpet creeper bloom lavishly. Huckleberries, edible violets, peppermint, and sassafras wait to be sampled, and in antithetically named "hollows," fox and opossum roam and sourwood honey flows. West Virginia has historically been a land of locals, not of tourists, but that's beginning to change. Tourism is offering some much-needed economic diversity to the state where coal was once king. While mining no longer employs many of its residents, it's still environmentally devastating-particularly in the southwestern part of the state-and politically powerful. Locals like Currey believe that if given the chance, responsible tourism could be the area's "Lisagor, Kimberly is the author of 'Disappearing Destinations', published 2008 under ISBN 9780307277367 and ISBN 0307277364.