Crimes Against Nature: The Many Uses of the Daniel Boone National Forest
By Kathy Dobie
First appeared in Harper’s Magazine, July 2008
Any crime you find in the big city you’ll find here in the Daniel Boone National Forest, but no big-city police officer gets the chance to deal with such a variety of offenses: assault, murder, rape, turkey-baiting, timber theft, drug trafficking, body-dumping, ginseng poaching, looting of archaeological sites, DUIs and off-road-vehicle violations, illegal camping, fishing and hunting out of season. Marijuana is grown on the mountainsides in the southern half of the Daniel Boone, and every fall, especially at Halloween, the woods are set afire. With fewer and fewer wild places left, less and less “outdoors,” many more Americans flock to the national forests, bringing their own ideas of “wilderness” with them. Aren’t they free to do anything here? Isn’t this dark wood a place where you are out from under rules, prying eyes, the law itself? And aren’t these cliffs and creeks full of treasure—wild game, morels, gas, coal, timber, and ancient arrowheads—there for the taking by anyone with enough pluck and cleverness? Give Americans a few hundred thousand acres of untrammeled woods and we all become pioneers again.
I came down to the Daniel Boone to write about crime in the forest. (They say on the forest here, not in the forest, perhaps because the Department of Agriculture, which runs the National Forest System, thinks of trees as crops, so you’re “on the farm,” a tree farm.) When I arrived it was April, and the forest had yet to leaf out, although the redbud was in bloom. Without its thick upholstery of green, the forest was essentially undressed, and I could see how mountainous the terrain was, how the trees congregate in the hollows, climb steep cliffs, and stand stiffly along the camel-colored ridge tops like the hair of a frightened cartoon character. Turkey-hunting season had begun, and the fire season was in its last wild weeks. Soon everything would be too green and too moist to burn. (The Daniel Boone is known in the eastern United States for its fires, 80 percent of which are set by arsonists.) The marijuana growers were just setting out their seedlings, and locals were still gathering morels from the woods. Rattlesnakes and copperheads had begun to stir, but it was still cool enough that they would crawl onto the paved roads to warm themselves. Pink and white flowers, some shaped like stars, some like turtle heads, speckled the forest floor.
The more than 700,000-acre Daniel Boone National Forest cuts north to south across eastern Kentucky. On a map it looks like a leg thrust forward in the act of walking west, the thigh just a few miles from the Ohio and West Virginia borders, the foot stepping on Tennessee. That leg accounts for about 482,000 acres of the forest, and it is divided into three ranger districts—the Cumberland, the London, and the Stearns. Behind the leg is another 145,840 acres of forest that make up the Redbird District, named after a Cherokee chief who was murdered by white men, robbed of his furs, and then thrown into a river that would also, one day, be named after him. Oak, pine, red maple, and hickory form the skyline of the forest, and beneath them you can find beech, bigleaf magnolia, flowering dogwood, sassafras, mountain laurel, tulip poplar, thick mazes of rhododendron—otherwise known as “hell slick” for its impenetrability—and green or whizzer brier, “living barbed wire,” as one Forest Service biologist described it. Beneath the mountain laurel, which flowers under the oaks, are ferns and black cohosh and sourwood (when you chew it, your teeth turn green, but it has a refreshing tang), trillium, and countless wildflowers. The forest is also home to 233 species of mammals—including white-tailed deer, red and gray foxes, elk and raccoons-eastern box turtles, wild turkeys, and fish and insects and amphibians and reptiles. Twenty-two endangered or threatened species live in the Daniel Boone, more than in any other Appalachian forest, including the bald eagle, three kinds of bats, various freshwater mussels (one with the lovely name of little-wing pearlymussel), fish such as the dusky-tail darter, and plants like the whitehaired goldenrod, which grows nowhere else in the world. Venomous copperheads and rattlesnakes abound in the forest; they say you can smell a rattlesnake (the scent of cucumber) and of course hear the rattle, but a copperhead, which is the burnished brown and gold of dead leaves, has no scent and makes no noise. A woman who lives in the Redbird District laughed when I told her my plan to take a walk up in the woods and along the creek that rushes behind her house. “Watch out for the rattlesnakes!” she called out merrily as I left. “And the copperheads! And the bears!” The people who live in and around the forest may prefer their flower and vegetable gardens and their lawns, but they feel strongly possessive toward a forest that, in many senses, is no longer theirs.
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The Stearns and Redbird districts in the south, and much of the London District, lie within the federally designated xvAppalachia High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTA), and all summer National Guard helicopters roam the skies, searching for pot patches. Law-enforcement officers and national guardsmen rappel out of Black Hawks into the plots on eradication missions. Local cops and forest police sneak into the woods and set up surveillance, hoping to catch the growers. Nameless Army troops go with them. (Literally nameless. I spent time with two such camouflaged figures who were accompanying a Forest Service agent on a trip into a pot patch and called them “Hey.” “We’re just green figments of your imagination,” one said to me.) Since the Appalachia HIDTA came into existence, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms have set up offices in the town of London, and the FBI has expanded its local operations. This has become a good place to make a living as a criminal-defense lawyer.
But up north, where the feds are not fighting the drug war, only three law-enforcement officers patrol the Cumberland District, an area of about 183,000 acres. Recently, two districts were combined to create the Cumberland, and now there’s only one district ranger for the area instead of two, one wildlife biologist, one archaeologist, and no backwoods country ranger at all. Although attacks and threats against Forest Service employees have increased more than fivefold in the past decade, the Forest Service as a whole has lost almost a third of its total patrol force since 1993 and now has, on average, one law officer for every 291,000 acres and every 733,000 annual visitors. Comparing the forest areas under the Appalachia HIDTA with those outside, it becomes clear that although the drug war is well financed, the Forest Service, which is in charge of protecting visitors to the forest and protecting the forest from those visitors, is being starved.
Tourists flock to the Cumberland District. Cave Run Lake sits in the top half, a boaters’ and fishermen’s paradise, and the police must deal with moneyed doctors and lawyers who think the law is something applied to someone else. In the bottom half of the Cumberland lies the Red River Gorge Geological Area, a wilderness of towering cliffs, steep inclines, rock shelters, and natural arches that have been carved out by water and wind over seventy million years. The Red River snakes through the floor of the canyon, and giant, flat-topped stone outcroppings stud the landscape: Half Moon Ridge, Revenuer’s Rock, Cloud Splitter, and Chimney Rock. Every summer people fall from these cliffs. Most often they are drunk, stumble over to the cliff in the middle of the night to relieve themselves, and topple over. Very few people survive falls in the gorge. Sometimes they’re lucky and hit the thick scrawls of rhododendron first. One man fell while defecating off the cliff’s edge. He was squatting with his pants down when the roll of toilet paper he’d brought with him tumbled off the cliff. He grabbed for it. That man was one of the few to survive his fall, and as he was carried out he asked his rescuers if they had found his roll of toilet paper, thus entering the forest’s rescue lore, along with the dog that survived a fall at Half Moon Rock and the dead man they winched out of the same crevice, his bones breaking as he was pulled. Weekend campers, hikers, fishermen, hunters, and bikers come to the gorge from Lexington, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio, for which it is the closest wilderness. Rock climbers come from all over the world and apply their own names to the cliffs and crags: “Global Village,” “Funk Rock City,” “Bob Marley Crag,” “Lunatic Fringe.”
Kenneth Scarberry works the southern end, a single officer covering about 70,000 acres. Scarberry, who is in his mid-thirties, has been a Forest Service cop since 2000. He’s wide-bodied and muscular, with thick, olive-hued skin and a neatly trimmed mustache and beard. He chews tobacco and likes heavy metal. He shows me how to unlock the rifle from the gun rack inside his truck in case we run into serious trouble, hands me the Luger in his side compartment, and teaches me how to load it. When I ask him what kind of crime he deals with, he says, “Rapes, drugs, marijuana, ecstasy, several meth labs, assault, attempted murder, thefta lot of theft-car break-ins, snakebites. I do rescues. During the summer, I do at least five a month. A lot of ’em die. I rappel over the cliff and hook them up to baskets and raise them up. Or lower them down to the bottom and take them out that way. I’ve had several suicides—they love to look over the cliffs. I’ve had them shoot themselves. Drive their cars out the trails and be looking over the cliff and have the carbon monoxide come in on them. Jump. Leave a note.” He’s a native of the area (as are many of the law-enforcement officers here), an avid deer hunter, an Army veteran who served in the first Gulf War, and a former city cop. He admits to seeing the world in black and white, hates drugs, supports the death penalty, and has no sympathy for any criminal he’s ever met. Still, there’s nothing arrogant about him, nothing mean. He’s calm and amiable with everyone we run across.
On two twelve-hour shifts with Scarberry (he often works even longer hours, especially in the summer), I tag along as he checks for signs of off-road vehicles going where they’re not supposed to (churning up woods, eroding hills, spoiling streams), responds to a report of a fallen hiker (bruises, maybe a punctured lung, but otherwise fine) and another report of eight or nine drunken kids harassing other tourists (the county cops make the arrests), arranges for a group of twenty-year-olds to pay a camping fee (they were going to stiff the woman who runs the campground), stops a forlorn-looking hitchhiker and asks for his I.D., runs the plate of what looks like an abandoned car, and checks the fishing licenses of four different men, all of them hoping to catch bluegill. We had to get to two of the fishermen by walking through a slippery bit of water, and when we reached them I could tell they were country boys, not just because they were fishing in their cowboy boots but because of their barely concealed resentment as soon as they saw Scarberry’s uniform.
At night we check camping sites, illegal and otherwise. Driving along one of the interior roads, Scarberry stops the truck and turns off the motor. We listen quietly. Sometimes we hear nothing but the tree frogs trilling, so Scarberry will hoot and holler—if there are guys out there, particularly young guys who are drinking, they will always hoot and holler back. Other times he spots the far-off flickering of a fire. Many of these people are camped legally, but he’ll drop by the campsite, see if everyone’s okay, let them know there’s an officer on patrol, sometimes using the visit as an occasion to gauge how much drinking is going on or to pat people down for drugs and weapons. (This sort of policing is one reason fewer people are falling off cliffs in the gorge. Falls have gone from about eighty a year to twenty.) We also hike into a couple of rock shelters where people are camping illegally. Twelve thousand years ago, humans began inhabiting the rock shelters in the Red River Gorge, and their story is written in the rocks (nutting holes, carvings of bird tracks, human footprints) and in the soil (animal bones and arrowheads, pottery shards, flint chips, bits of basketry, and human remains). In the gorge area alone, there are thousands of archaeological sites—and almost all of them have been looted, or fouled by campers and rock climbers.
It’s a crystal-clear night, still a little chilly, and a group of college students from Ohio have built a roaring fire in the Big Daddy Shelter. A Kentucky man, his nephew, and his nephew’s two friends are having a quiet bachelor party at another shelter that we reach after a steep climb down in the dark. The light from their fire is cast out over the forest, making the trees appear to shudder. While Scarberry writes him a ticket, the uncle, who goes by the name Speedo, calls us “slinky devils in the woods,” and then tries to cover his anger with a laugh. He used to come here thirty years ago, and “it was a lot freer then.”
We climb to the top of another shelter, pulling ourselves up by grabbing the trunks of trees, hoping no copperheads are nesting in the roots, and find a large group of people have set up camp there, nothing between them and a sky thick with stars. The spokesman for the group, a man who towers over Scarberry, is incensed. He tells Scarberry he spent all day cleaning the site up after the mess left by previous campers, and then swept every foot of it with a pine-needle branch. He can’t believe that he, of all people, a man who considers himself one of the “stewards of the earth,” is being hassled by a forest cop. Why aren’t the cops chasing real criminals, he wonders aloud, people selling crack and molesting children? “Do you even know where the North Star is?” he asks me, his voice dripping with contempt.
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The main roads through the Daniel Boone cut rapidly in and out of Forest Service land. Although the trees, the underbrush, the wild turkeys flying upward with a great rush of wings, look the same, you’re on Forest Service land and then you’re not. Sometimes the boundary is indicated by a sign: YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE DANIEL BOONE NATIONAL FOREST. LAND OF MANY USES. But often there is only a marker—a slash of red paint on a tree—unreadable to the untrained eye. Individuals, families, whole communities, live “inside” the Daniel Boone. I saw a 125-acre farm surrounded by forest (no one was farming it anymore; three generations were living in a trailer; the farmhouse was windowless and sagging, the barn collapsing) and small patches of cleared land set in the middle of the woods with a hunting cabin or trailer house set up on them.
All of the eastern national forests are a patchwork of publicly and privately owned land. None have the unbroken expanses of forests in the West, where the first national forests were formed in the late 1800s from land already owned by the government. The Forest Service had no authority to buy land from private owners—which they would need to form forests in Appalachia until the Weeks Act was passed by Congress in 1911 in response to disastrous floods in the East caused, in part, by heavy deforestation. For each national forest, Congress has mandated a boundary line, called a proclamation boundary, within which the Forest Service can purchase land. The Daniel Boone has absorbed only a third of the land within its proclamation boundary, making it the most fractured of all the Appalachian forests.
The federal government didn’t begin to buy up acreage in Kentucky until the 1930s. Timber companies were the first to sell. Having already stripped the land, they were happy to get rid of property that wouldn’t see regrowth or profits for decades. Many other parcels were sold by coal, gas, and oil companies, but they held on to the mineral rights. These companies continue to operate in the Daniel Boone; in fact, there are outstanding rights on 40 percent of the forest acreage. The gas pumps, silvery blue piping with cranks and valves and wheels—pop up everywhere in the southern districts, and on rainy days the smell hangs heavily in the air. During the Depression, many poor farmers sold their property to the government for pennies an acre. There’s still resentment over those sales, and a lingering nostalgia for what was lost.
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While tramping through the forest, it is not unusual to come across a family cemetery—stones broken, names faded/or the foundations of a house, or a collapsed chimney. One afternoon I was driving with Johnny Faulkner, an archaeological technician for the forest, down a dirt-and-gravel Forest Service road, pines standing stiff as corpses on either side of us, as if they didn’t yet know they were dead, when suddenly we came upon tidy, shiny clumps of daffodils and the remains of an apple orchard another twenty yards or so into the forest. People had lived here once, cleared the land with axes and mules, built a house and farmed, and some woman who worked as hard as a mule herself had wanted a garden—daffodils and lilies, maybe rose of Sharon, just something pretty to tend. You might come across the remnants of a still— fragments of glass jars, galvanized buckets, crudely constructed beds where the moonshiners would sleep. You might find traces of a niter-mining site, holes drilled into the sandstone during the Civil War, or wooden boards from leaching vats. Or evidence of a Native American hunting camp from thousands of years ago. This is lived-in, worked-over land … still.
One morning, I go up in a helicopter from the Civil Air Patrol field in London with men hunting for pot patches. Harold Sizemore, a legendary spotter, rides shotgun. We are rechecking for some pot he found the other day, a tiny patch, but they want to show me how an operation might work. Before Harold went to work in the HIDTA, he was the deputy sheriff of Clay County, but he did his job too well, and he wasn’t reelected. He’s a tall, rangy-looking man with a soft, pleasant laugh and a self-effacing manner.
We’re flying over Laurel County, better known for meth labs than for marijuana farms, but that’s where they’ve found a patch that’s close to the road, so when I go in later with some of the drug cops who will eradicate the plants, I won’t have a long hike. Much of the work these units do is arduous: they often trek miles over mountainous terrain to get to a site, or rappel into pot patches from helicopters and chop down the plants. Then they and the plants are lifted out and set down on some plateau, and once the helicopter has landed, they board it again. Sometimes they will do five or six jumps in a day—and all of it in the sticky heat of summer and early fall.
Sizemore and the pilot scan the terrain below. They are looking for things that don’t belong, Harold explains: an odd hole in the forest canopy, a cluster of dead, leafless trees, a peculiar change in the thickness of the foliage, and a particular shade of green—nothing else in the forest is that hue, the drug cops tell me. Bob O’Neill, the commander of the Two Rivers Drug Task Force, an HIDTA team composed of Forest Service agents, national guardsmen, and local law enforcement, says that this green stands out to him as vividly as the orange on a hunter’s vest.
Marijuana cultivation is the forest crime that has gotten the most attention by far—from the federal government, from the media. Once, people made moonshine in these mountains; now they farm pot, playing the same cat-and-mouse game with the authorities. The counties that produce the most pot are among the poorest in the nation. The Appalachia HIDTA team is considered a highly successful crime-busting unit, but if you add up the amount of marijuana eradicated, the number of meth labs cleaned up, the drug arrests made, and the length of the prison sentences handed out, and compare them to the area’s illiteracy rates (48.4 percent, the highest in the nation), average individual income ($12,000), and morbidity rates (Appalachian Kentucky has the highest death rate in the nation from all cancers), it is clear that the government has fought the drug war and abandoned the people, ensuring that the drug war never ends.
Pot is Kentucky’s biggest cash crop, and most of it is grown on public land; the Daniel Boone led all national forests in marijuana eradication during the 1990s and again in 2003. The forest is the perfect place to grow pot because even if a patch is discovered, it can be difficult to connect it to the grower, and even if the grower is nabbed, the government has a harder time confiscating the grower’s house or land. “If the federal government can prove that you transported marijuana in your vehicle or you processed marijuana at your house, everything’s fair game,” says Hunter Payne, a criminal-defense lawyer who works out of London. “But many times, the people who grow it have absolutely nothing to confiscate. And you rarely ever see a fine because they just don’t have anything. I mean, there’s nothing to fine.” This part of the country still has a cash economy, perfect for the drug business. Store owners have traditionally let people run up credit all year, knowing they’ll be paid in the fall when the tobacco is harvested. The growing season is the same for marijuana.
Vietnam vets, returning home with a taste for weed and a knowledge of the mountains from their childhood, were among the first cultivators in the early Seventies. Until the feds came in, the growers pretty much operated with impunity. Corruption was rampant among local law enforcement, and in some counties you not only couldn’t get a pot conviction, you couldn’t even get an indictment. This was partly due to the close-knit nature of the communities that make up southern Appalachia, and some people just didn’t think marijuana cultivation was a crime. But once the feds arrived, the locals no longer could rely on passive law enforcement and friendly jurors. Drug cases that go to federal court instead of state court are much more likely to end in convictions, and the sentences are tougher.
Suddenly Harold Sizemore sees the pot patch, eight plants tucked into the forest, and the helicopter begins circling. What he spotted first was a small hole in the trees. Pot needs sunlight, so growers will either find a natural opening in the forest canopy and plant below it or create an opening by chopping down trees or girdling them and occasionally burning the area. It is the same way this land used to be cleared for farming tobacco or corn. When the cops started using aerial surveillance, and cases started going to federal court, where sentencing guidelines mandate a five-year minimum for growing a hundred plants or more, growers started planting in smaller patches, spread out through the woods. They paint their Miracle-Gro boxes, tools, and seed trays green. The smart ones wear masks when they tend their plots in case they’re under camera surveillance. They never go into the patch by the same route, and therefore leave little trace of their presence in the woods. They plant decoy fields—of ditchweed—for the cops to find. As soon as the cops catch on, the growers change their tactics, everyone getting smarter in the process. Over the past two decades, Kentucky pot has become more and more potent, with the THC levels now twice the national average, making it a very attractive crop.
The pot grown in Kentucky—a high-quality product that sells for $2,000 to $3,500 a pound—is exported to other states. But locals are moving away from marijuana farming. Meth and prescription pills are becoming the businesses of choice, and Kentucky juries have none of the reluctance to punish meth makers that they have shown toward marijuana growers. The old guys still cultivate pot, but it is hard work, and the young don’t want any part of it.
The copter lifts and begins to plow a straight line southeast toward Leslie County, in the heart of the Redbird District, the Wild West of the Daniel Boone. Soon, houses disappear, the terrain becomes more and more rugged, high peaks appear on the horizon, and everything below is thickly blanketed in trees.
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According to Forest Service brochures, the Redbird District has little to offer but a sixty-four-mile loop trail, used mostly by off-road vehicles. The only work to be had is a few jobs in small timber and mining outfits. The biggest employer is the state government. There is no tourist industry. In fact, on any given day, it’s probably safe to say there are more bears than tourists in the Redbird District, and only a handful of those. One has moved into a hollow in Hell-Fer-Sartain where she has terrorized a coal truck driver. “She came on over from Kingdom Come,” a woman told me, referring to the highest-altitude state park in Kentucky. And there’s another bear prowling the brand-new RV park in Bear Branch.
Most of the arson in the forest occurs in the Redbird District. These criminals are the hardest ones to catch. Gene Smithson, the special agent in the Daniel Boone, says that in the few cases they’ve been able to make, “It’s just retaliation. You go in and you take a guy’s marijuana cultivation site, take the crop away, and he retaliates.” Both the cops and the residents tell you not to walk in the woods in the Redbird because you could stumble onto a marijuana patch or a meth lab, and if the guy working the patch or the lab is there … well, people in Kentucky carry guns. Al Cornette, an artist living in the Red River Gorge area, is also a member of the Kentucky Native Plant Society, and he tells me that he and his fellow wildflower hunters have never surveyed the southern counties, though they’d like to. “Every time we thought about running through the woods in summertime or spring, we’d hit this, ‘Well, we’re gonna run into some pot grower, and he’s gonna shoot us.’ Some of them are Bubba kind of characters, and they won’t believe that a man is hunting for flowers.”
It is in the southern part of the forest that I hear jokes about rangers giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to rare woodpeckers and sentiments like “What good is a tree if you can’t cut it down?” Much of this anger stems from the fact that the feds own a lot of the land in these counties—80 percent of McCreary County in the Stearns District and at least a fifth of Leslie and Clay counties in the Redbird District—and pay next to no taxes on it. So there’s no funding for schools, policing, health care, sewage, water, or roads, and the residents can no longer make a living off the forest as they used to.
Bruce Lominac, a criminal-defense lawyer from McCreary County, says a whole people are being wiped out in this part of Kentucky. They simply can’t survive. Over lunch, Bruce tells me this story: “During elections they used to have what they call speakings. They would go to each precinct and the people who were running in that precinct would get up and make a little speech.
“So Bill Roberts was running for constable and Harry Vanover was his opponent, and Bill got to speak first. He said, ‘Ya’ll know me. You know I ain’t much. You know I ain’t never been much. You know I don’t ever want to be much. And if you don’t want much for constable, vote for me. If you want less, vote for Harry.”
Bruce explains, “But that said volumes about the philosophy around here: ‘I ain’t much, I ain’t never been much, and I ain’t gonna be much.’ I guarantee you that you’ll run into more of that here than other places you’ll go. ‘My daddy was never much, Grandma and Grandpa weren’t much, and there ain’t a whole lot of hope for me neither.’ And see, I blame part of that on the Daniel Boone National Forest, because we don’t have the economic benefit from it.”
It’s easy to learn how the local people feel about the Forest Service, harder to know what they think about the forest itself. “I’m just an outgoing person, and I don’t have no shy bone about it!” is how Kathy Crawford describes herself. She lives in Bear Branch, which sits in the middle of Leslie County, the heart of the Redbird District. The Forest Service was planning to build a road along the ridge behind her house and over Bear Branch creek. The road was being built for a private landowner who needed a road big enough for his coal trucks to pass one another, but the people who live directly under the ridge and along the creek were never informed of the plan by the Forest Service. It was only when Paul Lovelace of the environmental group Kentucky Heartwood went door-to-door telling people about the project that they found out, and then they began to write letters to the Forest Service, objecting. Months went by, but the Forest Service didn’t bother to respond. [As of April 2008, this project has been canceled.]
The people who live here love their creek. When I first visit, Kathy asks if I’ve seen “the waterfall”—a silvery sheet of water that drops off a slab of rock and is only about a foot high. This is not nature in a grand, awe-inspiring form but backyard beauty, the trees and hills you climbed as a child, the familiar music of birds and streams, the wild violets plucked in the spring and set on the table in a mason jar. There used to be crayfish in the creek, Kathy says; they caught them in baskets. Her father-in-law, a retired coaltruck driver who is dying of lung cancer, tells me you could drink straight out of the creek at one time, and how good the water was. Now everyone in Leslie County drinks bottled water, and there is no flavor to it.
If you follow the creek up behind the houses, you can see the edge of an old-growth forest that stands in the way of the proposed coal road. When Paul Lovelace and I take a hike back there, we find a shallow pond, a newly formed wetlands area, likely teeming with life, and hollowed-out trunks that bats and owls nest in. On the ridge above, an old coal mine that was never properly shut down or monitored is leaking acid, sending a neon-orange stream down the hillside and into the creek. Paul promised Kathy and her family he’d find a crayfish on our walk, and he did find … one. I heard the splosh of a single frog and then saw it kick off downstream.
After I returned to New York, Paul emailed me about his ongoing fight to stop the coal road from being built. “Today, over the phone, a Redbird District manager justified the Bear Branch project by saying the people who lived there had helped to strip the mountains for coal.” This exemplifies the Forest Service’s attitude toward the residents, which is both arrogant and punitive: You, too, plundered the land at one time, so stop complaining.
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The day Kenneth Scarberry caught the looters of the Sunny Shelter site, he was sitting in his vehicle on a Forest Service road, pulled off from the blacktop. He and some county sheriffs had set up a roadblock, looking for drunk drivers and drugs. It was Scarberry’s type of policing, “I’m still a traffic cop at heart,” he says, but he wasn’t feeling well that night and was thinking about going home. The other officers had stopped a car when a pickup truck approached from the opposite direction. Scarberry stopped it so that the driver wouldn’t run over the deputies. Looking inside, he saw two men and two open beers.
Patting down one of the men, William Blaisdell, he found three arrowheads in his pocket. “It didn’t click, you know, because I was stuck on the DUI and drugs at that time,” he says. In the bed of the truck he saw a shovel and a little axe, and he thought maybe they had been in the forest planting marijuana. Scarberry separated Blaisdell from his companion, Scott Johnson, and when the two men began to talk vaguely about wandering the woods and poking around in caves, it hit him: they had been digging for artifacts. He asked the men to take him back down to the site, and they agreed. He took photos, and then asked them to take him to their houses, and they agreed to that too. (When I met Scott Johnson later, and asked him if he thought there was too much law enforcement in the forest, he replied amiably, “No, no. They should be there. I mean, if they weren’t there, we wouldn’t have nothing left.”)
It is forbidden by law to dig on federal land, and looters can be prosecuted under the 1979 Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA), but they rarely are. The chances of catching someone digging in the Daniel Boone are tiny—hundreds of thousands of acres are patrolled by a handful of law-enforcement officers—and on the rare occasions looters are caught digging a site, they’re usually charged with only a misdemeanor, which makes it almost worthwhile to dig. As with marijuana cultivation, Kentucky juries have shown a reluctance to punish this kind of crime. Even Kentucky judges and prosecutors have trouble taking it seriously. Artifacts are a big business in this part of the state, and there’s a long tradition of digging, primarily for arrowheads or points (different weapon, same idea). You can dig on private land if the owner allows you, and in the spring you’ll see people walking through freshly plowed fields searching for arrowheads. Some diggers are amateur archaeologists, passionate hobbyists with extensive private collections; others dig primarily to sell their finds. One McCreary County man remembers that when he was a child, a store owner used to give children candy if they brought him a good arrowhead.
David Pollack, the archaeologist for the Kentucky Heritage Council, estimates that 90 percent of the 15,000 known prehistoric sites in the state have been damaged by looters. Looting is so rampant nationwide that the U.S. Geological Survey now omits archaeological sites from its topographical maps. But here in the Daniel Boone, the Red River Gorge Climbers Coalition routinely publishes locations of archaeological sites suitable for climbing, and the locals don’t need a map to make their way through the woods.
Although the ARPA statutes have been on the books for nearly thirty years, the very first cases from the Daniel Boone to be prosecuted didn’t occur until the past decade. This is a sign that the Forest Service is beginning to take these crimes seriously, but there’s still no effort to protect the sites, repair them after they have been dug, or save what remains.
Scarberry knew these weren’t amateurs. There were artifact-price guides at Blaisdell’s house, and Johnson admitted to having been at the site two years earlier and taken a U.S. Cavalry button and a piece of railroad track. “They’re professionals. It’s what they make their money at. I couldn’t prove it, but that’s what they do. They knew what they were doing and they were really good at it. I’d never been with anybody, besides Johnny Faulkner, as good in the woods as I those two guys were.”
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Faulkner is a compact man, slim-waisted and very fit; Scarberry calls him “a snake in the woods.” He’s got a pug nose, and a trimmed but fur-like beard and mustache that are both white. His hair is tied back in a braid, his green uniform pants are stuck into black snakeskin boots, and around his neck he wears a handmade necklace of bear teeth and river-cane beads on a string of deer hide. Although he has no formal degree, he is considered one of the best archaeologists in the state.
Faulkner has worked for the Forest Service for twenty-nine years, most of it in the Cumberland District, surveying miles and miles of cliffline, documenting historic and prehistoric sites, and running archaeological programs for the public. Whenever the Forest Service wants to build a road or a log landing, put in a wildlife pond, burn acreage, or give an electric company a right-of-way to run lines though the forest, by law they must first ascertain if there are any archaeological sites and any endangered or threatened species that might be harmed. At least that’s the way it worked until President George W. Bush’s Healthy Forests Initiative, enacted in 2003, provided a series of exemptions from the laws that once protected the forest’s ecology and archaeology and ensured clean water and clean air. Under the guise of preventing catastrophic wildfires, the government has opened the forest up to logging companies once again. The Healthy Forests Initiative allows for logging operations up to 1,000 acres and prescribed burning projects up to 4,500 acres without any environmental or archaeological analysis of the effects, or any community input, or any chance of legal appeal. The scientists, those experts on forest health, and the citizens, those supposed “owners” of the federal forests, have no say in the matter. The government calls these projects “hazardous fuel” initiatives and says logging the forest or burning it will prevent out-of-control wildfires by ridding the forest of “fuel build-up.”
Surveying in this mountainous terrain is arduous, and the archaeologists work in the dead of winter (they can see better when the forest is bare) and in the height of summer. They climb up and down long, steep inclines, wrestle with rhododendron thickets, hike for miles. On any given workday, Johnny Faulkner might find three to five historic and prehistoric sites—old homesteads, niter mines, ancient campgrounds. He is the only archaeological technician in the forest, and when he retires next year it’s doubtful he will be replaced.
In the Seventies, Faulkner worked on the trails, emptying trash, killing and planting trees. The Forest Service used chemicals then, Valpar and Tordon, and removed what are called “non-crop trees” or “trash trees”—redbud, dogwood, red maple. “Some places we’d kill everything just about, except the white pine,” he says. (White pine grows fast and can be harvested quickly.) “But, you know, now we kill pines,” he adds with a laugh. When the pine-beetle epidemic swept the Southeast seven years ago, the Daniel Boone was devastated. So much of the forest had been turned into a pine plantation that the beetles, as one resident put it, “just walked from one end of the forest to the other.” Trees go in and out of fashion in the national forests, as do forestry techniques and concepts about the forest itself. As a way to clear out unwanted trees, herbicides have given way to fire. Thousands of acres are burned in the Daniel Boone every year—either to clear out unwanted trees and plant wanted ones or to “thin fuel,” the practice that was started in the western forests, where downed logs and brush, and the complete suppression of wildfires, have led to catastrophic flare-ups. The eastern forests do not burn that way—they are too green and damp, and fallen logs rot—but if the government gives you money to burn, you burn; you don’t hire more back-country rangers or law-enforcement officers to protect archaeological sites or provide educational projects for the public. Under the rubric of the Jellico Prescribed Burning Project, 2,025 acres will be burned on and around Angel Mountain and Rube Hollow. Fires will be set from above and below, animals will have to move fast, and the surrounding areas will be awash in smoke and ash for days. “We went through a period when we did anything possible to stop a fire, and now we’re doing everything to start one,” a county historian told me. “It seems like the Forest Service is just standing there throwing matches at the woods.”
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I spent four days with Johnny Faulkner, going in and out of looted rock shelters and learning the most elemental facts not only about the forest but about the lives of the people there. Sometimes we’d hike down to a location, and when it was time to come out, he’d step back and make me lead. Could I find my way out of the woods? I ate sourwood leaves and gingerly took the tiniest taste of Indian turnip (a bite would make you foam at the mouth). I learned that locals call squirrel hunting “squawk hunting,” after the sound a squirrel makes, a sound Faulkner can imitate perfectly. Turkey hunters will hoot like an owl to make a male turkey “shock gobble” and give away his location. We found a swallow’s nest with an egg in it, a dead fox, black cohosh or rattlesnake root, hundreds of moth wings left by feasting bats, a turkey fluttering in the road to distract us from her young, a giant hornets’ nest that looked like it had been assembled with the daintiest of papers and glue.
On a Saturday in May that starts out sunny and then turns windy and gray, threatening rain, Faulkner and I head toward the looted Sunny Shelter. We drive through Hawkins Branchprivate land—from which many of the residents commute to work at the Toyota factory outside Lexington. We pass small farms where people grow their own corn and beans and raise some cattle, and many beautifully tended family cemeteries, aglow with both real and vividly fake flowers. The next day, Mother’s Day, there would be many visitors to these small graveyards. With such respect for their own dead, I’m surprised that local diggers don’t have the same feeling toward the ancient grave sites. “Some do, some don’t,” Faulkner says. “They think it’s so far in the past and they’re not kin to them and they’re Injuns. But I’ve heard many stories of people digging and they run into skeletons and that makes them quit digging.” (Kentuckians have a complex relationship to the Indian. By the time European settlers moved into Kentucky in the mid-eighteenth century, most of the Native Americans were long gone, annihilated by smallpox and other Old World diseases, and yet Kentuckians are prone to claiming they have Indian blood. As one archaeologist dryly tells me, “There must have been more Shawnee and Cherokee princesses in this part of the country than anywhere else, because everyone you meet says, ‘Oh, my great-grandma was a Cherokee princess.”” What Kentuckians want from this imagined Native American heritage, he believes, is an even deeper tie to the land.)
The Forest Service road takes us along the top of a ridge. Although locked gates are supposed to keep everyone but Forest Service employees off these roads, we find tire tracks from off-road vehicles going around the gates. Sometimes we see the wellworn trails of horseback riders or hikers or off-road enthusiasts who actually come in with chain saws and make their own paths. Two thirds of the trails in the Red River Gorge area are “user-created.” With so little law enforcement and not even a backcountry ranger working the district now, there is not much the Forest Service can do to stop these incursions. Worse, the service often bows to the pressures exerted by well-funded climbing associations, off-road-vehicle lobbies, and passionate hunters.
“It’s a known fact that deer hunters loot sites,” Faulkner says. “Not all of them do, but they’re out along a lot of these back roads.” When you hunt you look for these natural draws, he tells me, places the deer move up and down from the ridge top, as an ancient hunter would have. The nature of the deer has not changed, and the landscape is pretty much the same, so the modern hunter will find himself hunting not only in the tracks of ancient hunters but also near their camps.
From the ridge top, Faulkner and I scrabble down a steep incline. I don’t see much on the way down because I’m watching the ground for copperheads and trying to keep up, and because my eyes are not trained to see things in the woods. When the incline levels out, I’m knee deep in a foamy sea of maidenhair fern. Ahead is a black gash that is the mouth of the Sunny Shelter. A big boulder sits in the middle of the shelter, and it was there, all around its edges, that the looters dug. They knew what they were doing. Prehistoric peoples often buried their dead next to such boulders or along the back wall of a shelter. And they probably sat on this rock while they knapped arrowheads or points and scraped deer hides. I sit on the boulder while Faulkner crawls on his hands and knees in the back of the shelter, “looking for diagnostics,” the bits and pieces of lives lived here thousands of years ago. He finds tiny flakes of chert, shell fragments from an eastern box turtle, a jawbone from a bobcat, and assorted bone fragments from a white-tailed deer. A breeze brushes the earth, rustling like silk. Higher up, the wind clatters through tree branches. Decaying leaves outside the shelter give off a pungent odor; in here, it smells of dust, old dust. Twenty years ago, when you walked into some of these sites, you would sink up to your ankles in loam. That is how rich and untouched they were.
“We’ve lost so many sites,” Faulkner says. “Hundreds and hundreds in the gorge, by camping and allowing people to go anywhere. It’s sickening.” The “dispersed recreationists,” as they are called by the Forest Service, cause far more damage than looters, he tells me, because there are so many more of them, and they range all over the forest. Looters look for sites that were inhabited continuously over long periods of time, sites with more promise of riches, but campers are just looking for a good rock shelter to bed down in, and they will disturb areas that may have been used by Native Americans for only one summer, sites that to archaeologists are a clear window onto a very specific time. In these types of encampments, the evidence is not buried deep; it’s often in the first few inches of soil, easily jumbled and made illegible, or brushed away and lost altogether by a single night of camping. “The government could have protected these sites,” Faulkner tells me, “but they’re still in the mind-set of managing timber.”
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Settlers began coming through the Cumberland Gap in the late 1700s. During a period of three weeks in 1775, Daniel Boone and thirty axe men cut a 208-mile horse trail through the gap, opening up a westward passage, and in the following decades hundreds of thousands of people flowed through the mountain pass and made their way toward the good, flat farmland of the Midwest. The ones who came into Kentucky and stayed, settling in the western foothills of the Appalachians, must have been a peculiar group, given the rugged isolation of the mountains. At one time it must have been invigorating and hard to survive off that forest, to hunt and fish and trap and forage, to raise pigs and cattle (letting them loose to graze in the woods), to drill the dense rocks for iron and clear the heavily forested ground for farming. They mined for salt and gathered herbs. Daniel Boone himself made his fortune from selling wild ginseng, not from furs, as legend would have it. Salt and iron mines gave way to coal, and mining towns sprang up in the southern parts of Kentucky. But timber was the real enterprise. It was big business, and every able-bodied person took part. Thousands upon thousands of acres of old-growth forest were cut, the logs floated down rivers, piled onto railcars. The land was stripped. There were no more turkeys or bears or elk to hunt. The soil had no nourishment. Silt filled the creeks. The water went bad. A clear-cut forest will take many decades to come back, and in the meantime, the wildlife that depended on it has moved on, diminished, or died out altogether. Artifacts are not renewable at all. A rock shelter that served as a summer camp 6,000 years ago does not “come back” from a looting.
The U.S. Forest Service is charged with the health of the land: with providing water, timber, and mineral resources such as gas and oil; with protecting wildlife and archaeological sites; with providing recreation and at the same time ensuring the survival of the wilderness. But the service is being crippled by these competing interests, by the lack of a clear directive from Congress as to its primary mission, and by severe budget cuts. Often it is a lawsuit, or the threat of a lawsuit—brought by timber companies, recreationists, and environmentalists—that determines the fate of a forest. The Daniel Boone is now an endangered forest—one of ten in the nation, according to the National Forest Protection Alliance. Meanwhile, all the people who use the forest—the campers and the rock climbers; the deer hunters, ginseng gatherers, blueberry pickers, and pot farmers; the looters and archaeologists, both with their calloused knees; the coal-mine owner and the coaltruck driver dreaming of clear water; and all those great-grandchildren of Cherokee princesses—care deeply about the Daniel Boone, and they each have their own reason for wanting it to survive.
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