Folks have historically collected near bodies of water for access: to resources, to food, to information, to trade. Access to fresh water is essential for survival. Most of the world is water.
In the temperate rainforest of the Smoky Mountains, countless hollers, each with their own tributary, join in confluence with larger creeks and cricks, eventually flowing to nearby lakes and rivers.
Each holler is connected to one another through these waterways, regardless of how far apart they are.
The first settled civilizations developed in areas where bodies of fresh water made population growth possible.The Tuckaseegee, the French Broad, the Little Tennessee, and other rivers meander through the Cherokee land of Western North Carolina (now the home of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, ᏣᎳᎩᏱ ᏕᏣᏓᏂᎸᎩ), peppered with little towns along their length.
In rural Western North Carolina, as in many Appalachian areas, access to some resources is limited: affordable medical and dental care, fresh food and grocery stores, and cell and internet service.
We can no more control availability of resources than we can control the ebb and flow of our waterways.
In the Smoky Mountains, we don’t dry out the same way other areas do during a drought. During dryer times, we still wake up to misty wisps of moisture each morning, sometimes lasting until nearly midday.
Our hollers are often shrouded in clouds by early evening. Our dwellings continue to be inescapably susceptible to mold. But we are also vulnerable to drought. In 2016, wildfires in the area left 14 dead, nearly 75 injured, and 80,000 acres destroyed.
Almost exactly six months ago, flash floods washed out roads.
This month, Jackson County is experiencing unusual “moderate drought,” heading towards ”severe drought.” Living in a rural floodplain is an exercise in acknowledging the liminal space between too much and not enough.
By the time the most recent drought started our household had been without internet service for two weeks, and it would be two more before our service was restored.
The service had been interrupted as the result of an electrical storm, which would be the last significant rain for nearly a month.
North Carolina is the 14th “most connected” state, as defined based on the percentage of the population with access to 25+ mbps wired broadband, with 10% of the population qualified as “underserved” (access to less than 2 wired providers).
The internet, unlike the clouds that cling to our hollers, is a solid, tangible resource which requires intricate infrastructure.
Since 2011, access to a wired connection of at least 10mbps has improved from 93.4% to 97.4% for North Carolinians. And yet, while there are a total of 171 internet providers in North Carolina, there are 914,000 people in North Carolina that have access to only one wired provider, leaving them no options to switch based on cost or service quality. An additional 125,000 people in North Carolina have zero wired internet providers available where they live.
Sylva, NC, located along the Tuckasegee River, is the second least covered city (of 200 NC cities), with 41.3% of the population able to access broadband coverage from a surprising eleven service providers.
The Tuckaseegee, likely an anglicisation of the Cherokee daksiyi, or “Turtle Place,” is sixty miles of slow-flowing, shallow water. When the Tuckaseegee is low, fishing weirs, uga’yatun’i, are viewable, perhaps constructed by the Cherokee prior to colonization. Fishing is now a tourist draw.
Western North Carolina has been a hub of water-based tourism for years: trout fishing, kayaking, hiking to waterfalls and swimming holes, and most recently, beer.
We are drowning in breweries, few of which contribute with tangible, long-term benefits to the community. Asheville’s revitalized “South Slope” has erased any trace of Black legacy in a historically Black neighborhood. “The water flows down from the mountaintops, and we brew it up right with some barley and hops” — a line from a Convention and Visitors Bureau video touting Asheville’s identity as "Beer City USA," featuring local musicians and performers.
In a recent article for the Asheville Blade on the Tourism Development Authority (TDA), which controls a budget of over $25 million in hotel tax dollars, Ami Worthen writes: “While communities throughout our area struggle with a lack of services, with being pushed out, the hotelier-led TDA markets Asheville to the white and wealthy. It is a major factor behind the rampant tourist growth that has cost us dearly.”
Responding to the city council’s recent passing of a year-long moratorium on hotel development, Worthen notes that “Locals rightly tied the TDA and the 'extractive' hotel industry to woes with increasing segregation and other ills.”
The tourist industry is locally extractive, fueling ongoing displacement and segregation of people of color from our downtown Asheville neighborhoods, the rising cost of living in WNC, and the persistent lack of resources in our rural and impoverished communities.
In their 2018 article ”Power Lines: Broadband and Democracy in East Tennessee,” author Katie Myers and photographer Lou Murray illuminated similar struggles in East Tennessee, examining internet access, extractive industry, and the effect on those who are committed to staying, and thriving, in their communities. “[The digital divide] is both a symptom and an aggravating factor of economic inequality, born from years of neoliberal privatization and a deeply uneven balance between resource extraction and investment.”
Appalachia is in crisis in many more forms than addressed here, opioids and substance abuse chief among them. Ten of the thirteen states considered part of Appalachia have poverty rates over 14%, the exceptions being Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Appalachian population is 42% rural, compared with 20% nationally, according to World Population Review.
Appalachia has historically been represented in stereotypical aspersions relating to its poverty. After Hillbilly Elegy was published, a deluge of responses poured out of Appalachia, criticizing J. D. Vance’s depiction of the region (including Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, which includes essays, poetry, and images from forty artists, poets, and activists).
Queer Appalachia, an Instagram account with over 220,000 followers, uses their platform to celebrate the queer voices and identities from Appalachia and the South, and to amplify calls to action for harm reduction, rural organizing, and wider representation for the region.
“Up until now the people that got to choose who and who wasn’t documented from their own culture and community acted as gatekeepers—people with access to higher education: historians, folklorist[s], archivist[s], academics etc.” wrote (Gina) Mamone, Artistic Director of Queer Appalachia, in a recent article for Activist History Review. “At Queer Appalachia the under-documented and undocumented document themselves. It’s simple and revolutionary, a marriage of community and accessible technology, rural broadband be damned!”
Though access to resources and to one another in person may be limited, the flow of information and connection offered by the internet across hollers, community to community, is vital for those who are geographically isolated, and Queer Appalachia’s outreach initiatives and harm reduction tours have been able to provide life-saving resources, harm reduction supplies, and training to areas with limited or no access to such resources. Queer Appalachia shows what rural communities are able to accomplish through community organizing, mutual aid, and the internet.
Appalachia, which has historically been rich with natural resources, is rife with recurring barriers to access which have stripped and further isolated its populace. Kin to a floodplain, interjacent between abundance and scarcity, stuck between a rock and a hard place. Yet, it is with the folks who choose to stay, who rehydrate our parched hollers, who channel resources back into their communities, that we chart our course.
While we may live on the “wrong” side of the river, the limited, spotty internet we have enables us to connect with those many miles away, in confluence, working toward collective liberation. And “God willing and the crick don’t rise,” our cup will runneth over, and our well will not run dry.
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