Nothing gets the pulse racing like escaping from the world we're living in
now, and discovering the worlds that lived before us: it's a reminder that
nothing lasts forever, not even this.
In the 1950s, North Carolina's Haw and New Hope River valleys were
prone to horrific flooding. The hurricane of 1945 was one of just
many hurricanes that laid siege to what was already a poor valley,
putting it under water. The US Army Corps of Engineers came up with a
plan to flood it permanently, offering a mechanism of flood control
and providing hydropower for electrification of the region. When it
was done, Lake B Everett Jordan had become a permanent fixture on the
Piedmont landscape.
As is the case with any dam project, flooding the valley meant doing away
with a couple of small towns and their infrastructure: roads, bridges,
buildings. And a section of railway had to be rerouted. Vestiges of all
that stuff still remain if you know where to begin looking for it.
And lately, looking for it has become my favorite weekend passion.
The map that led me to Beaver Creek showed that the railway once passed down
one slope and followed Jordan Lake's current shoreline before emerging on
the north. But satellite images revealed buried treasure: on both sides
remain bits of road that once connected but now lead sadly past water's edge
down into the deep. I had to go.
Never mind the awesome sight of mankind's handiwork being swallowed under
the waves, or the melancholy landscape of a road that leads only to
destruction. Look out across the still waters remembering it was once a
farming valley, that a culvert of some sort still lies submerged somewhere
out there, that lives that once traversed the valley now circumnavigate it.
Some day soon we'll drive past parts of Florida, New York, Virginia. And the
roads that once led to places people call home will instead plunge under the
waves that rose to put our cities underwater. And the vestiges of our pride
will flap from the water's surface like the drowned stumps of forest that
still dot the corners of Jordan Lake.
