In Virginia: Taking On a Dam Site

By Joelle Attinger

As they always have in Brumley Gap, the men and women sit separate. Outside, the evening cold has already crept in, and the hard outline of Virginia mountains has softened into darkness. Inside Hunter Holmes' one-room country store, three worn couches, a board placed on milk cases, and a few wooden chairs make a circle around a Buckeye 135 wood stove. The room is filled with people. The walls are lined with canned goods and staples like salt, sugar, cornmeal and motor oil. A blue denim jacket hangs from one shelf, and a few feet below it hangs a new white T shirt with green lettering that proclaims NOT BY A DAM SITE. A middle-aged woman with a hesitant voice and bright blue eyes is speaking: "I'm sure there are Indian graves around here. It would close down APCO's whole operation if we find an Indian grave."

This is a meeting of the Brumley Gap Concerned Citizen's Association. Geographically Brumley Gap is a chip in the rim of a natural cup shaped by the South Virginia Hills. APCO is the Appalachian Power Company, which wants to put a 200-foot-high dam in the notch, turning the bowl into a reservoir for the largest pump-storage facility in the U.S. and putting the old homesteads of nearly all Brumley Gap's 119 families under water. The hope of finding Indian graves and getting the whole area protected from APCO by having it registered as a National Historic Place is just one of several desperate ways in which the people of Brumley Gap are trying to fend off inundation. The Indian relic idea is not entirely farfetched either. Store Owner Holmes recently found a Paleo-Indian double-fluted pentagonal flint point dating from 9000 B.C. It was authenticated by Randy Turner, regional archaeologist for south Virginia. Piles of arrowheads and doodads, picked up by residents over the years, still await serious examination.

By any worldly standard Brumley Gap is hardly in a position to stand against a $1 billion water project. The village is set in the middle of what the inhabitants proudly refer to as Poor Valley. The soil is rocky and hard to farm. Most families cultivate an acre or so of tobacco, the town's only cash crop, and a vegetable patch, with a little meager grazing land for a few cows. The families in the scattering of wooden houses and log cabins have a median income of about $6,000 a year. To eke out a living, many men have had to work outside the Gap, some, like Gale Webb, the father of six children, journeying 50 miles a day to Johnson City, across the state line in Tennessee. There are other concessions to the modern world in Brumley Gap. TV sets, for instance, and souped-up pickup trucks. Since last May, moreover, a blue APCO work trailer has been parked on Route 698 to serve as an advance base for surveying teams. But most people have lived in the Gap all their lives, and life is as it has been for 100 years. The men meet at the Coon Hunters Club to swap stories. The women spend a good deal of time making quilts. They also keep the Methodist church as near as in the days when they had their own preacher. APCO is offering "a fair market value" for the land, which means up to $3,000 an acre for cleared fields, $500 for woodland. Townspeople know they cannot find the equivalent near by at that price, because the Gap lies on the edge of richer and more costly terrain. But more than that, they fear the loss of a way of life, of strong family ties, if they are forced to move.

It's hard to explain what's precious about life here," says Levonda McDaniel, 50, the association's secretary. 'I think it's something about the earth, a sort of communion with the Lord when you can go out there and plow your fields and produce half of what you eat. Most people here realize they're not really college-educated types, yet within themselves they are secure." An extreme sense of self-reliance, growing rarer by the day in urbanized America, and at the same time an odd reliance on each other against the outside world may be the strongest bonds for the people of Brumley Gap. "You don't want to take welfare. That's a disgrace, forever," says McDaniel. "Everybody knows, though, that when the time comes and if someone needs help, you're going to know it and they sort of expect you to be there."

That spirit explains why in the past few months the Coon Club and the church, like Holmes' store, have been pressed into service as centers for meetings and fund-raising schemes. All told, $10,500 has been collected so far for the legal fees involved in seeking an injunction to block exploratory drilling or digging by APCO -at least until some thorough environmental studies have been made. The case is scheduled for trial in the Abingdon Circuit Court at the end of this month, but the town is beginning to realize that whatever the decision, later appeals may cost them an unimaginable $100,000. That is one reason why they have swallowed their distrust of outsiders and outside help enough to encourage the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund to appeal the project before the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Tonight's meeting learns that the association has $5,789.43 left in its account. A campaign to write letters to Senators is discussed, and plans for a gospel sing in the local high school and a benefit play, Red Fox: Second Hanging, at $5 a head to raise more money for the lawyers. Richard Austin, a Presbyterian minister, one of the few outsiders (he moved to the area from Washington six years ago), urges everyone to be at the trial in Abingdon. He goes over the long list of ponds, drill sites, access roads and trenches that APCO intends to create just for its survey. There is also a 2,000-foot tunnel to be drilled into the mountainside.

"I thought they told us they'd leave everything the way they found it," a man in the back calls out. Everybody laughs. Crickett Woods, 53, says she wrote Johnny Cash's sister-in-law asking if he would sing at a Brumley benefit. "She said she didn't think so," Woods reports. Debbie Maretz has written President Carter, and letters have gone to Senator John Warner, who came out against the APCO project during the fall campaign. After the serious business is disposed of, Roby Taylor, a wizened man in blue coveralls, begins showing around color pictures of his twelve-foot tomato vine. "I reckon you never seen anything like it," he says with a great grin.

APCO maintains that the region needs the Brumley Gap storage as a source of extra power during peak demand periods that lately have overstrained the company's resources. It also claims that the dam, and the pump to shoot water up out of the Holston River into the storage plant, can be built most economically in Poor Valley. These are hard arguments.

But unlike many towns in the U.S. similarly engaged in tilting against giants for their very lives, the people of Brumley Gap have at least got their resistance going early in the proceedings. Most of them cannot imagine defeat. Says Cletis Leonard, a tall, rawboned woman with her silver hair drawn back in a bun: "I sold three quilts at that auction down at the Coon Club last October. Made $200. Maybe I'll do even better next time around." Skinny but indomitable at 95, Floyd ("Unk") Hayter, whose wife Bess thinks the town's big mistake was not getting guns and running the APCO people out when they first appeared, gloomily confronts the future: "If that judge is against us I don't know what we'll do. Jail used to be a disgrace, but I don't reckon it is now."

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