Category: Essay

Assured in advance by the region’s soggy-foggy reputation that I would face constant drizzling rain there, I bought the first modern rain-proof garment I’ve ever owned before my May trip to the Olympic Peninsula of Washington.

But following the thread of waterproof garments as I comparison shopped for that red Goretex parka I finally purchased, I considered what a fine thing it is that nature has succeeded in keeping land vertebrates both warm and dry.

The challenge is to keep the body inside from losing heat and from retaining water vapor given off by the animal’s metabolism. For mammals and birds, wet means heavy. Heavy means slow, and slow means you’re somebody’s lunch. Wet near the skin also means evaporative cooling, and too much of that can also be the end of a creature that experiences the shutting-down of hypothermia due to heat loss.

Nature wins first prize here with a wonderful invention called skin, a porous, heat-retaining, moisture-releasing surface, oiled by tiny glands and covered, more or less, with water-shedding hairs or feathers that also trap warm air next to the body.

Next to skin, so to speak, Goretex (patented in 1976) comes a distant second, but it has solved the problem I learned about the hard way long ago. In my ignorance, I wore a rubber-coated Army-Navy raincoat on my first backpacking trip to the Smokies. It repelled 100% of the rain and retained the same percent of the moisture created by my uphill exertion. Somewhere not far from the Clingman’s Dome parking lot, the cheap raincoat quickly became a pedestrian sauna.

Breathable and waterproof Goretex solved that issue with its design that lets the body’s moisture as molecules of vapor escape but prevents much larger drops of moisture from coming in. We should not take this modern “miracle” fabric for granted.

Bare human bodies in their native state are as well equipped to retain heat as a plucked chicken. We are laughably lacking in wool, feathers or fur. Conveniently our meat–buffalo or bearcat, cow, sheep or wooly mammoth–has come wrapped in warm, water-shedding coverings we lacked.

Then came mankind’s period of exploration. When our ancient ancestors reached the coasts, they built boats to get to the other side. On the boats, the early mariners in wet-heavy bearskin coats were worthless climbing the riggings in a winter storm and possessed all the buoyancy of a cinder block when washed overboard. On to Plan B.

At sea, a serious waterproofing issue beyond the soggy sailors was the sails. The linen sailcloth became heavy when wet, which played havoc with both speed and balance. Slathering sails with fish oil helped, but a thousand cats met your ship at the dock. Eventually, cotton replaced linen, and wax replaced oils.

But the waxed cotton became stiff as a piece of plywood when cold. So much for the billowed sails. And the sails turned yellow as a pirate’s smile over time. Sailors cut those discarded scraps of cloth, first into capes, then into slickers as a better alternative to bear skins. The yellow of your hooded first-grade raincoat carried the color of those ancient sails into modern times.

And in our day, the perflurochemistry (PFC) industry has ushered in all sorts of rain, grease, stain and dirt-shedding, no-stick chemicals. The basis for this class of compounds is fluorocarbons–carbon chains that hold fluorine at bonds where hydrocarbons like propane hold hydrogen. Goretex, Scotchguard and Teflon are PFCs.

The teflon-like compounds are not natural in nature. They are stable and long-lived, and PFCs are now found on every continent in almost all humans and animals. High levels of PFCs have been linked to impulsivity and attention issues in children. The full health effects are still unknown.

And closer to home, beware the toxic fumes from an overheated teflon pan (or a Goretex raincoat on fire?) The vapors produce “polymer fume fever” in humans, and an over-hot teflon frying pan can kill your PFC-sensitive pet bird instantly.

The price for my Goretex jacket was right dear. But more than that, the miracle fabric’s final cradle-to-grave COST (from production to disposal) will make me think twice about any future rainwear purchases. Next time, I may go with wooly mammoth.

And I should mention, the week I gave my new red raincoat a road trip to the Pacific Northwest, it came back dry. It never rained a single drop.

This tale appeared in the Floyd Press and Roanoke Star-Sentinel in the fall of 2011.

This selection is from Slow Road Home, written in August 2002, a lament during one of the worst droughts in living memory for the old-timers who live in our part of Floyd County. Hundreds of wells went dry that year. We’ve never since seen the creek dry up completely. But it’s getting mighty low, and we’re concerned, but hopeful.

The cool breeze is welcomed today, a respite from the unrelenting heat of summer. But the wind and sun are also the enemy because they carry away what little moisture remains in the pasture grasses, forest and creeks. More than that, even the underground waters that are the source of streams like Nameless Creek are silently ceasing to flow. More water has evaporated from tree and soil to the thin clouds overhead than has fallen from sky to earth during the past three months.

No current moves the surface of the creek, though minnows still stir the shrinking pools in a claustrophobic frenzy. They struggle to find edible specks in what little water remains in the shallow depressions here and there along the drying creek bed. We are in the midst of a sad and awful drought. There is a tendency to take the malice of this dry, parched weather personally, but we should keep the cycles of nature in perspective.

Our valley is a tiny crease carved by water in the more recent stages of Appalachian mountain erosion. The core of the Blue Ridge formed nearly a billion years ago when land masses collided, lifting up a massive bulge of fire-hardened rock. It is difficult to conceive now that these green and gentle mountains began as a rocky dome, higher and more craggy and hostile than today’s Rockies.

Millennia passed like seconds on nature’s clock, and water in unbelievable floods has worn away the old rock, one granite grain at a time. Time and water have done their work and smoothed away the roughness of these old mountains. Fragments of those ragged summits of stone now lie in pasture rock-conglomerate, beach sand and delta soil. All that remains of that former high magnificence are these soft and rounded, green, moist and water-worn remnants we call our Appalachian mountains.

One has only to dig down a few inches over by the barn to know that river cobbles by the tens of thousands have been left there in the sandy soil, washed long ago down Nameless Creek, whose waters meet Goose Creek not a hundred feet from where I sit.

These two creeks tumbling down from those ancient mountaintops have cut against the resistant rock of the east ridge of our valley, then the west, then back again–each time widening the valley floor by imperceptible inches in hundreds of years–an unthinkably long time to our mortal perspective, a flash of time in a million years of eternal wind and sun, frost and floods.

Floods are cataclysmic, sudden, drastic and evident in their consequences. Drought like this is chronic and insidious. It drains life invisibly, quietly, leaving no record in the sands of geology’s time.

But it is an abundance of water that has carved the hollow of the creek bed and made the valley wide–not water’s absence. It is an abundance of water that has nurtured the broad-leaved forest that covers these mountain hillsides and allowed them to persist in this leafy biome. Drought has not formed this landscape, and it seems reasonable to have hope that it will not subdue it now.

We will miss the rains for a few more weeks, for maybe one more season, or two. But we must learn to see the cycles of wet and dry as the land sees it, and be patient. If history is any lesson, water will tell the story.

Note: This appeared in last week’s Floyd Press, while things were still dangerously dry. I just checked the rain gauge in the garden: 3.75 inches. And it’s still falling, still soaking in more than running off–the sustained, mostly gentle rain we’ve been needing. And contrary to my fears yesterday when the creek was going up so fast, we WILL be able to get across the creek on the board (which we rescued before it was swept downstream) to tend the &$#!! chickens.