Musings on Motherland...Appalachia x Ireland x Japan
Great Smoky Mountains National Park, TN
I moved to Virginia almost 20 years ago, from England, with my baby girl, to raise her close to her grandparents who retired here. For these entire 20 years, I have longed for other places, wished for distant lands, and just broadly lacked any real feelings of connection to the landscape in which I have made my home.
Though I have built many important and beautiful relationships here, I have not been able to love this PLACE. It has been a strange feeling, this failure to bond, an unsettling inability to connect and love these Appalachian landscapes. Hiking alone up these mountains and through these dark, chaotic forests has always generated a real sense of discomfort, and sometimes even fear. I prefer openness, simplicity, light, and I have travelled extensively seeking places to connect with that aren’t THIS place, including Ireland and Japan. Until recently, that is. Enter pandemic, also known as the end of the world as we know it. Enter paradigm shift. Through various avenues, I have begun to discover connections between the place I live, places I have travelled, and my deep ancestry. And that is what I want to capture here: the myriad of ways in which my life, spent divided across both place and time, converges upon THIS place, and how I have come to feel connected to it and to love it.
My father is from the hills of Tennessee, and he carries the blood of the Cherokee, the Eastern band, the original occupants of that part of Appalachia. Half of the blood that runs through me has been connected to the Appalachian mountains for many generations. I’ve known this, of course, but that connection alone apparently wasn’t enough to foster an emotional bond. I was interested, and this Cherokee ancestry certainly made me curious about the Great Smoky Mountains (part of the Appalachian mountains for those who don’t know), where I began my landscape photography journey. The forced exodus of the Cherokee from the Smokies, the Trail of Tears, is one of many great indigenous tragedies of this country, and an injustice that can never be made right. And coming to know the Great Smoky Mountains led to a greater understanding of this history. But the rest of my blood hails from Ireland, the wild, western coast, littered with windswept beaches, and a mostly treeless, rock-strewn glaciated landscape. For much of my life I have visited there, and it was Ireland I always felt more drawn to. The open land, the lakes and bogs, all resonated for me. And the potatoes and Guinness and NO SNAKES. What's not to love? I wanted to be there, not here. But circumstances didn’t permit.
As the pandemic forced me to spend more time photographing my local landscapes here in the Appalachian mountains, I began to develop an appreciation for the zen beauty that can indeed be found here. Sure, I had to search and learn and come to understand how, where, and when to find these calm, contemplative scenes, but they are HERE and knowing this makes me feel more connected to HERE.
New River Gorge National Park, WV
In 2022, I began training to become a certified Virginia Master Naturalist. I’ll spare you the minutae of why, but suffice it to say, I had to withdraw from the program this year (though I plan to start again in 2023). Before doing so, though, we had a genuinely exciting class on the physical geography of Virginia, presented by a Geographer from Virginia Tech (Stewart Scales, you inspired many folks with your lecture!). The class was fascinating and inspiring, and it really resonated for me. I have a Master’s degree in physical geography, and so this subject lights me up and I was taken back to those years I spent in academia , researching, learning, and living it… But more specifically, this class focused on the Appalachians (which I did not in my studies), and some things were discussed that were genuine lightbulb moments for me.
The rocks here in the Appalachian mountains are the same types of rocks as those found in parts of Ireland. These rocks formed as part of a single mountain range, the Caledonian Orogen, formed over 400 million years ago on the continent of Laurentia. Since their formation, and as a result of plate tectonics and continental drift, those rocks have become separated across 2 continents.
Learning of this ancient geological relationship eventually led to a personal realization: the substantial connection I felt with Ireland made sense on more than just a cultural or hereditary basis. The physical connection between these landscapes and their geology was undeniable, and understanding that opened me up to considering that my longings for Ireland and its lands might be satisfied by appreciating the connections between Ireland and my home in Appalachia. Of course, there are many cultural connections, but knowing about this physical, geological connection added many layers of complexity and substance and allowed me to begin to consider ways in which I might belong to both places, and maybe even find my way to feeling at home in both places…
Further reading led me to a tangential and equally personally relevant discovery:
Fully half of the tree and shrub species found in Appalachia can trace their ancestry back to plants found in eastern Asia, a widely studied phenomenon known as The Asian Connection. For at least 260 years, botanists have noted similarities between the two plant communities. In Hollows, Peepers, and Highlanders: An Appalachian Ecology (1994), George Constantz devotes an entire chapter to The Asian Connection. “The forests of eastern Asia and southern Appalachia are so similar that if you were swept from one to the other you would be hard pressed to tell them apart.” He went on to explain that, “At the genus and species levels this similarity involves more than 50 genera of Appalachian plants that are restricted to eastern North America and eastern Asia and, except in fossil form, are absent in between.” Between 300 and 250 million years ago, numerous plant communities were contiguous across a circumpolar landmass known as Laurasia, that included Asia, Europe, and North America. When Laurasia subsequently split due to continental drift/plate tectonics, much of the vestiges of this plant community died out in Europe, western Asia, and western North America due to glaciation, leaving the Asian and Appalachian communities intact but widely separated.
New River Gorge National Park, WV
After a pre-pandemic trip to Japan, I had developed an interest in the seven Japanese aesthetic principles and read extensively about their meaning and the myriad of ways the Japanese apply these principles in their art and their everyday lives. Knowing now that there is a botanical connection between Japan and Appalachia, and developing that subsequent openness to exploring the physical connections between landscapes, I started thinking about ways in which I could photograph Appalachia using a Japanese aesthetic. I loved the thought of using my work to honor this botanical bond, and to also mark my own understanding and appreciation of physical connections between landscapes across time and space. And so I began an exploration, a somewhat hesitant experiment in visual expression. I have been searching for ways to show these connections in my work, and the project is young. Indeed, just getting these thoughts down here on my blog is part of the process of building out the project. Writing about it forces me to reach for a certain clarity of thought…
And so, below are just a few of my early visual experiments, Musings on Motherland, all images made in Appalachia with a nod to the Japanese aesthetic. Jappalachia, perhaps. Or Appalasia. Click on the images to view them uncropped and full size.
I hope to continue my visual exploration on this subject into the future. And if you know more on this subject and would like to chat about it with me, please reach out!
For anyone interested in reading more, below are a few of the pieces I found on these two connections:
https://today.duke.edu/2015/05/easternforests
https://www.geological-digressions.com/bits-of-north-america-that-were-left-behind/
https://smokymountainnews.com/archives/item/4429-‘big-ice’-links-flora-and-fauna-here-and-in-asia
This subject and some of these images are included in my upcoming ebook, Riversong: Creative, Holistic Approaches to Photographing New River Gorge. Sign up below for my newsletter to be notified when this drops!