On the Blue Ridge
On the Blue Ridge features conversations with people shaping the Blue Ridge Mountains. Hosted by Asheville-based journalist Jon Page, the show explores the ideas, creativity, and vision driving Western North Carolina forward.
Through long-form interviews and on-location storytelling, each episode captures the evolving story of these mountains. The conversations focus on people doing meaningful and inspiring work across the region, from conservation and outdoor recreation to the arts, agriculture, food and beverage, entrepreneurship, and beyond.
On the Blue Ridge
Brent Martin on William Bartram and the Nature that Could Have Been
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Brent Martin is a conservationist and writer whose work has been deeply influenced by the 18th-century naturalist William Bartram.
Brent lives in Macon County, where his work has long been rooted in the landscapes of Western North Carolina. Until recently, he served as executive director of the Blue Ridge Bartram Trail Conservancy, a nonprofit that maintains 112 miles of the Bartram Trail through North Carolina and Georgia.
Bartram was a naturalist, writer and explorer who traveled extensively through the American Southeast in the 1770s, documenting its plants, wildlife, landscapes, and people. His observations became the basis for “Bartram’s Travels.” Published in 1791, it’s a detailed account of the natural and cultural world he encountered along the way.
Brent’s latest book, “William Bartram and the Nature that Could Have Been,” draws directly from his longtime interest in Bartram. It’s due out this October from Mercer University Press.
Brent is also the author of “The Changing Blue Ridge Mountains” and a hiking guide to the Bartram Trail. In 2022, his book “George Masa’s Wild Vision” won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award, and Brent has also served as the Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for the western region of North Carolina.
Later this month, Brent is helping lead Spotfin, a two-day gathering that brings together writers, artists, naturalists and makers at the Cowee School Arts and Heritage Center, a former public school in Macon County that has been transformed into a home for arts, nature, and community.
In this episode, Brent discusses his new book, including what it was like to write directly to Bartram and to wrestle with both the world he documented and the complicated legacy he left behind. We also talk about Spotfin, and what comes next for Brent now that he has retired from the Bartram Trail Conservancy and is preparing to wind down Alarka Expeditions, a nature-based touring company he has run with his wife, Angela-Faye Martin.
“William Bartram and the Nature that Could Have Been”
Buy the book via Mercer University Press
Catch Brent at book release parties at Outdoor 76 in Franklin on Oct. 9 at 6:30 p.m. or at City Lights Bookstore in Sylva on Oct. 10 at 3 p.m.
Spotfin
Learn more at coweeschool.org/spotfin
Theme Music
The song "Goa" was written by Lyndsay Pruett and performed by the Jon Stickley Trio.
Learn more about On the Blue Ridge and sign up for updates at ontheblueridgepod.com.
If there's one thing I feel like is to be learned from anyone in America about this man's life, is that there's one value that I think is completely embedded in his writing, and that value is humility. And I feel like humility is the one thing that he has taught me. That I don't know if I would have gotten that lesson without just reading him and reading him and reading him and reading him.
SPEAKER_04Today, on the Blue Ridge, our guest is Brent Martin, a conservationist and writer whose work has been deeply influenced by the 18th century naturalist William Bartram. I'm your host, John Page. Let's begin. Brent lives in Macon County, where his work as a writer, naturalist, and conservationist has long been rooted in the landscapes of Western North Carolina. Until recently, he served as executive director of the Blue Ridge Bartram Trail Conservancy, a nonprofit that maintains 112 miles of the Bartram Trail through North Carolina and Georgia. Bartram was a naturalist, writer, and explorer who traveled extensively through the American Southeast in the 1770s, documenting its plants, wildlife, landscapes, and people. His observations became the basis for Bartram's travels, published in 1791. It's a detailed account of the natural and cultural world he encountered along the way. Brent's latest book, William Bartram and the Nature That Could Have Been, draws directly from his longtime interest in Bartram. It's due out this October from Mercer University Press. Brent is also the author of The Changing Blue Ridge Mountains and a hiking guide to the Bartram Trail. In 2022, his book George Massa's Wild Vision won the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award, and Brent has also served as the Gilbert Chapel Distinguished Poet for the Western Region of North Carolina. Later this month, Brent is helping lead Spot Them, a two-day gathering that brings together writers, artists, naturalists, and makers at the Cowie School Arts and Heritage Center, a former public school in Macon County that has been transformed into a home for arts, nature, and community. That's also where I met Brent for our conversation. In this episode, Brent discusses his new book, including what it was like to write directly to Bartram and to wrestle with both the world he documented and the complicated legacy he left behind. We also talk about Spotfin and what comes next for Brent now that he is retired from the Bartram Trail Conservancy and is preparing to wind down Alarca Expeditions, a nature-based touring company he has run with his wife, Angela Fay Martin. But our conversation begins with Bartram and why, despite his lasting influence on this region, he remains relatively unknown to many people living here.
SPEAKER_00I mean, he I guess is somewhat obscure and never made it into the huge conservation and all like John Muir or Thoreau and Burroughs or any number of big 19th-century people. You know, he kind of was lost to history for a while. And I think some of that was because he had so little ambition. So he was not a self-promoter. And travels, when it came out in America, was poorly received. He was really criticized for it for being so sympathetic to Native Americans, partially. And some of it was just, it felt like it was a florid kind of, you know, a very um romantic kind of tone. And many people in America at the time who were more into botanical works uh were really wanting more scientific kind of work. And, you know, Bartram was that was not him, you know. He had the soul of an artist, I think, more than he did a scientist. So he didn't really promote his work that well, and it just didn't take off here like it did in Europe, you know. And I think he really started to become important here in the South when conservation started to become something in the South, and people began reading his book for baselines. So ecological baselines, you know, like Bartram's description of this landscape in the 18th century. That's all we have. There are no other natural history descriptions. Um and the language is dense, it's hard to read. You gotta really hang in there with Bartram, you know. And it's the South. So um he's not the kind of thing that you know people in general are drawn to as a rule, I think, here. You know, as someone who's grown up in the South, I mean, I didn't encounter him until graduate school. So um I don't think that he's brought up in most education kind of curriculums. He's not something that's just required reading anywhere. Um why? It's just it's it's a tough question to answer. I mean, you could probably point out any number of Americans from that period who were kind of traveling in circles different than what mainstream America was in at the time, and it'd be the same kind of thing. I mean, you can look at other artists from that period, female artists like Jane Colden, you know, who was just an amazing talented uh illustrator and who Bartram encountered and was arguably better than Bartram in the illustration. But no one has ever heard of her. No one touches like you could just look her up online right now and probably get a few hits on her, you know. But I don't know. He definitely is sort of a cult figure here. And even in this community, I guarantee you there are people who, well, particularly in the last few years, because this place is flooded with newcomers, you know. But when I moved here in 2003 to work for Main Spring, which was then Land Trustville, Tennessee, Bartram was sort of what I went to, you know, because I was working in outreach and development. And for me, Bartram was like, wow, you know, this is what this valley, exactly where you and I are sitting right now, this is what this looked like in 1775. And you can kind of extrapolate from there and see what happened to the landscape since then, you know, which was which was huge. So I don't know, I can't say that he'll grow, you know, in popularity. I mean, old dead white guys kind of were not like, you know, really respected anymore. And even though he he dodged some of the, you know, colonial bullets that so many other 19th century and you know writers have had to to be taken down for legitimately. Um, you know, he had a complicated life. He had slaves at one point uh for six months and later became an abolitionist, but had a very uh bad time trying to be a plantation owner, failed miserably, like immediately. So I don't know. It's a good question.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I mean you you bring a lot of this up uh in the new book. There's this tension running through the new book, uh, where you clearly admire Bartram, but you're not trying to turn him into a saint, um, and you're reckoning with the fact that he enslaved people, and you're thinking about your own place in that history. Um did writing to him in some of it make make it easier to wrestle with some of that? Definitely.
SPEAKER_00Because I struggled with with this book, I really did, and my wife kind of broke the the log jam on it. Um I got a two-week residency down at Wafford College to just go and write for two weeks. And I was working for Bartram Trail Conservancy full time, I was running all our expeditions full-time, I was trying to write this book full time, I was just doing a lot. And I got down to Wafford and checked into my this old, old mill house and froze. It was like two weeks, what do I do? Where do I start? How do I make the most of this time? And I called my wife, you know, the next morning. I was like, I I'm just stuck, you know. She's like, you just need to start writing letters to William Bartram. So um, I just started writing letters to him. And it really did help me to kind of free up my thinking, you know. It it made a creative process that I hadn't even considered, you know, when when starting out writing this book. And it became part of the book. And, you know, I didn't know if the publisher would would like it or hate it. And so I sent Mark Jolliot Mercer, you know, some samples of the letters and was like, this is kind of where I'm going with this. I hope this is gonna be okay. And, you know, he's he's great at kind of giving the writers creative you know freedom. Because I I'd hook I thought at first I wanted a more of an academic book, you know. But um I really don't like to write academically, you know. I was in a PhD program and dropped out of it for after five years. And you're a poet as well. Yeah, so I just don't really, you know, creative writing is where I kind of live. But um the letters kind of broke that creative logjam, you know. It was it allowed me to have more freedom in writing the book. It started to open up more after I did it, you know, and process some of my own family history and personal stuff and you know, writing across, you know, a time frame that, you know, is just fictional. Um I could have gone further with some of it, really, but I felt like it was getting too crazy and you know, yeah. So the letters were the letters were important for me. Like I don't I don't even know if they work, you know. Like I have no idea what other people like yourself reading those, like if that if it actually makes sense, you know.
SPEAKER_04I I really enjoyed it. Uh I will say when I first when I first came to that spot where you bring it up, I was like, Where what's what's about to happen? Uh where is this going to go? Yeah. But then I I found it to be like one of my favorite, like when I would start to see like a big block of italic text coming up, I was like, cool, this is not a thing that was like a one and done, it's gonna keep coming up.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, good. That's really good to hear. Yeah. Yeah, I've been worried about that.
SPEAKER_04I mean you you go on about this more in the book, but kind of where are you right now in terms of your reckoning with uh the the that fact that Bartram did have slaves at one point in his life.
SPEAKER_00Um I mean there's it's impossible to to accept it, you know. It was just a stain on the man's life. Um could have been worse. Still was awful. Um It was very hard to go to Philadelphia two summers ago and look at the original one of the original deeds that he signed when he sold one of his slaves to his brother, which I think that particular instant is was pretty much ignored in American history, that he owned slaves for six months, and then those slaves were sold by his father, which was basically his inheritance because he, you know, he was in love with the St. John's River Valley, and that was an attempt for him to to live there, and to really be a botanist and a naturalist and not a plantation owner, which he failed miserably at. But um that was sort of what what his intention was was to to be a naturalist, and his father, of course, never supported that. So he owned slaves, he sold slaves. There's no way to clear his, you know, uh responsibility in in in that endeavor, that big, big colonial project, you know. And then he bought another slave, and that was like a very brief kind of period that there's really nothing known about it except for that one deed. And there's just not any kind of historical record about it, you know. So um encountering that and seeing that, it was like, well, you really didn't repent from this immediately, you know. And it's been theorized that the cell of Jenny, the slave that he sold on seventy 1771 or two, I could forget, but um that that helped fund his travels in the Southeast. Um because the money that John Fothergill was giving him as a patronage to travel really was insufficient to do all that he was doing. And the slave ownership potentially helped get him started. So there's that. Um and then, of course, he later begins writing broadsides for the Family Plant Catalog, and he takes advantage of that opportunity to write again for those broadsides that were published as part of the catalog to make big abolitionist, you know, statements. And he became a very active, like very, very powerful vocal abolitionist, some of who what he writes, I think, is some of the most powerful stuff, you know, coming out of that period about the importance of abolitionism. So but it's in it's still interesting that with Travels, you know, which came out in 1791, there was there was no moral, you know, reckoning upon him himself with that book. You know, he he he traveled and enslaved people traveled with him at times, who were kind of on loan, you might say, from plantation owners that you know Bartram would encounter people that governors had, you know, set up meetings with. And so um anyway, his culpability and all that it's not a word, minimal's not a word to use. It's culpabil he he was culpable, you know, in that enterprise. And uh so it's a hard one, you know. Um I think Bartram Bartram did wrestle with many issues. He he became a recluse when he got back from the southern backcountry and spent so many years alone, you know. He he he returned to Philadelphia. I say alone, he was with the family business, but um, you know, he never left Philadelphia more than a day's ride by horse for 40 something years.
SPEAKER_04I was gonna ask you about that. It's like so incredible to think. Like I can't imagine myself like having come to a place like this and granted it's a totally different time and era, but uh and then going back to a city and being like, yeah, this is where I I this is where I am now.
SPEAKER_00I think that Philadelphia, when he came back when he got back to Philadelphia, I think he was, of course, a changed man. And uh uh and there's no way to to prove this, only through his writings and and exchanges that he had with someone like the Dr. Benjamin Smith Barton about Native American people in the South. Um I think his encounters with Native Americans made an enormous impact on him as a as a person and helped influence his morality for the rest of his life because he wrote so sympathetically about Native American people and moral equivalency and superiority on their part in many, many ways to ours. Uh I say ours, you know, me being part of that colonial heritage. Um so, you know, he he just became reclusive. And I mean, you know, four years of like doing what he did, well almost four years doing what he did in the South when, you know, he was traveling around some pretty unsettled landscapes, like this one here, you know, there were colonial traders, several living here in Calwi when he came to Cowie, but this was a pretty wild country, you know. And the same for parts of Florida and Alabama that he traveled through.
SPEAKER_04Going back to the the the idea of the landscapes, um you you were also right about this a fair amount in the book. Like when I think when you're at Wafford and you're talking about uh he didn't, you know, Bartram didn't go through there, but you you're saying before me is the legacy of what followed, a burned out factory, a weary river, a forest, and a floodplain full of invasive and non-native species, an economically challenged neighborhood dealing with the fallout. Uh what's it like for you to kind of carry around uh his version of the landscape in these mountains in the southeast uh in your head while while looking at the one that exists today?
SPEAKER_00I I think that's what a whole lot of people who are into Bartram that's what that's what carries them along are these past landscapes, um these heavily altered, damaged um landscapes that in 250 years have just you know what's left. I mean and you read Bartram's landscape descriptions from that period and it's just paradise, man. It's just like um just these rich, lush forests full of wildlife and people living um lives that are more integrated into the natural world in more sustainable ways. Um and then there's this enormous diversion from that, you know, to where we're sitting right now, you know, in what is Cowie School built on top of what was once the capital of the Middletown Cherokees. So um you know, Leopold talked about living with an ecological consciousness was to live in a world of wounds. And I think anyone who lives with an ecological consciousness lives in a world of wounds. And I saw that growing up. You know, I grew up in a rural part of uh what is now considered Metro Atlanta, and um it wasn't a Bartram baseline, but it was my own childhood baseline of what woods I what I thought woods looked like, and what I thought, you know, for lack of a better way kind of saying this, kind of was like uh an internal geography mythology about a place that I heavily romanticized, like Bartram romanticized the American landscape. And I spent a lot of time in the woods around where I grew up, and that's really why I'm here today, is because those woods made me who I am. I watched those woods fall to the bulldozer as a teenager, late, you know, 18, 19 years old. Atlanta just started mowing down everything in front, you know, in its path, and now it's all just I don't even recognize that landscape anymore. I literally cannot find landmarks anywhere any anymore there. None. So I think, you know, that that hit me really, really hard growing up, just seeing how quickly we could just destroy things and change things, and that the people who were responsible for making those changes, you know, this is really naive, but you know, I felt like, you know, why didn't anyone like they didn't even consult anyone on this, you know, like like they just took down my mental geography and no one even asked, you know. It's just like, and that's happened all over this country. I think that's you know, I heard Richard Louvre once, who wrote um Last Child in the Woods, ask uh an audience that I was I was in, uh, how many people in the room saw their childhood forest destroyed. And, you know, probably over way over half of the room raised their hands, you know, and they were like, is then that's why is that why you're here? You know, and I think it it it made a big impact on me. So, you know, I I travel around in these landscapes and it I still see that type of behavior all the time, just absolutely ignorant behavior about how we treat the land here, you know. And I and maybe I'm jumping ahead, but thinking about the title of this book and and how Bartram viewed the American landscape, and how historians like Roderick Nash have said that he was the first American to to write about the American landscape in a romantic way and to describe it in terms of the sublime. Um, that was no one else was doing that, you know. And no one else, I mean, you think about him and his reclusiveness, he had no allies, right? You know, there was no North Carolina writers network for him or um, you know, any other number of like people that were like him that could coalesce, you know, into an Instagram post or something. Right. So it's like uh I think he had to live a a life that was probably like he probably felt like an oddball because of his views.
SPEAKER_04I've I've seen you refer to him as America's first hippie and also probably like America's first nature writer.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I think he was like, yeah, probably I think about him as being our first nature writer and probably first creative nonfiction writer. Um and after him, there's not a lot that happens until up until about Thoreau. So he had no real contemporaries, you know. He had patrons who loved his art. So, you know, that would have been Bartram's community. I think um were people who really appreciated his artwork and people who were genuinely interested in Native American people uh and weren't part of the colonial zeitgeist of just drive them out, mow them down, move them out, take it over. Um I mean Bartram has been accused somewhat of being a real estate agent too. You know, he was on a patronage from John Fothergill, a British doctor, but to write about the southern landscape primarily and to collect plants that were new to European science. Um, but he does write occasionally about, well, you know, I could see this being like an amazing vineyard, you know, or like this could be great plantation country or whatever, you know. And his father, you know, he and his father traveled into uh northern Florida in the 1760s under King George III's patronage. And it was, you know, after the French and Indian Wars and Florida had, you know, been been um given over to the British government, uh, that was territory that needed to be assessed. And John Bartram traveled to Northern Florida with William to basically do a real estate assessment of the St. John's River Valley, you know. And that's truly like a reads like a real estate, you know, ad to read John Bartram's journals. I mean, he was an astute botanist too, and and he even, you know, in the early 1700s when William was a teenager riding back and forth with Peter Collinson and others about how the American landscape was being altered to the point of where he didn't know if there'd be firewood in fifty years in New England where he was, and how wildlife was just being killed wantonly there. So they were complex characters.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. Uh I'm curious as someone who, you know, you you worked you have worked with young people on the Bartram Trail, volunteers. Uh you know, when you think about what has happened to the landscape, what is continuing to happen to the landscape, like what do you tell young people that they can do about it?
SPEAKER_00Um almost all the young people I've worked with, I'd say almost, not all of them, are doing what they're doing because they do want to have some connection to nature. And I would say that um that's one of the most um hopeful things that I encounter on a you know annual basis. I've been teaching a class in Highlands for six years this set semester is six years um on environmental science communication. And I I would say down to a person, there's usually there's always 15 people in the class. Every student in that class is working to make this planet a better place. And that's a hopeful thing. It's probably it's nowhere near enough. I mean, I don't think we're gonna turn the sixth grade extinction around. Um, but I do feel like there is an environmental consciousness out there among younger people that probably is growing now due to climate change being so in your face and so many other environmental issues that are just absolutely unavoidable. Um yeah, so I mean I do have a a pretty good bit of hope and a certain part of this current young population, and it may be just because of where I live and how I encounter them regularly or had through the Bartram Trail Conservancy, and really working hard in that job to build young culture, you know, into the organization and bringing in younger board members and um hiring youth crews to do trail work and getting to spend time out on the trail. And a lot of them were artistic, you know, and and were very into the artwork of Bartram. I can't say that all of them were like 18, 20 year olds that were really wanting to go sit down and read travels. Yeah. But I think they understood that the Bartram Trail, and I've said this before, is the Bartram Trail here, which follows Bartram's journey into the Southern Appalachians, um, is not just a trail, you know. It's it's a piece of history, and there's a a bigger dimension to it than just point A to point B hiking. Now, ninety, ninety-five percent of the people who get on that trail, you could have called it anything. Doesn't matter what you got on the trail maps at the kiosk or what the mission of the organization is. They're just out to to jog on the trail or to walk their dog on the trail or to hike. But I tell people all the time that the Bartram Trail is like a creative vector. Like the Bartram Trail is different because it's attached to a particular individual who traveled through this landscape very differently than people are traveling through this landscape today with a lot more attention and a gr tremendous amount of observational skills and encourage people to to to do that. You know, I'm friends with um a guy here in town, Chris uh Patterson, who just set the record for um running the Bartram in and out here, you know, the section that that we all h maintain and have here that goes from South Carolina to the summit at Chiobald in Swain County. It's a 112-mile trail. So he ran it out and back 224 miles, and I think it was 78 hours or something like that.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_00Um and before he ran it, he and I had a beer at, you know, in town here. And you know, it was like a few days before he's gonna run it, every week before or something, because he just wanted to talk about the trail, you know. And we'd met, of course, before and but he's like, I'm about to do this, you know. Just tell me the conditions you know you know right now, because I haven't run it in a while now. And he was about to do it. And he's like, So just be honest with me. Like, what do you think of um someone trying to set these fastest known times? I'm like, well, you know, it's impressive, yeah. It truly is. It's like amazing human kind of feat to run that trail 224 miles and set a record and do it, you know. But I said, you know, I'd also like to see someone who set the slowest time. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Like who was the who had the most contemplative journey? Exactly.
SPEAKER_00Who saw the most birds on their trip or you know, identified the most plant species, or uh made the most interesting artistic, you know, and like that I just tell people it's like um I mean it is the trail less traveled, you know. We have a shirt design, and people who hike the Bartram from beginning to end here always tell me that. And I've met a lot of them. You know, they're like, Why'd you hike the Bartram? If I ask them, they're like, I just knew I wouldn't see as many people. Yeah. Because it's a rugged, hard trail. And it is the trail that's less traveled. It is not the AT, you know. It may grow, I'm sure it will grow in popularity with through hikers, you know, in the years to come. But I do hope that we're also trying to create a different trail experience by pushing the idea that that think, slow down on this trail, you know. Uh look around you on this trail and read Bartram, you know. And the trail the trail guide I have, uh the have that I wrote was um that was my intention with that trail guide was to preface every section of the trail with a lot of cultural and natural history so that people would walk that section with some sense of the historical aspects of that trail. I don't know if it works, you know.
SPEAKER_04I do I we we have that book and I I love the way that it's laid out. I love the way that it um does all of those things. And uh we we we took our kids up to weigh a bald a couple years ago because I was looking for like what are some like really short there's obviously you can do the whole thing, uh, or you can look for like little little sections and that's great. And so we just we just kind of stumbled around there for a while, enjoyed the the fire tower lookout and and all of the the kiosks there, which were great.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. It does offer a different experience than the AT. I I do think that people who stop at the trailhead and read the map and look at the interpretive information we have on the map um are going to have a different experience, whether they necessarily realize it or not. They're walking out on that trail with maybe some sense of history. Um and, you know, I think the AT of course has an enormous history too, um with Ben Mackay being a founder and visionary for that trail and why he you know, why he envisioned the AT to be created. But I think people who envisioned the Bartram Trail being created had a different vision, you know. They really wanted it to be about education and um you know, creating an experience that was tied more to the Bartram legacy.
SPEAKER_03I I feel like I've seen talk of like some kind of bigger corridor. Is is there any potential for that?
SPEAKER_00It's been talked about for so many years. It's such an enormous lift. That was the the reason why there's a Bartram Trail here and elsewhere, like in Florida, and there's some short trail bark and trail segments in Alabama, and you know, when the Bart when the 200th anniversary of the Bartram you know Bartram's travels uh occurred in in 77, 1977, there was a big regional gathering in Alabama, and um government officials, politicians, garden clubs, you name it, everyone came together around that 200th anniversary to um to think about how to create a national scenic trail system in the southern states. Um and that just hit every political obstacle in the world until finally um the groups that were involved began kind of going off on their own and just going, look, we just gotta do this one state at a time, you know. And here in North Carolina, there was a North Carolina Bartram Trail Society, and in Georgia, there was a Georgia Barcham Trail Society, and in Florida there still is a Florida Barcham Trail Society that does amazing work down there. Um, but it just has been so hard, you know, to to put piece all this stuff together. And I had a young intern here a couple summers ago, and that was his task was just to like figure out how we connect all this stuff, you know? And it was like hundreds of miles of roadwalk. Um, you know, there's a lot enough good greenways out there today in small towns and large towns, and the you know, from like like right now you could walk the Bartram all the way to Charleston, like even though it ends, it hits the Foothills Trail, you know, in South Carolina, and the Foothills Trail hits the Palmetto Trail, and people are doing that, uh, you know, and Bartram, of course, traveled here from Charleston, and there was just uh so you know, and then there's a lot of stuff on the coast, you know, that you get down to the Florida Bartram Trail uh with a lot of road walking, but also some walks through good pleasant country, and it's not crazy, you know. I mean, if you think about something like the Mountains to Sea Trail, there's like that's twelve hundred miles and it's like four hundred miles that's on road, I think. A lot of it, yeah. Yeah. And people are doing it.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I've heard I've heard people tell me they want to do that, and I've thought, why? Like we just just enjoy the part we have here. I do.
SPEAKER_00And I have a guy who used to work here at Bartram as a trail manager, uh, walked it, did it all, and walked the roadwalk. And I was couldn't believe he did it. More power to him. More power to him. You know, he's cowboy camping, like sleeping, you know, on private land, whatever. But uh I mean, you know, there's enough people are just interested in that kind of thing now. I don't think it's an impossibility, but it would just take a tremendous amount of effort. And you know, the thing about like Bartram people are kind of aging out, you know. Like um the Bartram Trail Conference um as a board still exists. I mean, I'm on that board, and you know, we're having our annual meeting next year in Philadelphia at Bartram's Garden, which is still a big nonprofit, huge part of Philadelphia history. Um, but you know, it's hard to recruit people, you know, into those or types of organizations now. And it's gotta there's gotta be a very creative hook to that, you know, to really get young people like psych about being part of an organization, about as I mentioned earlier, about an old dead white guy, you know. It's just um what is sustainable about his work and his legacy, I think, are those ecological baselines and his artwork, which is unique for that era. And books are still being published about that. So I don't see him you know losing ground in the historical world. I see him maybe losing ground in the world of you know, popular opinion or common culture, you know, just um I see other organizations aging out. And if you're not reinventing yourself all the time and reimagining yourself all the time, you're gonna age out. And um, you know, I I've like I said, uh you you've gotta actively just bring people into this world. And uh Faith Williams, who works for Bartram Trail Conservancy now, um really, really gets it. Uh she's a trail manager. I hired her several, you know, six, eight months before I left I left um the Conservancy. And what was so im is uh so impressed me about her is that she's really into Bartram, you know. Um she's a botanist and a plant person and a trail person and loves history. So yeah, we were just extremely fortunate to get someone like that who's only like twenty-eight. Oh wow. Yeah, yeah, she's twenty-eight. And uh so that to me has just been like a super encouraging thing because you know I've watched other young people here at Calwi School where we are now, um, come in and be part of this organization who are in there are young. And I think about this landscape, how much it's changed, like all of Western North Carolina's changed really since COVID, uh, with this enormous influx of people coming into um this part of you know, we're Asheville West, really, or Asheville all the way up to the Pisca. Um, just this enormous influx of people, you know, moving here. Um some of them you seem to understand that the way to live here is to have a strong connection to this place. Uh and a lot of those are the young people who are moving here, and they're struggling to make a living here, you know, but a lot of them moved here to work and live because they wanted to live in a beautiful place and they want a connection to place and they want a good place to raise their kids and to be in nature. And so that's all not necessarily Bartram, but you know what I encourage people to do is just read him to get a sense of this place. Whether you appreciate his writing or or don't, you can read him and you can go, oh my God, this place, look at what Cow Weed described 250 years ago what Cow Wee looked like, exactly what Cowie looked like. Only descriptions we have of Cow Wee from the 18th century, you know, and you can just kind of like use that as sort of a way to look at the landscape today. And so I use that as an example of just how you know I encourage people to connect a place, really care about this place on a deeper level. Um because I stay so frustrated here now. You know, it's just everything from like the Corps of Engineers coming in last year and demolishing our river, doing debris removal and seeing just such disregard for this place, you know, out of state contractors just coming in and running up and down the river and heavy equipment and running over fish wears and you know, just absolute total disregard, you know, for this place. Um so, you know, sort of my mission with Bartram is to help create a sense of place here with this organization.
SPEAKER_04Stepping away from Bartram for a minute, um, there's a funny moment though in the book where you write about helping to put together a Bartram event here and basically say, I'm never doing this again. Uh and now you're helping to organize not a Bartram event, but uh another event that's coming up uh in a couple of weeks here. So what happened? And and tell me about Spotfin.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, never say never, right? Um Spotfin, well I'll back it up. So the original vision, as me working out of the school with the previous director here, uh Laura Brooks, uh, who's a very creative person, um, and uh Matt Sawyer, who works at City Light's bookstore. He he he was doing a podcast here out of the school for a while called Why We Cow Week. You know, and Matt's you know really connected to the literary world. And it was just sort of a um a dream I had of creating a literary journal for the school called Spotfin Literary Journal and why Spotfin? Spotfin's um a rare fish that just lives in the little Tennessee River watershed, which is a pretty big drainage, you know, it's like 450 square miles, and its range within that watershed is pretty limited, but it's an endemic fish, you know. It needs clean water, it needs clean habitat and good habitat and undisturbed habitat. And you know, so it uh it was sort of a metaphor, you know, like yeah, we've got a lot of great endemism here in the sense of like history and unique history and art, and a lot of great talented writers and artists living in this valley, and like uh, let's make this thing the Spotfin Literary Journal. And you know, it was a lot of work to even try to get that off the ground, and a lot of money is what we found out to, and and there was just not the capacity to pull it off. I didn't have the capacity to pull it off. And um, it was still a dream, you know. And then Matt, Matt and I and Laura talked a lot about, you know, and we've hosted a lot of literary events over the years here at the school. I bring in writers to do different literary events here at the school. It's like, well, let's make this something else, you know, that we can pull off, which would be a spot fin art and nature literary kind of gathering. And it, you know, it's been a lot of work. I'm saying it again, I'll never do it again. And and part of what I've been working with with this spotfin event is bringing in young people that are helping me organize and you know, with the idea that I'm passing it off this year if we if the school chooses to do it again. And and I I do hope that it's like, you know, a really successful event, but Laura Laura left the school and at the same time I left Bartram for a really, you know, much better paying job and better benefits, and can't blame her. She's got two kids. It's like, of course, do it. And then school had no director for a while, takes a while to hire a new executive director, and I'm in the middle of this thing, right? Um and there's just a part-time admin person here in the office, and so I really just kind of pulled my hair out, you know, for the last several months. And they've hired Will now, so they have a director who's been on board now for about six, eight weeks, and uh yeah, he's he's got a lot on his plate. So Spotpin, Spotpin has been uh, you know, it's something I've always wanted to do here at the school. And I hope that it continues on, but it's just it takes up a lot of headspace, and you know, I'm moving on to some other undefined headspace. But I'm trying to figure out, you know, where am I going after all this, but uh and hopefully I'll have some times and and some years to do other things and stay involved here with the school. And Spotfin, you know, is just this kind of um amalgamation of people who are really into the natural world and are offering workshops specifically connected to the natural world. Uh and then there are artists who are doing classes here, like Carol Conte, for example, down the hall doing a botanical illustrations class, which she's taught here many times before. Um everything from like uh a weaver who we have down the hall who's doing um an amulet-making workshop, and uh uh a couple of young women here that are connected to the school who are do who've done this workshop for Bartram before called Nature is Kin. And it's a very kind of of a force bathing type of experience and a deep immersion into nature, a very conscious observation class. My wife and I are doing what we always do, which are cock trips down the river, cultural natural history tours of the little Tennessee. And then Saturday is more literary. We've got some writers coming in, like Holly Hayworth's coming in, Zelda Lockhart's coming in to do writers' workshops and and and presentations, and we've got other writers who are doing workshops that day, Sidney Cale. Uh so you know, we're we're it's a literary, cultural, artistic event that I love the idea of it. It's something Something that's hasn't been done here, of course, but it's something I think could continue to build connection to this place and and connection consciousness about this place, really. Not not uh so much like to the past as much as to the future, uh, you know, and to the present. Um that's sort of the dream, you know, is to really build build a higher level of c consciousness to this place and an ethical kind of unity with this place, responsibility, really, to the place. Uh, which is what we should have in our minds all the time, is how are we treating this place? You know, is it responsible? Is it sustainable? Um, is it for the greater good or actions? Um so I think these are just it's an event to, I think, hope hopefully kind of create that idea. That's that's our intention with it. You know, the the two young women I just mentioned uh who are doing the Nature is Kin workshop. Um we've really worked to like make this idea of this being um a relationship builder to this place. Uh they've been two of the other primary organizers uh behind all of this. And that's just that's our dream. That's the dream of what we're doing with Spotfin.
SPEAKER_04Awesome. And we'll we'll put a um a link to it in the show notes here. And if somebody's listening before September 25th and 26th of 2026, they can find out about this year's event. Um and then maybe maybe next year. So yeah. I'll I'll be there to volunteer. Well, yeah and not to lead. So yeah, so what what is next for you? You've you've left the the Trail Conservancy, um, you've got this book coming out in October, but then there's there's more works ahead. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I mean, I've always wanted to do kind of a deep time um study of the Little Tennessee River Valley. I don't know if that'll go anywhere, but I've wanted it to be more of an artistic and historical rendering of the Little Tennessee River Valley that um I mean like really going back in deep time, like as far as like this crazy idea of I mean these mountains are 300 million years old or so, and they're one point thousands and thousands of feet higher, and we have the contoured landscape that we have today. You know, sort of like artistically reimagining these mountains from that period and building a timeline of of what these mountains have looked like throughout the s the eons to become what they are today, to build a more deep time kind of connection to the Little Tennessee River Valley. I mean, a book like that is only going to have a very local kind of audience, is the problem. Um so I don't know. That's just maybe a project that I don't really um, you know, see to fruition, but it's something I've thought about for a long time. And I think for me it's gonna be digging more into writing poetry again, which is which is what I really feel strongest about as far as like what I enjoy to do. It's the hardest, it's the most challenging form of writing for me. It it's really, you know, my experience with poetry has been like it's never been easy, it's just always been really hard to write good poetry. And um I like poetry a lot because of that, you know, like really good poets I just admire more than probably any other writers because I just know that what they're doing is just so hard to pull off, to really condense language down, you know, to where you're just really getting the essence of it in a line. And I've I've known really good poets over the years and love just reading poetry. So maybe it's back to writing essays. The thing that I keep telling my poor wife, who has had to put up with me through all this, is that I I just need a blank page right now to look at. And as long as I'm like organizing literary arts events and um being open 25 hours a week here in this space that I'm in right now here at the school and teaching, like I'm still teaching this semester, and even though it's just a part co-teaching with two other instructors, it's still like when all that is gone, when all that is uh out of me, then there's gonna be a greater emptiness that I'm already sensing is coming, that I'm already experiencing. You know, and I'm 67, so I don't know how many more years I even will have left. So it's like it feels pretty important. What I do do, I don't want to sit around and not contribute, you know, because I do care deeply about this place. And so where that all goes, when I get to that blank page, uh it'll be interesting. And maybe Spotfin is going to be somewhat of a fulcrum, you know, to launch that new phase of whatever that becomes. But I w I know without a doubt that I'll stay connected to the arts and literary world here in this valley. Um I just I'm still struggling with what that actually means or what that is going to look like.
SPEAKER_04Well, I hope you do keep writing more essays, whether it's a a a book, an essay, poetry. Um if we go back to the landscape and we go back to Bartram, uh what do you think Bartram would make of the Blue Ridge Mountains today? Oh my God.
SPEAKER_00You know, he was living at a time when he was witnessing this landscape be transformed. I mean, when he came through here, he'd already seen what happened here from two French and Indian War campaigns, and he described how much the landscape had been changed just by those campaigns, you know, and and elsewhere in the South, he w he would write about how significantly the landscape was being changed. I think it it would probably boggle the mind, his mind to think about this world if he were to see it today. It's sort of like if I try to think about this landscape 250 years from now, I don't think about good things. Yeah. Yeah. Because the the trajectory of how we have developed as a country has been unrelenting without very little thought, except for some of the more he you know good politicians that have agreed to these bigger conservation goals of conserving landscapes like Theodore Roosevelt or any number of other presidents who actually saw the benefits of protecting what makes this country such a unique country with all these great parks. Um what's happened, you know, in tandem with all that is just this unrelenting relenting kind of a uh development that's just in so many ways mindless, you know, where if if there's not a vision um behind what is happening, then bad stuff follows. And I've watched that here. You know, we've got a great land trust here that's protected a lot of land. We've got 50% of our land base is national forest. Um the national park is just to the north of here. So I tell myself and others that the worst case scenario here right now, given all that's going on, is still better than some of the best case scenarios elsewhere south of here, like with Atlanta moving north.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Uh we've got a big public landspace here to defend. We've got an incredible river here that's 30 miles of Little Tennessee River protected in permanent conservation easements or just view simple purchases. And, you know, to live here in North Macon County is like, I feel like one of the best places left in Southern Appalachia. There's a lot of great places left in Southern Appalachia, but um, this place is like, you know, it's this there's a lot of hope left here, you know. I've seen young people moving in here who are growing food. And we have a tailgate market here, for example, at Cal Wee School every Wednesday, and these young farmers are bringing in produce, you know, and baked goods, and got a local bakery just right up the road with a young couple working out of their house, and they come to the Cow We School every Wednesday afternoon for the tailgate market, and there's a line out the door, you know, for them to sell bread, and they're making a living, a pretty decent living at it. So um and I've seen a lot of really good young creatives moving here uh uh post-COVID, and yeah, they're paying twelve hundred dollars a month to rent a 350 square foot tiny home, you know, and they're wondering if they're ever gonna be able to buy a house here, but they're hanging on in this place, you know, and they kind of get it uh about why it's unique to live here. And but thinking 250 years out, God help us, I just don't know. It just feels like climate change and um everything that we've seen, like even with a lean, like we dodged that bullet here in Bacon County, barely dodged that bullet in Macon County. Could happen to this year. You know, we just just right now we live in such a world of of uncertainty. Um I'd love to have seen this place 250 years ago. I don't know if I want to see it 250 years out.
SPEAKER_04I interviewed Paul Boonsteel earlier this year uh and right right before um his latest documentary about George Massa came out. You were in it. Yeah, yeah. Uh yeah, cool to see you. You wrote a book about Massa too. Um Paul, after studying Massa for so many years uh when we spoke, referred to him as kind of like one of his dead friends. Uh and and I'm curious if you feel that way about Bartram.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I do feel it's there's no way for me not to. I've spent so many years on that man's life now. I I told uh a friend of mine who's done a lot of artwork here for Bartram, uh linoleum artist named Craig Burkulter. Um when I left Bartram, you know, I had a going away party and it was fun. People brought all kinds of stuff, and but he brought me a linoleum cut that's hanging on the wall over here. Um and uh he's done other linoleum work for us over the years, but uh he brought a linoleum piece that said, You're on your own now, William. I'm retired. And but you know, it was like, but you know, he's not on his own. I mean, like Craig was doing that just because I have like spent so many years on his life and where that's going. I don't see me ever being disconnected from him, sort of like Paul and George Massa. Um, you know, that was another person's life. It was really interesting to immerse my own life in for a while. Um, but I've immersed my life my own life into Bartram's life for so long now that I just I really I don't see how I could ever not be, you know, somehow connected to him. I you know, my wife, like when I finally finished this book uh and got it turned in, you know, to the press, she was like, You can give him a break now, right? And, you know, uh um 'cause it was a long time coming. And then writing the Bartram Trail Guide was a big project and you know I've just been so so so immersed in that man's life sometimes that I just feel like, what is going on with that? You know, like what what is what is really behind all this, you know? Like uh sort of like Paul and and George Massa, you know. There's that deep, long connection Paul has had to to George Masa. And these are not like popular characters or anything, but people like Paul or if like myself get so immersed in someone's life, like is that just stuff being intergenerationally kind of passed on to certain people through you know, I don't know, telepathy. Um that's sort of why the letters kind of came out as important for me is like riding across time, you know, like riding across space-time to communicate with someone who's long been gone, but still wanting to feel a personal connection and being able to do that creatively.
SPEAKER_04Um Is there anything we didn't talk about today that you would want people to know about you or about Bartram?
SPEAKER_00If I were to go back and look at thirty something years of conservation work, which is when I started working in in Georgia, um to this moment, I would have never imagined that William Bartram would have become such a big part of my life. And this is not really anything apropos to what you just asked. It's just an observation that I've made about my own life, you know, over the decades. It's like where do these things come from? You know? Um I encountered this man just briefly in passing working when I was working on a graduate degree, and then when I came to work for Main Spring and, you know, Land Trustville, Tennessee then. Um I would have never imagined that this man would have become such a huge part of my life, um, and influenced me so greatly. And I guess and when I say that, I guess that has also helped me to figure out how to answer what you just ask, which um if there's one thing I feel like is to be learned from anyone in America about this man's life, is that there's one value that I think is completely embedded in his writing, and that value is humility. And I feel like humility is the one thing that he has taught me. Um that I don't know if I would have gotten that lesson without just reading him and reading him and reading him and reading him and studying him, that you know, hum humility is kind of what infuses his approach to the world. Um and of course, we know about his past, and that was not always true for things. But I feel like, you know, particularly when Travels was published in subsequent letters and writings, that Barsham really was on to something about where America was heading with ambition and avarice and greed, um, and that he withdrew from that. And I just think it's something that's still highly relevant in American society today, that his writings are something that that we can learn from. That that that that that value of humility, if we want to call it a value, um is something that that I've learned from him, others can learn from him. Um it can help us as we try to negotiate this world in a time where humility is just seemingly absent from discourse, you know? Like it's the one thing we need more than ever right now, and it's in that book.
SPEAKER_04That's all for today. Huge thanks again to Brent Martin for joining me. You can catch Brent at book release parties for William Bartram and the Nature That Could Have Been at Outdoor 76 in Franklin on October 9th at 6.30 p.m. and on October 10th in Silva at City Lights Bookstore at 3. Or you can order the book via Mercer University Press, and we'll add a link in our show notes. Plus, you can learn more about Spotfin at cowieschool.org slash spotfin. And Cowie, by the way, is spelled C O W E E. You can find OnTheBlue Ridge on Facebook and Instagram at OnTheBlue Ridge and online at on the blueridgepod.com. And if you're enjoying this podcast, please follow or subscribe wherever you listen. Consider leaving a rating and a quick review, or just share it with a friend, as it really helps more people find the show. Our theme music is the song Goa, written by Lindsay Pruitt and performed by the John Stickley Trio. Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you next time on the Blue Ridge.