Callaway Sink. A hole in the top of the Cumberland Plateau two miles wide and 700 or so feet deep. High forests slide slowly into its depths. No water leaves the site except through the gaping and terrifying drain in the bottom, furiously carved and recarved by the massive flush of 70 inches of rain a year.
It is a forbidding place, an ancient haven for those lost to society – timber rattlers, giant Cumberland pack rats, moonshiners, shamans hoping to catch the attention of gods. Their signatures are everywhere on the rocks and in the caves.
It’s also a last refuge for trees and wildflowers trampled out of existence in much of north Alabama, with one of the most astonishing displays of spring ephemerals left in North America. It’s the kind of place that makes world travelers like John Pickering want to write odes, a place where beauty is so strange, so unfamiliar it will make you shiver.
We are fortunate it’s part of the 4000-acre Nature Conservancy preserve that the Research Center monitors and helps supervise. Though Callaway Sink seems remote and isolated beneath its high rim, Huntsville’s expanding development is stomping through the valleys just a few miles away, spreading its asphalt and Bermuda grass carpet, obliterating anything that remotely resembles this forest.
This Paint Rock Valley and the sinks like this within it are the last vestiges of one of North America’s most important ecosystems, and there’s increasing reason to believe this area may have sheltered genetics that are key to the survival of North American forests for millions of years in the past and millions of years into the future.
If it survives the present.
A few thousand acres isn’t nearly big enough to protect the forest of the future. We’ll need to conserve much more if we are to save any of it.
And yet we still treat Paint Rock Valley as if it’s just another stomping ground. In the bottom of Callaway Sink, where oceans of bluebells bloom, where you must wade cautiously between the rainbow flowers of a half dozen species of trilliums, where the most golden of all poppies glows beside goldenseal and wild ginger, hunters decided to clear and plant a large section with European invasives to feed the deer.
You may be forgiven for wondering what North American deer ate before humans decided they had to eat cheap European plants. But I wouldn’t hold it against the hunters. They perform a critical service in the preserve. And they mean well. They’re just following the directions in the hunting magazines and blogs, which have no self-interest in encouraging these so-called “greenfields” – other than selling the seed and all the paraphernalia that goes with it.
Maybe because we don’t feel respected, all of us have this sense that we must bring something to the Southern landscape to make it more respectable. So we spread acres of European fescue and Bermuda grass around our houses to ape the estates of English overlords, just as we plant Italian rye to feed the deer. And all along, what the landscape of the South, of the Cumberlands, of Alabama had to offer – to humans, to deer, to the North American forests and streams – was worth more than any of the seeds or enterprises we import.
Seeing the bottom of Callaway repeatedly plowed and herbicided got to be a bit hard to explain after a while. I asked the hunting club if they wouldn’t mind ignoring the hunting magazines, at least in this part of the preserve. The deer are attracted to the lush foliage of sunlit meadows, not to the store-bought seed. Just leave it be, I said. We’ll mow it on occasion if necessary, to control the brushy thickets that sometimes take over after humans abandon their mess.
Some members of the hunting club look puzzled.
“You know it will come up in weeds?”
I tried not to smile.
The weeds of Callaway are spreading nicely now through the greenfield, another small but critical acre of bluebells, twinleaf, trilliums, lilies, orchids, larkspur and golden poppies against a world determined to plow and pave it all.
Bill Finch. Paintrock.org