This past week, I received an e-mail from a family friend stating that TVA was doing repair work on the embankments along the Chilhowee Dam, and the agency had lowered the level of Chilhowee Lake down to an unprecedented level; the lowest since the reservoir's impoundment in 1957.
Chilhowee is the third in a series of reservoirs daisy-chaining down what was once the Little Tennessee River Valley. The "Little T" drained the northwestern portion of the Smoky Mountains, and its valley, once home to Woodland Indians and wooly mammoth, would become the seat of the Cherokee Nation, then a thriving pioneer river economy and finally (sadly) host to a series of gated lakefront communities.
The Little Tennessee River didn't die of natural causes; it was strangled by a series of dams, beginning near its headwaters with the huge Fontana reservoir and then slowly proceeding downstream, both chronologically and topographically, along the valley. The final death knell sounded in 1978, with the political maneuverings that ultimately authorized the completion of the Tellico Project at the mouth of the river.
The Chilhowee Reservoir itself was impounded in 1957. My father, who had fly-fished the area for years, used to talk about how he and my mother would take my older siblings up above the dam on weekends to watch the water level slowly progress upstream, to finally inundate the beautiful valley. By the time I came along and was old enough to fish Chilhowee, the still waters of the lake had defined the area for well over 20 years.
To me, the lake was always striking, with long steep ridges flanking both sides of the valley from the Caulderwood Dam all the way down to Chilhowee. The reservoir, while not a particularly wide or deep one in comparison to some others in the region, was a lake nonetheless and my father and I fished it regularly in my grandfather's old motorboat.
When we would drive along its northern shore toward our favorite boatramp at the upper end of the lake, my father would sometimes stop the car and stare out across the waters, quietly humming to himself as his mind traveled back to days long past; days spent wading the former river's icy waters as a young man in search of elusive mountain trout. He would point to a spot about midway across the lake from the boat ramp and talk about how, in the summer of 1952, he had hooked and then chased a huge rainbow trout downstream across a series of shoals before ultimately landing the monster a few hundred yards below. He would always describe that struggle as a pinnacle moment in a lifetime of avid fly-fishing, and the tale would never fail to prime me for a long day on the water.
Today, we took the girls and drove up to have a look at the lake. The day was flawless, the October sky bright and blue; the weather balanced precariously between summer warmth and autumn cool. We stopped first just below the mouth of Abram's Creek, also the former site of the Cherokee town of Chilhowee (for which the dam and lake are named). The reservoir level was substantially lowered and the waters had receded toward the center of the valley, although the calm surface still very much resembled a lake. As we descended an adjacent boat ramp, we soon found ourselves standing on ground that, at least until these last few weeks, had not been trodden upon in over 50 years. My wife and daughters had a great time picking through a cross-section of trash spanning five decades, and exploring the formerly submerged foundations of several old buildings. One such site, clearly a former gas station, still sported an impressive mound of bottle caps out back, thousands of them, with mid-20th century versions of Coke, Pepsi, Fanta and other company logos still clearly visible beneath the rust.
We then drove northward along the river, following the route my father and I had driven so often when I was a boy. As we progressed up the valley and the terrain steepened, the water level began to drop markedly. When we finally arrived at the old boat ramp on the upper end of the lake, the water was clearly confined to the original river bed. The girls and I again descended using the ramp for access, and soon found ourselves traversing a wide field of cracked and drying lake mud. We crossed the former road bed and passed an old fence row (still standing) both formerly buried beneath 25 feet of water. Closer to the river, we began to see green grass sprouting from the mud, even though the area had been exposed to air and sunlight for only a few short weeks.
And then, a miraculous thing happened- having slogged through the dried silt and mud for a couple of hundred yards we were suddenly standing on the former banks of the river, looking out over a crystal clear mountain stream and the long shoals my father had so poignantly described to me when I was a boy. When I looked at the clear cool waters, the bottom strewn with the same round stones one would find in any Smoky Mountain trout stream, I felt realization and elation dawning on me simultaneously. The river wasn't dead. It was still here, looking probably identical to what it had when my father waded its crystalline waters for the last time over 50 years ago. We each picked our way across the remaining mud and found ourselves standing on the river bottom. We watched as a father and daughter (and a big black lab) made their way across the stream toward us, having waded to the opposite shore and now back. The girls and I each stooped to pick up a few smooth river stones, and then slowly made our way upstream another several hundred yards. We finally stopped at a large bend in the valley, and I looked across to the mouth of a small tributary stream where my best friend and I had camped, my grandfather's boat loaded with several cases of beer, for an entire week in the spring of 1983. We had camped at the waterline then, and now I noted the spot was about 15 feet above the river bottom.
It was getting late (and cold) and the girls and I finally turned to walk back across the mudfields toward the old road bed that led back down the valley. As I turned, I noticed a light hatch coming off the water in the late afternoon sun, and in a deep pool among the shoals, a trout rose and took his evening meal. I thought of my father and of his love for this place.
As for the river, it was still there; and it would always be there, silently awaiting the inevitable erosion of man's conventions and patiently contemplating its own return. That revelation has warmed my heart beyond words.
