April 2003
Contents

Message From the Executive Director:
* The Upstate as the next regional city

Conservation:
* Couple preserves land along highway 11
* Northern Greenville county tract preserved
* UF members donate land adjoining
Jocassee Gorges to State
* Conservation Bank Act signed into law!

Articles:
* The Upstate is being developed at the rate of a new Haywood Mall every three days!!
* Downtown Schools: a key step toward sensible growth
* Downtown schools in the Upstate
good news and bad news
* Can Stories Save a River?
Bringing Lawson's Fork back to life
* Main Street: Heart and soul of the Upstate
* Victory for streams in the Upstate!

Upstate Forever News:
* Events
* Awards
* Volunteers
* Staff

CAN STORIES SAVE A RIVER?
Bringing Lawson's Fork Back To Life

by Betsy Teter
I’m rounding a bend in Lawson’s Fork Creek in my long, tan kayak, leading a flotilla of twenty boats on a Sunday afternoon in late April. Energetic paddling has put me a couple hundred yards ahead of the other boats, and I’m drifting now, enjoying the quiet in this out-of-the-way corner of Spartanburg, South Carolina. A little further down the stream I encounter the sounds of splashing and rock-and-roll music coming from the woods. I float sideways to the current and wait for some of the others to catch up.

     The middle of Lawson’s Fork Creek is a place I could never have pictured myself six years ago when a group of local writers gathered at a downtown coffee shop and founded the Hub City Writers Project. In the intervening years, we have published a series of twelve books, most of them collections of stories about the place we live. None, though, have had the impact of the one we published last spring about this urban stream.
     We knew when we started that most people in town would think it was a crazy idea. Lawson’s Fork Creek was nothing but a drainage ditch for factories, strip malls, and subdivisions. An afterthought. A place where if you went swimming, “your skin would fall off,” as a childhood friend once warned me.
     Could stories save a river? We didn’t know the answer to that question, but we wanted to find out.
     The idea started small: Interview the folks who lived and worked on the river. Put a local writer in a boat and send him down the creek to tell
his own story. Take some kids to the river’s edge. Have them write some poetry. Find a local artist to illustrate the flora and fauna. Take somephotographs.
     Author Gary Henderson found 92-year-old Bea Hewitt to tell the story of the big flood in 1928. He found African-American artist Thomas Parham to describe how the indigo textile dye used to sweep down the river before the mills all closed. He found a silver-haired biologist who told him that thanks to the Clean Water Act, Lawson’s Fork was “500 times cleaner” than it was when he first started water samples.
     Meanwhile, fresh from publishing an anthology of the work of early South Carolina naturalists, local English professor David Taylor set off in his kayak to explore a creek few had ever seen except from bridge crossings. In a stirring narrative, he told of encounters with sunken shopping carts and toilet bowls. But he also found fishermen pulling bass and brim from the water. He followed great blue herons and watched beavers slip into the creek. The manuscript David handed us in December 1999 was the story of a creek being reborn.
     Heady with our own ingenuity, the Hub City Writers allowed ourselves to get increasingly ambitious. We found two local videographers to create a documentary about the river and wrote a $10,000 grant to the S.C. Humanities Council to help pay for it.
We got the Spartanburg Water System to fund an elaborate web page.
     And of course we needed a festival to launch the book. For four days in April 2000, in four locations, with four completely different sets of activities, we encouraged Spartanburg residents to come to the banks of Lawson’s Fork Creek. We put our slogan, “Explore the Interior” on banners and bumpers and T-shirts. There were Indian storytellers and symphonies, a children’s river drama and nature walks; an environmental arts exhibit and kayak rides. There were gospel choirs and river murals and bluegrass bands and articles in the newspaper every day for a week. The National Endowment for the Arts paid for most of it with a $10,000 grant, and our local arts council chipped in another $5,000.
     It was a festival that could only have been created by a group of writers—people who made fiction and poetry but didn’t stop to think how crazy (and exhausting!) this publicity stunt really was.
     But what an impact. Today is the one-year anniversary of the closing ceremony of our Lawson’s Fork festival, and we are celebrating. Just yesterday, there was a successful river trash sweep. One group of volunteers pulled 27 automotive tires out of a 100-yard-long stretch. It’s challenging to catalog all the changes that were set in motion by the publication of The Lawson’s Fork: Headwaters to Confluence. Unbelievably, there now are five boat launch sites up and down this creek. Thanks to a $25,000 allocation from our local Legislative Delegation, Lawson’s Fork has become a recreational river.
     A conservation organization out of the state capital set up shop in Spartanburg and has just opened two miles of hiking trail along Lawson’s Fork. A local foundation has given them $240,000, and they are currently scouting the Lawson’s Fork floodplain for more trail sites.
     A group of residents downstream at Glendale Shoals has spearheaded the opening of a small sculpture park on the banks of the river. “Rebirth,” a ten-foot-tall abstract representation of the native umbrella magnolia crafted from black steel beckons people to park their cars and come look at the river. There are plans for a community garden on the bottomland just around the next bend.
     A partnership we launched with an elementary school has blossomed into a two-year-long environmental science and writing initiative. Third graders at Chapman Elementary School, which sits on a hill above the creek, have become experts on macroinvertebrate life in the waterway. These kids not only can tell you the difference between a caddis fly and a stone fly, they can draw you pictures of them and write poems about them as well. The children know that when these insect larvae are found under rocks in their creek, it means the stream is healthy. When the rocks are empty, something is badly wrong.
     Last, but certainly not least, a group called Friends of the Lawson’s Fork, dormant for nearly 25 years, is meeting again with a new generation of river activists. They plan Sedimentation Patrols to make sure developers have silt fences in place. They’ve bought water testing kits and will check the water quality twice monthly. A prominent local philanthropist has joined, and with a group of friends, she recently waded waist deep in the water
to oversee the difficult removal of numerous sunken shopping carts.
     Today there’s a tailgate party going on in the woods in a large area where the underbrush has recently been cleared. They are cooking barbecue, awaiting the arrival of our group of paddlers. The place looks like a mountain campsite, not a Piedmont floodplain overrun by kudzu and privet. A banner welcoming us hangs across the river.
     We pull our boats to the side and climb up the bank by way of a ladder someone has graciously placed there. I recognize some of the guys who pulled the 27 tires out. One of them owns the house through the woods, and I wander through the crowd of
50 or so until I find him.
     “Wow, this place looks great,” I say to him. “What made you do this?
     “I’ve just figured out I have waterfront property,” he says with a wink.
     Can stories save a river?
     Unquestionably yes.