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Whose Idea was This?
Landis’ fiction looks at heritage of TVA
by Jeanne McDonald
In 1933, the world as they knew it changed for thousands of people living in Appalachia. That was the year a federal agency was formed to provide cheap electric power, irrigation and flood control by building dams and reservoirs to develop the entire basin of the Tennessee River. The Tennessee Valley Authority displaced family after family when it relocated people from farms destined to be flooded after the construction of Cove Creek Dam, later known as Norris. But financial compensation could not repay those families’ investments in the land, its history, and their very heritage.
A photograph snapped by Marshall Wilson, an empathetic TVA employee who realized the vast historical impact of the massive project, serves as the cover art for Harvest, a thought-provoking new novel by Knoxville author Catherine Landis (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s, $23.95). In Wilson’s photograph, the child looking back from the departing wagon might well be Arliss Greene, the author’s incarnation of a blunt, practical boy whose whole life—present, past and future—revolves around life on the farm. “On the day of the move,” Landis writes, “Arliss hurled his 6-year-old body into hauling frying pans and overalls and quilts and dinner plates and baskets to the wagon until, finally...the house stood empty.... Arliss left the place where he was born, riding backwards on top of a loaded wagon.... He imagined fish swimming in and out of the gaping windows [of the house].... He pictured tree limbs bending to river currents instead of the wind. In the sky, he could almost see the bottoms of boats where clouds floated now.”
Arliss tries to move forward, working the new land outside Knoxville to which the family has emigrated and taking over management of the farm when his father dies. Yet he never quite gets over the nagging loss of his childhood farm, and his two sons show no interest in taking over the newer one. One day he decides to drive to Norris Dam. “He was prepared to be stunned but was not. It was smaller than he had imagined, and dirty, streaked with something black like tar. It fit neatly, even naturally, between the two rocky hills on either side of the river. A web of power lines stood on a platform to the right, and at the base of the dam was a building studded with so many windows it looked like the way a child might draw a picture of a house, with windows stuck in every available space.” In a touching passage, Landis juxtaposes the stolid structure of the dam with its softer, natural surroundings: “The river looked dangerous, a metallic gray, a deathly color, not of water but of something mixed with water, like poison. Otherwise, it was peaceful there beside the dam, and surprisingly quiet. A low electrical noise hummed in the background, but the chirping of a cricket in the grass was louder and more insistent.”
As the years go by, housing developments spring up around the periphery of the farm; even a Wal-Mart appears on the horizon as neighboring farms are sold off, but Arliss stubbornly holds on.
Ironically, it is his daughter-in-law, Leda, who offers to help him keep up the land: “Over and over [Leda] had promised; if only [Arliss] would trust her, she would keep the developers away from it. Whatever it took, she would do. Because all around them, the land was going fast. She had seen vast tracts of it, cleared of all its trees, not just the scrap trees...but the dogwoods and red buds and even the big old oaks and poplars and hickory trees... The only value that seemed to matter was money, not animal habitat, not where food might come from not oxygen, not community, not science, not balance, not beauty, not peace.... She knew smart people who could spit out good reasons for all this development, but as far as she could tell, most of them concerned an economy of the moment. When she closed her eyes she imagined herself a hundred years from now looking down on a ravaged earth with new people who would not quit asking, Whose idea was this?’”
Harvest is partly a story about the shaky relationship between Arliss’s son Daniel and Leda, but in the background the reader always senses the tension of the aging Arliss as he struggles to maintain his heritage. Arliss’s decision about the future of his beloved land is less a surprise than a testament to the American definition of progress. Shaped by a gifted storyteller like Landis, this novel becomes a curiously unsettling reflection on modern America and its sometimes-tenuous connection with its own past. In the end, the reader, too, is left with the inevitable question: “Whose idea was this?”
October 28, 2004 • Vol 14, No. 44
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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