The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky's Red River Gorge

by Wendell Berry, Ralph Eugene Meatyard (Photographer)

Only someone who values land enough to farm a hillside for more than thirty years could write about a wild place so lovingly. Wendell Berry just as easily steps into Kentucky’s Red River Gorge and makes the observations of a poet as he does step away to view his subject with the keen, unflinching eye of an essayist. The inimitable voice of Wendell Berry—at once frank and lovely—is our guide as we explore this unique wilderness.

Located in eastern Kentucky and home to 26,000 acres of untamed river, rock formations, historical sites, unusual vegetation and wildlife, the Gorge very nearly fell victim to a man-made lake thirty years ago. “No place is to be learned like a textbook,” Berry tells us, and so through revealing the Gorge’s corners and crevices, its ridges and rapids, his words not only implore us to know more but to venture there ourselves. Infused with his very personal perspective and enhanced by the startling photographs of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, The Unforeseen Wilderness draws the reader in to celebrate an extraordinary natural beauty and to better understand what threatens it.

Genres: Nature, Essays, Nonfiction, Photography

144 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1971

About the author

Wendell Berry is a conservationist, farmer, essayist, novelist, professor of English and poet. He was born August 5, 1934 in Henry County, Kentucky where he now lives on a farm. The New York Times has called Berry the "prophet of rural America."

Reviews

[Jake Banta · Rating 4 out of 5]

A delightful reflection on nature and modern society that makes me want to step out and explore the Kentucky Wilderness that I’ve neglected most of my life.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wendell Berry wrote The Unforseen Wilderness forty years ago when it was threatened to be damned by the damned Army Corps of Engineers. He wrote with a sense of urgency for the wilderness he loved. I read this book because in a few short weeks I’m preaching a sermon on part of the Abraham story and wanted to read something indirectly relevant to my text. I wanted to press into the meaning of ‘place’ and thought that Berry would be a good guide.
So I pulled the Berry books off my shelf. I decided against rereading one of the Port William stories I love, and instead looked towards his essays. Many of his collection of essays focus on technology, society, agricultural practices and are often published as thematic collections. This short book was the only one I found on my shelf which focused on one theme, and so I walked with Berry into the Red River Gorge.
Having finished the book, I felt somewhat sheepish that I read this for what utility it would provide me in way of insight or imagination. I wished to lift out pieces I found interesting much like the strip miners of east Kentucky decimated the landscape for the coal within it. Perhaps my tendency to ‘use’ Berry is that my introduction to him was via Eugene Peterson who somewhere said, “Every time he writes “farm” I substitute ‘parish’ or ‘congregation.’ It works every time. I have learned more usable pastoral theology from this farmer than from all my academic professors.” But what Berry says by way of agriculture is different from his reflection on wilderness. While this book is critical as any of Berry’s of modern technique and economics, it principly commends the experience of place beyond any human attempt at manipulation of it. Still there were some things I found instructive.
Slow is the only way to Go
The Red River Gorge was inaccessible to me as Xanadu was to Coleridge. I never have been to Kentucky save a Grey Hound through the state. As Berry says of those who travel the interstate at 70mph, “Though One is in Kentucky, one is experiencing the highway, which might in nearly any hill country east of the Mississippi.(52).” Other than that my only experience of Kentucky is buckets of fried chicken and Bourbon, both exportable commodities which likely ill-reflect the culture, the place, or the people of this State. I learned from Berry that to experience a place, is first to slow down and to allow yourself to see it and to be present there. As Berry says:
The faster one goes the more Strain on the senses, the more they fail to take it in, the more confusion they must tolerate or gloss over—and the longer it takes to bring the mind to stop in ` the presence of anything. Though the freeway passes through the very heart of this forest, the motorist remains several hours journey by foot from what is living at the edge of the right of way (53-4).
Berry’s reflections upon the experience of place relating to speed of travel and busyness are instructive to me, not only in terms of geographic space but in terms of spiritual geography as well. I have reflected on this, in terms of Scripture reading and what is seen or not seen based upon how quickly you traverse the terrain. Berry’s words tell me I am ont the right track, even if I take some of his words in an unworldly direction he would not intend.
Entering the Wilderness on the Wilderness’s terms.
Berry writes:
A man enters or leaves the world naked. And it is only naked—or nearly so—he can enter and leave the wilderness. If he walks, that is; if he doesn’t walk he can hardly be said that he has entered. He can bring only what he can carry—the little things that it takes to replace for a few hours or a few days an animal’s fur and teeth and functioning instincts (56-7).
Likewise he reflects:
For the time, I am reduced to my irreducible self. I feel the lightness of my body that a man must feel whose lost fifty pounds of fat. As I leave the bare expanse of the rock and go in under the trees again, I am aware that I move in the landscape as one of its details.
In this, Berry is clear that the only way in which one can really be said to enter this wilderness place, is by entering into it. In approaching landscape one must adjust her step to its contours. There must be no coercion or manipulation. Otherwise, you have not really been there but somewhere else and the path that you travel is only a means not a place.
Place is Dynamic
Perhaps it is inevitable that reflections on a river gorge would postulate that to experience a place, is to know it as every changing. Berry writes:
No place is to be learned like a textbook or a course in school, and then turned away from forever on the assumption that one’s knowledge is complete. What is to be known about it is without limit, and is endlessly changing. Knowing is only like breathing: it can happen, it stays real only on the condition that it continues to happen. As soon as it is recognized that a river—or for that matter, a home—is not a place but a process, not a fact but an event, there ought to come an immense relief: one can step in the same river twice, one can go home again (75).
Therefore nature/place/home/anywhere is not a static locale to behold or bemoan but a dynamic relational event. When a place is not a static point on a map, it becomes a dynamic point of encounter. When Berry entered the Gorge, he was encountered by the presence of what he encountered there. At one point he reflects on his ignorance about the nearness of Dog Drowning Hole and says, “Before the Gorge had been a place I understood as I understood its maps. But now it became a presence that I felt in the roots of my hair and the pit of my stomach, as though something whose existence I failed to anticipate in the dark had come up behind me and touched the back of my neck. (80).” Following Berry, one does not experience ‘place’ unless we allow that ‘place to press upon us and change us.

It should be obvious that most of what Berry says here of the Kentucky Gorge can be said of any wilderness, or for that matter, God and marriage if you allow metaphor to frame your thinking on the matter. I do not know that there is anything in this book I can use for a sermon but it was well worth the read.

[Samantha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Classic Berry, with a generous helping of “place” and “slow living”, but with vivid, enchanting descriptions of the gorge throughout. If you’ve hiked there before, you can picture each scene he describes. It was interesting to see how much is still the same since this book was written 50+ years ago. Would recommend reading before /during a hiking or camping trip (especially one to the Gorge itself!)

[Tara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful poetic book waxing lyrical about a place so many of us, myself included, love. I love his point about finding wonder in the small details, not just the majestic cliff line views. There’s beauty and awe to behold everywhere if you take the time to look.

[Chris Poore · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful book.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Berry's writing is always beautiful and stirring. I found this book to be engaging and compelling even 40 years later after it was written. Chapter Three was a little thready and didn't seem like Berry, but the rest is typical of his writing style and if you enjoy Wendell Berry, this is a good read. The book was written in response to the idea that the Red River Gorge should be dammed to create a lake and stop flooding in the area. To avoid spoilers, I won't tell you what has happened in the last 40 years...so I suggest reading the book and then researching the area. You may find it interesting. It is heavy on the environmentalist side, but not preachy. Merely a matter-of-fact addressing of the issues and a look at the area through the eyes of a visitor. Enjoy!

[Chenoa · Rating 1 out of 5]

ah yes, blame environmental degradation on the “stupid” appalachian farmer who just wants to leave and doesn’t care about the land. i love some wendell berry poems but if he thinks appalachians just want to leave and don’t give a shit about the land, my opinion of his intelligence and attention to the world just bottomed out.

[Katie]

Berry really likes Kentucky. He makes you feel a little bad for ever being a tourist or taking photographs. But I got over that. I guess he's just really sure of what he thinks is right.

[N P · Rating 1 out of 5]

Didn't finish. Really wanted something amazing about Red River Gorge. The photos (black and white) to me were horrible. Anyone could have selected poor angles and make the images barely recognizable as nature scenes. Unimpressed, to say the least. The writing itself started out good, and interesting - almost (but not quite) like a good classic nature journal of old. But then, for some reason, the narrative veered off the expected theme with a weird, unnecessary insertion of political, environmentalist, and what have you, commentary that made me close the book disappointedly and never return. Maybe the writing returned to the beauty of Red River Gorge. I don't know. Didn't have the patience to skim through the crud to get there. Still looking for that/those good book/s about a place in Kentucky which deserves well-written accounts of its natural beauty.

[David Garza · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wendell Berry's evocative language is a perfect match for ruminating the treasure that is the Red River Gorge. All who love that land couldn't express themselves any better; and I'm sure all are glad Berry is able to say so poetically what most all feel the first time they step foot in the Gorge, as well as the last. The Unforeseen Wilderness is perhaps the best book of all for experiencing the Gorge. Most other books about the Gorge are intended to be guides, and thus overly and objectively descriptive. Berry wants you to experience the unseen, as well as the unforeseen.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard (what a name!) provides several black and white photographs. There's a few that I'm sure are stunning as original prints.

[Jim Brammell · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a life-long Kentuckian, but being relatively new to backpacking and camping in the Red River Gorge, I think that I will have a much deeper appreciation of it in the future as a result of this book. I think I'll look a lot less at maps and much more at Creation. I really enjoyed this book of essays.

[Dianne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who better to describe the wonders of the Red River Gorge than native Kentuckyian Wendell Berry? This 1991 book was written as part of the fight to save the scenic gorge from a planned dam; in this case, the environmentalists won. Berry describes his hiking, camping and canoeing experiences there.

[Jeanne Baker Stinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Set of essays about the Red River Gorge written in 1971 when there was a plan to dam the river for flood control. So thoughtful and interesting. I just want to grow up to be Wendell Berry. He's so sure in his convictions and he bushwhacks when he hikes!

[jeff 🍓🍓🍓 · Rating 5 out of 5]

“the place as it was is gone, and we are gone as we were. we will never be in that place again. rejoice that it is dead, for having received that death, the place of next year, a new place, is lying potent in the ground like a deep dream.”

happy new year everybody :)

[Carrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I visited the Gorge this summer so this was a timely read. It discusses many of the issues that speak to me, such as the busyness of modern life and how much a person misses by this speed. Loved this quote: "I see little hope that I will ever live a day as an optimist, still I am not desperate."

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

"There is something suicidal, and more sinister than that, in this quest for easy wealth and easy answers, for it proposes goals that are dead ends, that imagination and desire do not go beyond.Once the precious vein of silver has been found, once the speculation in land or mineral or timber has paid off, then our human work will be over; we will have escaped forever the drudgery of the plow or the office. But if we have destroyed in ourselves the capacity to enjoy work- and we do this inevitably by working toward the goal of escape from work- then how can we possibly enjoy leisure?"

"...though I am here in body, my mind and my nerves too are not yet altogether here. We seem to grant to our high-speed roads and our airlines the rather thoughtless assumption that people can change places as rapidly as their bodies can be transported. That, as my own experience keeps proving me, is not true."

"Our senses, after all, were developed to function at foot speeds; and the transition from foot travel to motor travel, in terms of evolutionary time, has been abrupt. The faster one goes, the more strain there is on the senses, the more they fail to take in, the more confusion they must tolerate or gloss over- and the longer it takes to bring the mind to a stop in the presence of anything."

"...the man who walks into the wilderness is naked indeed. He leaves behind his work, his household, his duties, his comforts- even, if he comes alone, his words. He immerses himself in what he is not. It is a kind of death."

"Even here where the economy of life is really an economy- where the creation is yet fully alive and continuous and self-enriching, where whatever dies enters directly into the life of the living- even here one cannot fully escape the sense of an impending human catastrophe. One cannot come here without the awareness that this is an island surrounded by the machinery and the workings of an insane, greed, hungering for the world's end- that ours is a "civilization" of which the work of no builder or artist is symbol, nor the life of any good person, but rather the bulldozer, the poison spray, the hugging fire of napalm, the cloud of Hiroshima."

"...it has seemed to me for years now that the doings of men no longer occur within nature, but that the natural places which the human economy has so far spared now survive almost accidentally within the doings of men."

"I thought of it then as a strange place, a place strange to me. The presumptuousness of that, it now occurs to me, is probably a key to the destructiveness that has characterized the whole history of the white man's relation to the American wilderness. For it is presumptuous, entirely so, to enter a place for the first time and pronounce it strange. Strange to whom? Certainly to its own creatures- to the birds and animals and insects and fish and snakes, to the human family I know that lives knowingly and lovingly there- it is not strange. To them as to the Indians who once lived in its caves and in the bottomlands near it's creek mouths, it is daily reality, regular stuff."

"To call a place strange in the presence of its natives is bad manners at best. At worst, it partakes of the fateful arrogance of those explorers who familiarize the "strange" places they come to by planting in them the alien flag of the place they have left, and who have been followed, always, by the machinery of conquest and exploitation and destruction."

[James Klagge · Rating 4 out of 5]

A little-known book by Wendell Berry written in 1969 (commissioned by the Univ. of Kentucky) to try to fend off a plan to dam the Red River in Kentucky. His account of the Gorge area, plus accompanying photos, had their intended effect, and eventually, in 1993, Bill Clinton declared it a federally protected area, ending the plan by the Army Corps of Engineers to dam it. This book is a great display of Berry's interests and talents. It concerns a specific place--which he always values, and the various chapters approach the location from his various perspectives--nature description and cultural commentary. (He does not offer us poetry or fictional story-telling.)
His descriptions of the area sounded very familiar to me. It is in the Daniel Boone National Forest. I spent 3 summers living in Eastern Kentucky in the mid-1970's, in an area that was surrounded by a more southern portion of the Boone National Forest. And it is somewhat like the area where I live, on the edge of the Jefferson National Forest. When I was living in Kentucky I knew an old man--Jack Clark--in his 80's, who lived on land that included an incredible rock formation that was a sort of overhang/cave. His land was separated from the highway by a train track, which made it very difficult to access. He was wary of outsiders because he feared they were going to take his land. He had nothing to fear from us (the Appalacia Service Project), but many years after he died I discovered that the state had decided to "improve" and "straighten out" the highway, and now it is hard to say if this formation still exists. More than 40 years after the book was published, Berry's specific concern seems to have been protected, but those familiar with his larger concerns know they are still very much in doubt. Thank God for modern-day prophets.

[Dan Gobble · Rating 5 out of 5]

Want to know how to save a place? You have to first know that place by spending time walking it from end to end, studying it, and beginning to learn what it is trying to teach. Wendell hikes through Kentucky's Red River Gorge and describes what he sees as an advocate for preserving this wilderness area. Ralph Eugene Meatyard provides striking photographs to accompany Wendell's narrative. Together they offer a powerful voice which played an important part in keeping these 26,000 acres of wildernes area and river gorge from being flooded permanently via a proposed man-made lake.

[David Ward · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Unforeseen Wilderness: Kentucky's Red River Gorge by Wendell Berry, photos by Ralph Eugene Meatyard (North River Press 1991)(917.692). Ralph Meatyard was recommended by Shelby Lee Adams as one of his photographic influences, so I checked this out. These photos are all water landscapes and mountain streams. My rating: 5/10, finished 8/29/11.

[A.E. Reiff · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is the same here as with the other books recommended. In the extreme b/w contrasts and the trust that Berry will get it right with the hepaticas, the work of the river on the gorge is not necessary to be guarded against, but relax and float on the prose.

[Tamara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bless Ralph Eugene Meatyard's heart. Wendell Berry's, too.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Classic Wendell Berry. Never disappoints! Book is specific to the Red River Gorge in Tennessee in some ways, but placeless in others.

[Ray Zimmerman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wendell Berry is at his best here. He may have established the term Place-Based Writing.

[Ray Zimmerman · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a fabulous treatise on wilderness and our society.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought the issues in this book, although dated, are really timeless.

[Dylan Bean · Rating 5 out of 5]

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