A Dairy Queen, a Subway, three dollar stores, a strip of half-empty storefronts along Main Street: you could hardly call it a community, where I grew up in rural Kentucky. Or rather, it didn’t feel like a community to me. Such hospitality was reserved for a narrow category of humanity, resembling as closely as possible those local barons whose surnames crusted the stones of local cemeteries. In this case, that meant you had to be white, athletic, anti-intellectual, and Christian.
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I ticked off the first of these boxes. That kept me safer than many. Still, I’d long ago learned to hide the fact that I grew up an atheist. A cadre of grade schoolers had taught me that this fatal flaw was a rot at my core. Nothing could redeem it.
I spoke in class and academic team, but outside of these structured spheres, sank into such silence that I often believed myself to be actually invisible. What friends I made, I couldn’t trust enough to keep. What people know about you, they’ll use against you. That’s a belief I may never shake loose of.
When you can only see so far, what more is there to hope for? No wonder, then, that in a single country we occupy a thousand different planets.
One day, we took a field trip four miles down the road to pick up trash along the shore of a local lake, a manmade reservoir constructed in the 1970s to control regional flooding. Picking our way between the trees, we watched the scrub-thick slopes beneath our feet for glass bottles and syringes. The lake below was green, opaque, and nestled into a hundred little inlets. No broad watery vista; only hills heaped upon hills.
I often wonder whether hope is a simple matter of elevation: if how far you can see before the last horizon determines how much you can imagine the world containing—and how much you think it contains for you.
This is perhaps the bias of someone who felt suffocated even when this terrain was at its most beautiful: central Kentucky’s soft slopes hissed and swarmed into the gentlest summers, blooms of clover nodding beneath the bees’ weight, deer swishing their white tails in the shade where pastures met the woods. But the first time I saw the ocean, it sent a long shift through me. That unquantifiable expanse. How small my knowing was in the face of all that there is. And how much more I could hope for because of it.
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Beneath that lake—just a few feet beneath the surface—was a town. My Latin teacher at school had grown up there. I never heard anyone else remember it. But there’s a display at the state park visitor’s center that starts with arrowheads ten thousand years old; the Mississippian and Fort Ancient civilizations; and then speeds quickly ahead, through “very few large Native American settlements” and the incursion of colonizers; warfare; and finally to a black-and-white aerial photograph of Van Buren, the soon-to-be-sunken town. “The sweetness, purity and healthfulness of these small hamlets make them desirable places for those worn and weary of the daily toil and grind of the cities,” declares a display, a reprint from some uncited article. “Van Buren, like all well-ordered towns, has its church and school house.”
They always have their purity, and their churches.
*
My debut novel, Underlake, tells the story of two women who must join forces in search of a missing girl. Otta is a failed marine biologist, carrying the guilt of a friend’s disappearance during a deep-sea dive. May is a stranger who shows up at her door, claiming that her daughter is missing, and insisting that she’s somewhere beneath the nearby lake—alive.
To find May’s daughter, Otta and May must travel deeper and deeper under the water. There, they discover isolated enclaves, houses and storefronts and factories, where people have lived in isolation for decades. In that time, they have constructed entire mythologies around their lived experiences, defined (as all stories are) by the limits of their horizon.
When I started sharing the plot of my book with others and telling them about Van Buren, I encountered a surprising response: Oh! people would exclaim, I grew up near a submerged town like that.
As it turns out, dam-induced displacements were common throughout the United States from the 1930s to the early 70s. The Atlas of Drowned Towns documents at least 271 displaced communities, affecting 1.5 million people—but this is just the beginning. The Atlas project, spearheaded by Bob H. Reinhardt, associate professor in the Department of History and School of the Environment at Boise State, is a collaborative effort reliant upon data from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, labor-intensive research on sunken communities, and the contributions of individuals with their own towns to submit and stories to tell.
As far as how many “drowned towns” there could be, Reinhardt says, “the safe answer in the United States is hundreds, perhaps lower thousands.” In the rest of the world, such displacements accelerated in the 1970s and have continued into the 21st century, and Reinhardt says there are certainly thousands. The Atlas documents towns as far-reaching as Derwent, England; Berich, Germany; and Shicheng, China, the “Atlantis of the East.”
In the United States these dams were built primarily to ease navigation, mitigate flooding, support irrigation, or generate hydroelectric power. Choosing where to build a dam, Reinhardt says, was a cost-benefit analysis: “Geologically speaking, hydrologically speaking, where can we build a dam that will not fall apart?” But there was also the question of how much it would cost to buy the property. “It would cost more money to displace a community that is big, that is wealthy, that has political, cultural, social capital,” he explains.
As a result, many indigenous and Black communities were adversely affected by these displacements. Benson, Alabama, was home to the Kowaliga Academic and Industrial Institute, a school built to educate hundreds of rural Black children, before the area was inundated in 1926. The school had been founded by William Benson, a Howard University graduate and the son of John Benson, who had purchased the land where he was formerly enslaved and later supported his son’s vision of building a self-sustaining Black community that succeeded in establishing its own sawmill, a variety of local businesses, and even a rail line.
The 1944 Pick-Sloan Missouri Basin Program illegally condemned Native American land in North and South Dakota and forced one-third of the area’s Sioux population to relocate.
The reason Van Buren stuck with me all these years was not its otherworldliness….What struck me was how familiar it all was: that isolation. I had lived there too.
Even New York’s Central Park and its reservoir were built on land acquired through eminent domain, displacing 1,600 people, including the prosperous African-American town of Seneca Village.
Our institutions have only begun to acknowledge the significant cultural and environmental impacts of these projects. Two hydroelectric dams on Washington’s Elwha River were removed in 2011 and 2014 after the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe and others lobbied for their removal for decades. NOAA Fisheries reports that their removal has resulted in the return of salmon to the region and an increase in salmon diversity.
*
In the United States, we must mourn our losses carefully—what is it, precisely, that we miss?
Near the lake that has swallowed Van Buren, someone has constructed an outlet called Heirloom Traditions Company Store. The name hums with nostalgia, and includes a placid nod to those coal-mining towns where people were paid in company scrip. They then used scrip to buy overpriced goods right back from the only store in town, often on credit. It’s a form of debt bondage akin to what today’s techno-feudalists dream of reviving.
Yet, in the white American nostalgic imagination, it is a pain made saccharine. It recalls these containment zones as spaces of blissful conformity, in comparison to the apparent upheaval of the present, when we are forced to look beyond the horizon, where others live differently than we do. It does not ask whether that monoculture ever really existed—and whether it was bliss.
Those two-hundred-some people in Underlake who chose to go on living in the valley beneath the lake claimed that the land was theirs, had always been theirs. They claimed they had the right to preserve their world against change. When you can only see so far, what more is there to hope for? No wonder, then, that in a single country we occupy a thousand different planets. But the reason Van Buren stuck with me all these years was not its otherworldliness: these underwater houses, blind to anything beyond their walls. What struck me was how familiar it all was: that isolation. I had lived there too.
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Underlake by Erin L. McCoy is available from Doubleday, an imprint of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.
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