CULLMAN — Wandering through the woods meeting people by chance who seem to have the answers to all the questions in man’s eternal quest to define God and understand the meaning of life isn’t my favorite plot for a novel. Hollis Hughes’ main characters are likable enough, but some of the secondary ones are just too conveniently hanging out in the woods, living the life of hermits and such.

However, his understanding of natural rock formations, forestry and the encroaching threat of civilization on these natural habitats is right on the money. He even touched on some things that have been controversial topics in Cullman County for years now — flooding farmlands and woodlands.

Hughes’ character, Rob, says it better than I ever could. I’ll set the scene for you.

Rob is walking through mountainous forests to find the source of a river. In doing so, he has just come upon a beautiful, crystal clear waterfall. He knows that someday “progress” will destroy places like this. Here are his thoughts:

“He looked up again at the waterfall as it began its leap and the great joy he felt was equaled by sadness as his vision of rising water grew stronger. He saw the fall becoming shorter and shorter, forty feet, twenty feet, one foot, and then only a swirl where the creek entered the lake, and finally not even that. A sound that had been unbroken for millions of years had died forever and was now replaced by the thunder of powerful motorboats pulling skiers. And there would be lakeside homes and marinas and the smell of burned oil and gas.

And people would call it progress, for the river had now been tamed and a delightful playground had replaced a long stretch of boulders and steep cliffs and near-useless land. And as pleasure boast thundered over this place, would even one occupant of just one boat consider for as much as one moment that the noise of the intrusion was defiling the grave of one of the most beautiful places in North America?

No one would pause to feel the sadness that this most beautiful jewel of the outdoors lay under two-hundred feet of water. Most would be unaware that such had ever existed and had they been, they would have felt it was a great swap; some trees and rocks for a fine lake. They would neither know nor care that flowing water could no longer remove silt and debris from a canyon tens of millions of years in the carving, that in almost total darkness, something once beautiful was now being slowly covered with dirt and trash defiling the sculpturing that took nature a hundred million years and more.

In a thousand years or so the lake would be filled with silt, and the cattails and other marsh grasses would come. If people by then had not destroyed themselves and the earth, would anyone take the trouble to come look at the ugliness that man had created in the belief that it was progress? Would there be one sensitive soul who on seeing the marsh would wonder if something of beauty might lie buried deep below the surface of the muck?”



Hughes is a man of great insight. He is a deep thinker, an inquisitive soul, and a strong individual who climbed Mt. LeConte, near Gatlinburg at the age of 75. Presently, at the age of 80, Hughes has lived long enough on this earth to be able to look back and see the mistakes that man has wrought in the name of “progress” and want to do something about it.

I don’t pretend to know all the “rights and wron’s” of the direction of man’s progress. I do, however, get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach when I read the phrases that depict the destruction of something that nature has been working on for a hundred million years…

Or think of some of the beauty I’ve seen being buried under two hundred feet of water…

Or the sound of a waterfall millions of years old, silenced forever …

Or acres and acres of forests clear-cut and burned-off or beautiful farms drowned …

Not that I’m a big fan of going back to the days before electricity and modern conveniences. I like my food processer and my refrigerator pretty well … it’s just that, as Hughes points out, sometimes we trade off what we take for granted and don’t miss it until later when we discover that it’s too late to get it back.

Much of the plot of Hughes book “Mindful of Him” deals with that discovery, be it natural habitats or affairs of the heart — his message is clear: If we are mindful of the things we love, both people and places, of the important things that we often take for granted, then we won’t have to sit and mourn for something we’ve lost forever.