In the free-range summers of our childhood, my sister and I sometimes hiked down the hill from our home near Morganton, across our neighbor’s bottomland to the banks of the Catawba River. I remember humid shade under sycamores, murmuring brown water and the stink of drying mud from those days in the 1960s. Horseflies and basking turtles. We stalked darters in the shallows and leapt across the river on rocks warm from the sun. Until late in the afternoon, when the wheels came on. That’s what we called the silent, abrupt rise of water as Duke Power made electricity a few miles upstream. Cold water from the bottom of Lake James spun the turbines under an old brick powerhouse and surged out as a...
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