Folkways Reporter Zack Harold recently made a trip to the small town of New Vrindaban, in West Virginia’s Northern Panhandle. It’s a Hare Krishna community started in the late 60s. These days, the town is home to a few hundred permanent residents, but thousands of pilgrims visit each year. They come to worship in the temple — and to visit the opulent Palace of Gold. But those main attractions were a pretty small part of Zack’s trip. He ended up spending much of his time in the kitchen.
Eric Gardner has a different perspective than most about the rivers in central Appalachia. That’s because he spends most of his time in them.
Gardner is a commercial diver. He works in the Kanawha and Ohio rivers, maintaining tow boats, barges, pipelines and spillways.
“I started out with some older gentleman that ran the company. [They] took a liking to me and taught me a lot of the trades that I still use to this day,” he said.
A deckhand from the Dr. Edwin Welch towboat grabs the ball of rope and debris Eric Gardner has just removed from the boat’s propeller.
Being a commercial diver can be difficult work, but Gardner thrives on it. “I’m a man of the river,” he explained. Year-round, he is underwater for two to four hours a stretch. His support team above water maintains an air compressor that sends him air through a hose. Visibility is often so poor that he does everything by feel.
One common task he performs is clearing towboat propellers, also known as props.
“When they get debris into the props or have damage [underneath the boat] or problems they’ll call me out. Lot of times it’s trees, cables and ropes, wound up into props,” he said.
If Gardner can’t fix the tow boats, they have to travel to a dry dock up to 60 miles away and may be out of service for days.
Credit Courtesy Photo: Eric Gardner
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An example of the trash the floats downriver. This is between a towboat and the riverbank.
Spending so much time on, and in, the river, Gardner is troubled by the amount of trash he sees. It often ends up collecting at the locks and dams that aid the barge traffics’ flow along the river. The trash can foul the locks.
“You will have an island full of trash, different debris, tires, refrigerators, anything plastic just floats,” Gardner said.
“It’d be nice if we could come up with a plan and try to work with Army Corps of Engineers to where we may be able to stop this from happening.”.
The US Army Corps of Engineers maintains the locks and dams. A representative explained that there isn’t a safe and cost-effective way to separate the trash from the natural debris so they end up treating it all as natural and sending it on down the river.
Eventually, much of the trash makes it to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, which then feeds out into the ocean.
West Virginia Week looks at the start of the 2025 West Virginia legislative session -- beginning with Gov. Patrick Morrisey's State of the State address.
The 303-mile Mountain Valley Pipeline from West Virginia to Virginia took 10 years to complete. Author Denali Sai Nalamalapu was part of the protests to stop the pipeline. They have a new book, called HOLLER: A Graphic Memoir of Rural Resistance. It’s written and drawn in comics form and profiles six activists who fought the pipeline. Mason Adams spoke with Nalamalapu.