Interview: Jay Gilliam

During our first couple of days of canoeing down the James, I had a chance to meet with two gentlemen who have helped Virginians understand the wealth and health of their waterways.  The first was Jay Gilliam who drove down from his home in Rockbridge County to meet us at the boat ramp in Buchanan.  He was very kind to take us out for dinner at the North Star restaurant on Rt. 11, which hit the spot after a day on the river.

I remember Jay from when I was in middle school in nearby Augusta County. He would take schoolkids out to look for critters in a stream bed and introduced me to the concept of using the types and number of aquatic insects to measure the stream's health.  What I didn't pay attention to at the time is that Jay had a great deal to do with establishing and coordinating the Virginia Save Our Streams program.  This program, run through the Izaak Walton League, enables anyone with an interest in his or her local waterways to get out in the water and take part in monitoring the biological integrity of those streams.
 
Jay spent a decade as coordinator and trainer for Virginia SOS and is still active as a volunteer monitor in his part of Rockbridge County. The trainings he conducted during those ten years took him to rivers and streams in 75 different counties throughout Virginia, in all the major river basins of the state.  You can see why I didn't want to miss a chance to meet up with Jay.

After offering dessert (which I took him up on), Jay said, "I still think the Upper James is my favorite." But a close second right up there in his personal list of best waterways in the state is those of Southwest Virginia. "I just really enjoyed getting to know the people and the rivers. It's an amazingly biologically rich part of the state...You put a net in the stream and you come up with twice the amount of organisms down there as you would find anywhere else in the whole state," he exclaimed.  He told us about the time he found a hellbender salamander the size of an iguana in Copper Creek in Russell County, and he reflected on people's sense of humor and hardiness in that part of the state.  Jay explained how he became interested in stream monitoring, about the "magical" partnership among non-profits, private companies, and governmental agencies that helped propel citizen water quality monitoring in the 1990s, and the political changes that have occurred since then. We talked until the place cleared out just before dark, then Jay drove us back to the riverbank to camp.

Laurel
P.S. Check back later for audio of this and other interviews