Summer 2007

The Lamentable Loss of Appalachian Yard Junk
 

BY BRENT MARTIN

Macon County in western North Carolina recently attempted the adoption of certain ordinances to regulate noise, junkyards, machinery and road signs. At one of the many hearings, the junkyard ordinance was brought up for discussion. The packed room held a mixture of multi-generational locals, second homeowners and people like me — people who now lived here full time but had moved here from somewhere else.

Many rose to the defense of the ordinance, citing specific examples of how junk and junkyards were desecrating their views and hallowed commutes to the local Wal-Mart. A stocky, late middle-aged woman from the Burningtown community rose to complain of a junkyard that dominated several acres along the single road running the length of one of the area's most spectacular valleys. Little did she know that the owner was seated almost directly in the row behind her.

He got up slowly, speaking calmly and deliberately. "My neighbors tell me that they'll take my junkyard any day over a hillside of half-million-dollar mansions."

The Floridian woman spoke out to let him know what an eyesore the place was.

"Well, it's been in my family for over 50 years, long before you came here to start ripping the place up with all your fancy houses."

Silence.

It was hard not to agree. I had lived in Burningtown for a year and a half when I first moved to Macon County and was fortunate to live among a local family that I had grown to respect greatly. I watched for 18 months as the remaining large tracts of land sold to out-of-state developers who gouged roads into mountainsides and razed the ridgetops for million-dollar views.

At another community event, one of the many newcomers complained of a single-wide trailer at the end of the gravel road I live on. A couple of old cars sit out front, and a band of ragtag goats drift about the adjacent pasture. The roof is in need of repair, and an old rusty swing set sits out in an unkempt yard. The field behind the newcomer's has an old bus in it, a couple of dilapidated sheds and a well-used garden site. She said she was concerned about property values — really, not an issue here, since the only direction they are going is up — and what an assault it was upon a variety of her middle-class values.

I happened to know that a single, working-class mother of two lives in the trailer she was referring to. Maybe this particular newcomer could host a fundraiser to buy her some Bradford pear trees, although a new roof would probably be out of the question.


Use and Reuse

For years I have heard people complain of the junk dumped off on old roads in secluded locations — popular spots where old washing machines, refrigerators, automobiles, tires and garbage thrown down hillsides accumulate for sometimes decades. Granted, many of these sites are eyesores and can even be toxic, but when wandering among the piles of debris I am always mystified and feel that I am witness to an accumulation of artifacts of past lives, families and culture. As a child I spent hours scrounging through the garbage piles of abandoned houses near my rural home for bottles and any other items I found interesting. And after having lived and worked now in Appalachia for over 12 years, and having descended from mountain people in Georgia who lived hardscrabble lives, it is my conclusion that much of the junk dumped in this fashion was done so because there was simply no place else to take it.

Landfills in these rural counties have only arrived in the last few decades, and then only because so many outsiders moving here needed a designated place to take their massive amounts of waste, as they could never bring themselves to throwing all that unwanted stuff out at roadside. The mountain culture here for many years utilized everything: Car seats made comfortable front porch furniture. Glass jars could be used multiple times for canning food. Old tires made excellent swings. Old cars were kept around for parts. None of it was necessarily considered trash. When it was, it was burned or taken out to a secluded part of the county and thrown out, usually to a place utilized by many.

The old roadside trash dumps that still exist in Macon County today are some of the most interesting places left, and represent a time and a place when such practices could be allowed without condemnation or need for apology. They also represent unconquered space, for if they exist, they have not been surrounded by or covered over by gated communities or golf courses, nor have their neighbors gotten near enough to feel the need to organize a cleanup.

One such place exists along a lonely stretch of State Highway 28 that runs from the Macon County line into Swain County. Just before a place in the road where Brush Creek runs beneath it into the state-owned Needmore Game lands, the roadside dump covers a large area of hillside that runs a few hundred feet down to the creek bank.

This past fall I was fortunate to spend several weeks with a local scientist studying the migrations of certain shiner species up this tributary to the Little Tennessee river. I found myself many times stopped at this location as we counted fish shocked up with a backpack shocker or ate a quiet lunch on the banks of this rugged mountain stream.

I studied the hillside, noting the numerous tractor tires, washing machines, mattress springs, rusted out washtubs, broken Mason jars and refrigerators. It was the most remote part of the county left, and just up the creek were families that had been here since the Cherokee removal and who were probably responsible for much of what was there. None of it was modern, and none of it was from recent years. The junk was settled among ancient moss-covered boulders. It seemed mysterious and not at all out of place. It spoke of times past and represented the transformation of a people — much like the rest of modern America — into an appliance-dependent culture with no place to discard the disposable metal carcasses upon their demise. Of course, these were a people who for many years had derived their existence from the natural world around them.

For me, this pile of junk was a symbol of the shift from independence to dependence for mountain people, and the current sanitization of the countryside by second homeowners was just another part of their cultural eradication.
 

The Voice of History

One close friend remarked to me that she believed that the multi-generational local people who had been here for the last 200 years had no land ethic, and she used the old roadside dumps as evidence. Her hackles were up over the fact that we had no land-use planning in our county and that our weak stream protection laws were not being enforced. It's true that there's a strong county contingent that cites private property rights at every opportunity, and a good many of them are local, but they are populated equally with out-of-state developers and crackpot philosophers of every stripe. What she has not seen and will never see is history, which speaks quietly in these mountains and which must be teased out of the landscape with gentle interpretation.

Perhaps history will judge the current destruction of the southern Appalachians to be part of one of the most uncivilized and unregulated movements in American history. The industrial loggers and mineral extractors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries razed the mountains for timber, coal, iron and labor, and in many places are still at it. But a host of Progressive Era federal agencies, such as the Forest Service and National Park Service, were able to recover and restore a good bit of the decimated land through reforestation and preservation. The Civilian Conservation Corps put thousands of mountain people to work in the 1930s building campgrounds, restoring streams, planting trees and stocking trout.

The few old mountain people I know who remember these days are proud of this work, proud of the once controversial Great Smoky Mountains National Park and proud of their old farmsteads and land. The removal or restoration of a Wal-Mart parking lot or a ridgeline full of houses will never stand such a chance.
 

Brent Martin lives in the Cowee community of western North Carolina where he enjoys writing, fishing, gardening and working in conservation. He has a chapbook of poetry forthcoming from New Native Press.