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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.
[top]
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.
[top]
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.
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