Another matter about which small communities can seldom feel impartial
is the prospect of attracting industry. With the growth of the great
cities here and there, perhaps a majority of small towns are faced now
with flagging agricultural prosperity, a lack of jobs, and the resultant
departure--often reluctant--of most of their energetic young people for
the new centers of action. The mere rumor that an industry is
considering setting up a plant in such a place is likely to set off
shock waves of delight and establish a general mood in which almost any
concession will be offered to tempt the corporation--to the point that
authorities, in some places, have issued bonds and built the requisite
factory themselves.
In a good many cases, this particular cure for the community's ills has
proved to be worse than the sickness, leading to total community
dependence on a fallible and perhaps capricious enterprise, pollution of
air and water, noise and flood-plain clutter, and frequently the
destruction of the local riverside where industries tend to locate
unless directed elsewhere. Little of this is necessary now, as a number
of examples of responsible industry in the Basin demonstrate. But it
continues, and will continue as long as communities keep looking on
industry as a source of payrolls only, free of sin: "It smells like
money," some residents of one Shenandoah town say of their factory's
miasmal odor, though other natives phrase their description
differently....
The full legacy of an older time when industry neither knew how to avoid
pollution and other troubles nor saw any reason to try, and no community
leaders saw any reason to bring the subject up, is found in prime
fettle along the North Branch, whose pollution is a sympathetic
reflection of the general state of that region's environment. Though
certain industries there--most notably the huge but aging pulp and paper
mill at Luke, Maryland--have managed at considerable expense to cut down
on the wastes they discharge to the river, the prevalent philosophy
elsewhere in the neighborhood would seem to be that both land and water
are already so afflicted that no single community's or industrial
plant's attempt at betterment could do much good.
This impression is illusory; people along the North Branch, as
elsewhere, are aware of what has been lost. But restoration is going to
be hard. In some of the deep valleys layered, stinging smog prevails
through most of the year. Most of the waters are acid from far up toward
their source, as we have seen, and downriver this acid is enriched with
other things, a situation that has existed for so long that hardly
anyone recalls when the streams were much different. Most of the
villages along them have a gray and weary look, with a good deal of
unemployment among the hardy people, and empty stores and houses that
remember a less ramshackles time when the area's coal mines needed many
workers and the air was alive with action, including old-fashioned
vigorous labor strife.
High up above the towns and the dark streams, the strip-mine bulldozers
and power shovels that have replaced most of the workers chew away at
the green flanks of mountains named for Indian chiefs and pioneers and
things that happened long ago. Where they have scraped out all they
economically can and have moved on, huge gray scars and spoil heaps
remain behind and ooze more acid to the streams below, as do hundreds of
the old deep mines. It is a pitted and hard-used landscape, where
occasional more or less ordinary farming valleys, and mountains and
streams that have escaped change, stand out as strikingly beautiful in
contrast.
Concentratedly typical of this landscape in general, perhaps, is the
Georges Creek valley, a hundred square miles of drainage extending
between two long scarred ridges from the neighborhood of Frostburg down
to Westernport. Here coal has a venerable and even romantic history, for
it has been mined in the valley since 1808, and the laid-out Scottish
orderliness of depopulated old "Company towns"--Lonaconing is said to
have been the first such in the nation--clashes with the grimy reality
of what has happened in modern times.
This natal section of the river system cannot be walled away from the
rest of the Basin, written off to coal and industry, and disregarded. It
is integral with the rest; its troubles are Basin troubles. And if the
ingrained landscape sickness compounded there by the old consumptive way
of doing things, blight begetting blight, cannot be healed, scant hope
glimmers through of healing the same sickness in other parts of the
nation where it is even worse.