The View From Here
I don't get out much. At least not like I did when I was doing home health in the county a few years back. And so it was a surprise to round one bend recently and see three places in the distance where pasture soil had been indelicately dozed away to create a raw patch of level muddy ground. I can predict with unhappy certainty two things that will be built on those scathed patches of former productive pasture: trailers or self-storage units. We've had an epidemic of both and neither do anything positive for the viewspace or the general ambience of rural living.
It's true that many of the trailers come as conjoined twins called "double-wides" and that this euphemism is somehow thought to ameliorate the ugliness of a mere "mobile home". As in "No, it won't be trailers. This new subdivision (carved conspicuously from the Rhododendrons along what used to be a shaded stream) will be double-wides"… and to this I am supposed to breath a sigh of aesthetic relief.
One particular disturbed site of recent discovery is in a broad valley of softly rounded hills. Cattle paths trod year after year follow the contours across the nape of each like tiered necklaces winding gently toward the meandering creek. Toward the back of these green hills, gentle woods cover level-lying land back away from the road. . . a wonderful place to put a home, I thought, when I first saw the For Sale sign on this piece of land a year ago. Someone will have a south-facing building site back away from road noise and out of the immediate view space of the old homeplace that has been so tastefully modernized without changing the charm of the place.
But no. The single-wide has been insulted into the subsoil of a rude unlandscapable excavation on the north side of one of those green hillocks-- barely out of the flood plain of the creek, very near the noise of the road and directly in the view of the secluded back decks of the immaculate old homeplace (which not surprisingly, is now for sale). But there are laws against neither stupidity nor bad taste. Some county zoning ordinances would be nice. And if they don't happen soon, this and other southwest Virginia counties will become uglified and overgrown and like every other place that has allowed growth at any price. Methinks I should attend the next county supervisors meeting.
And are there really so many people in rural places with a mold fetish? Now I confess, I've never needed the cubic footage of fungal space to store my unsold MaryKay inventory or my summer harvest of Sensimilla or overstuffed future mouse habitat. But either almost everybody in Floyd County is clamoring for dark, humid empty metal boxes for storage or there is a scam or tax dodge going on here. If I weren't so lazy, I'd research this matter to figure out how to account for these self-storage "parks" popping up like mushrooms on a wet lawn. I did go so far as to find but not explore the claustrophobia-inducing industry site called "inside self storage.com"-- I shudder at the thought.
If anybody has a solution to either of these rural development issues short of the Monkey Wrench Gang approach, or if you have similar concerns in your area (especially if your county commissioners have been dealing effectively with a solution) I'd certainly love to hear from you.
Comments
In Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where I spent a day last summer, I spoke a length with one woman who has lived in the town since its days as a hippie haven. Now the garden club has swaths of flowers growing along all the approaches to the town. Architectural maps give a walking tour of the restored jewels of Victorian and early 20th century homes. But the people who have only greed on their minds-- coupled with what would be a startling lack of taste if it were not so pervasive (so it IS American taste, let us face it at last)-- want to cut down trees and build McDonald's.
"How have you done it?" I asked the former hippie, now art gallery owner and photographer. "How have you managed to preserve this town?"
"One tree at a time," she said. "Constant vigilance."
It's tedious. It throws one into a fray one has gone to some lengths to move away from. It is cantankerous. It's democracy.
Posted by: trish | November 24, 2003 7:33 AM
Have you written about your home health days? If so, where? I'd be interested in reading.
Posted by: Trey | November 24, 2003 8:24 AM
This subject has long been a "pet peeve" of mine. It is a plague that will continue to escalate so long as we have a materialistic society and I don't see it improving anytime soon.
Have you seen these new "PODs?" They are something akin to half of a standard truck trailer. Call them and they will deliver one to your driveway. Fill it up with all the STUFF you believe you just can't go on living without and they will come back, seal it shut and take it away, to be stacked up, POD on POD. Coming to your neighborhood soon. Picture a vast expanse of concrete as far as the eye can see, piled high with tall stacks of these eyesores. Each one representative of someone's greedy, American lifestyle.
Posted by: Clarence | November 24, 2003 8:29 AM
The self storage units are often just temporary income until the land becomes valuable for something else. Land owners build them because they are relatively cheap and do produce cash flow until the great day that a developer asks about buying your land for an office building, or a subdivision.
Posted by: Chris | November 24, 2003 9:44 AM
Is there a land conservancy chapter for your area? If not, perhaps you should consider starting one (yes, I know, with WHAT free time?). It's a tragedy that we keep paving over our wild areas, and direct, grassroots action may be your only hope.
Once farm land is converted to industrial (be it housing, office, or other), it never goes back.
good luck.
Posted by: lyn | November 24, 2003 1:38 PM
Clarence--I had to laugh at the picture you evoked of the PODS. My brother, a PhD Electrical Engineer, bought two pods. They sit on the south side of their patio and constitute his retreat. He has possibly never thrown away a book (although I have one of his linear algebras books) and those pods are stuffed full of his text books, reference books, and computer-related books spanning the 40 years of his professional life, and he revels in sitting at a desk in their midst studying on whatever his project of the moment might be. His wife is happy to have the "mess" out of the house, and he is happy to have a sanctuary. (There are probably miscellaneous computer parts spread about in one of the pods, too!)
Posted by: Cop Car | November 25, 2003 7:31 AM
Here in Pocahontas County, WV, it is the lovely log homes, ski chalets and tastefully modernized farm houses that make us shake our heads and predict the imminent destruction of our rural paradise. These structures cost more than a native could or would spend on habitation, and they tell us that another local family has died out or given up on the dream of returning home to live someday.
Those ugly trailers are cheap to buy (sometimes you can get them free if you come haul them away), cheap to heat, and nicer to live in than the tarpaper shacks and drafty old houses they replace. Hauled away or burned down, they leave little evidence behind as the brush and wildflowers quickly reclaim the spot. Rural living is not what suburbanites envision. That beautiful farmstead in your header was not nearly so tidy and sweet smelling when it was a working farm with livestock. My neighbors have portable sawmills, welding outfits, junk cars and every imaginable scrap stockpiled in old trailers. These are valuable resources. They bring in a little extra cash and keep the old truck running another year. I see this as the modern "working farm" equivalent.
I hate to see the destruction of rural places too, and I am sure you have more to dread than I, for Floyd County is much more prosperous and accessible to the outside world than Pocahontas County (the most sparsely populated county east of the Mississippi). I too am a naturalist by training, and have left my profession behind in "DC" to enjoy country life again. However, long before I was a PhD I was a farm girl, and I hate hear transplanted city people complain about the unsightly natives and their tasteless ways, as if poverty were an aesthetic choice. I recommend E. Annie Proulx's 1988 book "Heart Songs and Other Stories" as a perceptive exploration of the misunderstandings between rural people and the "back to the land" folks. http://www.annieproulx.com/
I have been enjoying your "Fragments" for several months, and I attribute your apparent lack of compassion for the poor to your head cold. It's a treat to find a blog so on-the-money in its description of the natural world as we find it in the Southern Appalachians.
Rebecca Clayton
(Oh, look! it's starting to snow!)
Posted by: Rebecca Clayton | November 28, 2003 2:47 PM