Industry in the landscape
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.