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.
Other Basin landscape problems
New roads and highways, regardless of what traffic they carry and where they carry it, are too often planned and constructed as gashes of destruction across the landscape and across the "scenery of association," and frequently fertilize subsidiary ugliness in the form of billboards and commercial clutter. Attempts to mitigate the worst aspects of this have had some effect, but have not been widespread or strong enough to keep up with the growing numbers of cars and the growing demand for facilities on which to operate them.
Much could be done at the local level to erase roadside ugliness—Loudoun County, Virginia, is again a shining and rare example of a place where the right thing has been done. But more of the trouble comes from higher up, for it involves the routing and design of the super-roads, and stubborn considerations of strict engineering efficiency have usually tended to prevail over esthetics and such things, despite growing objections. Regardless of their beauty as roads, the sheer quantity of strip concrete Americans require nowadays is a basic problem. It has been said that an extraplanetary observer at first glance might well conclude that this continent was populated primarily by large four-wheeled bugs with detachable brains. Certainly in many places nowadays the earth is beginning to look as if it were arranged for the bugs rather than for the brains, if that is what we humans are.
When the bugs die they go to junkyards. These many-colored necropolises occupy wide acres of land near every center of population in the region, occurring quite commonly along the main entrance highways to neat and historic towns. Their stark and extensive ugliness has made them the subject of much high-level investigation, most of which has sought to make their conversion into usable scrap metal a profitable process. Undoubtedly this will be achieved sooner or later, but in the meantime the old cars, together with a wealth of other discarded items in roadside fields and along fencelines and stream channels throughout the Basin, form a scabby legacy from the recent past, and a less esthetic "scenery of association."