Littering the public highway? Of course I litter the public highway. Every chance I get. After all, it’s not the beer cans that are ugly; it’s the highway that is ugly…Junk, trash, rubbish—our lives are debauched, our natural resources squandered, our native land ravaged in this mad production of metal, plastic, glass and paper garbage.
-Edward Abbey, The Journey Home
As the water subsided on the day of the flood, tangled debris piles emerged from the brown waters. Along our stretch of river the flood debris was mostly slain trees, their trunks, branches and rootballs in twisted heaps, wrapped around their bruised but surviving brethren. But tangled up in the mess were pieces of houses: doors, cladding, foam insulation, chairs, refrigerators, plastic bags. Entire sheds and garages, long cluttered, were now cleansed, scoured to the point of nonexistence. Tucked among the piles were family heirlooms, photos, cookbooks.
We held our first community river clean-up three weeks after the storm; after driveways had been made passable, the sick and elderly had been evacuated, and flooded homes had been gutted. Our goal was to remove the small, non-wood, non-metal items from the riverbank: all the plastics and paint cans and styrofoam that could hazard the river. The following week, the South Toe Conservation Fund (STCF) held our first board meeting since the storm, and board-member Jesse Schaner, NCNHP botanist, offered to organize weekly clean-ups. STCF is a relatively new collective whose mission is to protect and preserve the wild nature of the South Toe Valley. Primarily we work with regional land trusts like Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy and Blue Ridge Conservancy to identify and fund conservation projects in the valley, but fundamentally, we are a group of people passionate about our land and our river, so we’ve activated to jumpstart the process of cleaning up and stabilizing the South Toe River and its tributaries.
Each Sunday afternoon at 1, a cleanup crew gathers at the former TTT/Toe River Crafts site, and has grown from a core crew of 8-10 STCF board members and their friends, to 60+ people. It is now the thing to do on Sunday afternoons in our valley, sandwiched between church/Friends’ Meeting and Celo Soccer. From the little cinderblock desert that was once our food coop, we carpool to the designated clean up site. At the destination, volunteers pile out of pick-up trucks and survey the disaster scene. The debris piles are daunting: anthropogenic trash tied into a knotted forest of dead trees and other riparian detritus. But after two hours of picking and tugging and cutting our way through, the effect is noticeable. There are still large items – vehicles, appliances, entire walls of homes – awaiting machines to pull them out, but the vast majority of the manageable stuff has been collected and heaped or bagged. The bags join enormous trash piles that are accumulating on the sides of the roads, awaiting pick-up from FEMA contractors.
Many of the existing debris piles were seeded by stuff gutted from flooded houses. When the flood came, it was like a wicked wizard’s magic wand: the precious items that make a house a home were turned to trash in a flash. The trash and rubble eventually migrated to the roadsides to make it accessible for the mythical FEMA haulers. Refrigerators, washing machines, piles of carpet, insulation, drywall and mattresses are now on full frontal display. It’s hard to imagine FEMA folks will find a place to put all the trash that has accumulated since the storm, but then you remind yourself that our society has gotten pretty good at hiding trash.
Years ago, before the regional dumps and local transfer stations, each local holler had its own little dump – old appliances, cars, cans and bottles were shoved into a ravine and gradually covered in soil and vegetation. These old dumpsites can still be found, and the stuff that hasn’t rusted away protrudes from the forest. These were the days before ubiquitous plastic and our current culture of disposables, and the found items are mostly rusty metal and glass. As society moved towards its current throw-away economy, the trash became too much to store on private land, so a large two-county dump was established. Eventually that too was filled, and now each spur of the county has a transfer station where rural residents haul their trash to dumpsters, that are then banished by truck to who knows where – South Carolina? Florida? China? All we know is that it is no longer kept around to clutter up the pretty mountain valleys. I live in a community of artists and soulful nature lovers who are very sensitive to the visual landscape. Though I’m guilty of being the latter, I lack an artist’s sensitivity, so I’m not bothered by the trash piles as much as some of my neighbors must be.
Last week was a solemn event, held at the Wiebe farm, just downstream from Patience Park campground. Four lives were swept away at that site – a mother, a father, a son, and a grandmother – each of them a story of dear relationships, and collectively one that spans two continents and two global crises: war and climate change. We began our work with a moment of silence and a song of grief-carrying and mutual aid, led by Jesse. Thrive Appalachia organized homemade tacos and cake for the volunteers.
After weeks of living amongst the ruins of torn-up infrastructure, you’d think I wouldn’t be shocked by the scene at the campground. It’s no longer an easy place to get to since the bridge that provided the most accessible route to the site is lying in pieces in the river, so this was my first time down there since Helene. One of the county parks and rec employees had told me how they made everyone move their RVs to the highest part of the property before the storm. This is a river that tumbled cars and tore apart houses; the RVs didn’t stand a chance. As we picked through the debris, we learned the myriad ways that water can dissect an RV. I have no idea what happened to the campground’s “dump station,” but I can say that the water oozing from the mud at the far end of the campground was the nastiest fluid I’ve ever seen in the wild of the South Toe Valley. Despite the Sisyphean vibe, at the end of the day we left the site in a different state – everything small enough and accessible enough to gather had been collected into enormous piles, ready for hauling.
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