One the features that Miley and I pass regularly on our walks is the bizarre forest junkyard. It is really strange to come across several rusting old cars in the middle of maturing hardwood forest.
In the late 60’s or early 70’s, some guy parked in the middle of what was then a disused pasture that local family had used for generation to graze their dairy cattle. With no cattle being turned out onto the property, he found it a good place to abandon them.
And when pastures are no longer grazed or mowed, the forest gradually returned. Decade after decade, the shrubs have given away to saplings and saplings have grown into tall trees, choking out the undergrowth and leaving the rusty artifacts displayed upon the forest floor.
These old cars remind that things are always changing.
Their final resting place was once a vibrant pasture for dairy cattle. At one time, the agrarian economy flourished here. Big farm families manged to eke out an existence on ridgetop farms, cutting hay with scythes and pitching into stacks. They were all locavores, canning the produce from their gardens and butchering their own cattle and hogs for meat.
But more efficient agricultural practices and the development of the interstate highway system put an end to that agrarianism. It became cheaper to buy food with origins in Iowa or California than to raise one’s own food on these little ridgetop farms.
And the call of industry lured so many farm family away from those ridges. The postwar economic boom meant that the factories needed more workers. And the unionized auto plants were the ticket out of poverty in the hill and into the growing industrial middle class.
It was in that period after the war that West Virginia’s population dropped. Everyone ran to places like Cleveland or Detroit, where the wages and benefits were good. And the supermarkets kept you fed.
As the farmers left, the vast array of pastures and cornfields that had been cleaved from that ancient forest in the eighteen and nineteenth centuries began to return to its original condition. The forests began to work their way back in.
Of course, things have a way of changing back. The census data was released this week, and Michigan was the only state that had a decline in population over the past decade. Michigan– the place were most of these cars were likely made and the place where so many poor families from the hills found their way to the American dream.
But just as these cars have rusted away into the forest, that industrial middle class has also fallen away. No longer can a poor boy from West Virginia run off to Detroit and seek his fortune in the auto plants.
These cars stand as a remind of what once was. There were once farmers who pastured their stock on the rugged ridges of West Vrginia, and there was once a burgeoning industrial middle class in the United States.
Both of those things have disappeared, as these car surely will as they sit deep in the woods through each passing decade.
These old cars tell us what once was.
Like monuments to their era, the cars take us back to a time so different from now.
Technology and trade take us down different paths, and how humans relate to the landscape changes with each new advancement.
As we continue on into an uncertain future, perhaps it is time to stop and think about the old cars for a bit. What story do they have to tell?
***
I think this is the story:
I occaisionally found old cars way, way back in the mountains where I used to live on the Tennessee/North Carolina border–but they were usually missing all parts of any value–just the bare framework! They were cars that had been stolen, stripped, and abandoned in as isolated a spot as could be found. The top five forms of employment in that county at the time(an actual survey done by some group!) were #1-marijuana growing, #2-car theft and stripping, #3-moonshining, #4-wildlife poaching(mainly for bear gall bladders and other bear parts to sell to the oriental black markel trade), and #5–the ONLY legal one in the top five–SOMETIMES–lumbering–quite a bit of illegal lumbering went on too–tree poachers! I survived mainly by minding my own business and letting it be known to the locals that I did indeed, mind my own business! Lots of other “outsiders” and “furriners” who didn’t, got burned out regular. The only thing I really feared was one of my dogs(or me!) blundering into an illegally set bear trap…..
My friend Tom Russell did a great song about this kind of thing.
Re Lane’s comments– always good– do you know Steve Earle’s Copperhead Road?
That Tom Russell song is excellent. That’s basically the story of the Monongahela Valley and the whole Rust Belt in general.
Copperhead Road is the modern Appalachian song, kind of like a hillbilly version of Born in the USA.
My favorite Steve Earle song is “Tom Ames’ Prayer.”
Ha! I always thought they wrote “Copperhead Road” about the county I lived in then(Cocke county, Tennessee, which the locals jokingly say was named after all the cock fighting that goes on, rather than the Senator Cocke it is supposedley named after!). After the locals got to know me(it helped a LOT that I found and returned numerous lost bear and coon hounds over the years, and refused all rewards) it was understood that if people left me and my dogs and “wolves” alone, I wouldn’t bother nuthin’ of tharn! In fact, despite the fact that I knew where quite a few marijuana plots were located, and stripped cars abandoned, I didn’t fear the locals since they knew me and knew I minded my own business. I DID fear the dang federal agents that patrolled every year in helicopters and ATV’s, etc., checking up on my neighbors’ forms of employment! With my long hair, out roaming in the middle of frikking nowhere, I doubt they’d believe that I was just communing with Nature! So I always found it wise to avoid them and their operations, which, as it turned out, was embarrassingly easy! Even accompanied by a large pack of canines, as I was 99% of the time! And, just in case anyone is wondering–NO, I was never ambitious enough to involve myself in any of the top five forms of employment there at the time–I was always WELL BELOW the poverty level-a po hillbilly fer shore! OR, as we prefer to be referred to in this politically correct era, a “financially challenged Southern Highland American”!!!
Henry Ford, the assembly line, unions, the entire huge industry of the automobile and its attendant industries is a remarkable chunk of American history, far too often taken for granted or overlooked. We would not have won in WWII without the efforts of all those factory workers — so many of them women taking their places as equals for the first time– turning out aircraft, military vehicles, and more. A factory job meant that a family could be housed, and fed, and educated at a much higher standard than otherwise, and could even afford to own their own automobile. This in turn led to so much more, including the Interstate Highway system, wider opportunities for recreation, discretionary spending, other occupations..; in short, our modern life.
[…] This is the last of the old cars that I wrote about several years ago. […]