d, 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 "scene