Even I Shouldn't Be "Planning" Southwestern Virginia

Yesterday I posted a press release some friends upstate e-mailed about the proposal to let the Crooked Road / Round the Mountain, a tourism-promoting association, take over the responsibility for "planning" what property owners in southwestern Virginia are allowed to do with their property.

E-mail on this topic has been coming in for weeks now, and frankly, Gentle Readers, we have been speechless. When Gena Greene joined The Crooked Road, she was hoping that the kind of nice, polite, professional-looking web advertisement for which she paid dues would attract more profitable business. It hasn't. So now The Crooked Road want to take, well, the crooked road, grab more money and power, and try to force tourists to spend more money, or force local people to change our style to something they think tourists will spend more money on, or....Gena Greene takes no responsibility for these people or the mysterious workings of their minds.

(For the record, Grandma Bonnie Peters wanted to join The Crooked Road, too, but was barred because she currently lives in Tennessee.)

Well...I could be part of The Crooked Road, too; I'm a Virginia artisan, and I certainly wouldn't mind a little discreet marketing of bits of my family history as tourist attractions. I mean, discreet, to the right sort of tourists. No bus loads, no "campgrounds" with electricity and wi-fi and that sort of unwelcome intrusions of urban life. I mean, there's a Civil War battle story, and as Tony Horwitz observed, you have your "hardcore" Civil War reenactors and your "farbs," as in "far be it from us to make our act authentic," and I am only interested in the hardcores who want to hike up roads that were built to exclude motor traffic. But there is an obscure, mainly human-interest, hardcore-authentic story in these old hills, if my relatives ever agree on the extent to which we're willing to exploit it. (I am not talking about a volume of tourists that would disrupt our quiet hardcore-rural-pioneer lifestyle.)

So for those who think that a bit of dictatorship from a nice, refined group of artists, crafters, food and fiber farmers, and owners of family restaurants and bed'n'breakfasts might be just what southwestern Virginia needs, consider what I could be tempted to do with the power to "plan" just what goes on in Scott County. I certainly have the right to make these plans, because I am the epitome of what Scott County has to market. Hardcore, old-school, Granola Green, I usually choose to wear longish skirts, own a sunbonnet, have done a bit of spinning and weaving, baked my own bread when I ate wheat, raise organic crops and pick organic wild foods on the mountain, use spring water and a water-free toilet, have driven a horse, and wouldn't mind driving tourists around in a wagon. My ancestors were here long before one of them was hired to survey and lay out the eventual town of Gate City.

So it would be so easy for me to be one of those Crooked Roadies who are apparently saying, "Hmmm, the trouble with our marketing plan is that we've not been able to 'plan' enough of what our neighbors do to coordinate everything into a unified scheme of yadda yadda..."

Come, temptation, into my mind. Speak, Satan! And the tempter suggests things that would present no problem whatsoever for me in marketing what I have to offer:

1. The kind of tourists I want, which are not the kind who prefer Dollywood, would love the authenticity of riding in a mule-drawn wagon. Or even a horse-drawn "sled," which was what my grandparents usually drove and what I was taught to drive. Trouble is, motor traffic makes that touch of authenticity too dangerous. We have to ban all motor traffic from at least the west end of Gate City, the so-called Daniel Boone community and former town of Bray, which is where my family's Civil War story took place. Cars and trucks would have to be loaded onto the (inauthentic, but distant enough to be tolerated) freight train at Speers Ferry and released at Moccasin Gap. Their owners could either walk through Gate City, or pay to ride in a wagon.

2. Also, to filter out the wrong sort of people, even encouraging those of the wrong sort who live here to consider relocation, we should redesign all motor vehicles used in Scott County. In order to be legally driven here, cars and trucks should be built for a maximum speed of 25 miles per hour and a maximum fuel capacity of one gallon at a time. Also, because so many Scott County drivers don't seem to know how to use a dimmer switch, all headlights should be permanently dimmed--they won't need high beams since they won't be going fast enough to need to see that far ahead.

3. And, one thing that really puts me off the historic Jackson Street shops, appealing though some of them would be if I had a lot of money to spend, is that it's seldom possible to walk down historic Jackson Street during business hours without passing through clouds of nasty cigarette smoke. I will grant that tobacco is an authentic part of the history of southwestern Virginia. Cigarettes are not; they're an ugly twentieth-century innovation. We need to ban all cigarettes. When our Civil War soldiers smoked, which many of them did, they smoked pure local tobacco in pipes. Pure tobacco smells less offensive and contains fewer carcinogens than tobacco rolled in bleached paper.

4. Then there's the way some local people look. (Naming no names.) Did any of our grandparents weigh 250 pounds? I doubt it. They walked almost everywhere they went, did their own chores with hand tools until they became disabled, and ate mostly local produce. On that regimen I doubt that even a hypothyroid patient could be really obese. So, suppose we stop importing food, ban motorized tools, and require all obese residents of Scott County to attend weekly meetings where they weigh in and work out. (The gym that's recently opened in Gate City would be a good site.) After a year, those who've not slimmed down to a shape reasonably similar to at least our older, flabbier elders' could be offered a $1000 incentive to move out of Scott County. These funds would be taken out of the gym dues the obese would have been required to pay.

5. Now, about our toilet and sewage system...I hesitate to go here, because, historically, mountain people looked down on everyone else. In the nineteenth century the ideal lifestyle was to live near a pure mountain spring, get your drinking water from that spring, dump all your refuse into the outflowing stream below, and let the flatlanders deal with your garbage and sewage as best they could...which was why lowland communities near the Atlantic and Mississippi used to be considered "unhealthy." We are more enlightened now, I hope. Some ancestral customs should not be revived. But far too many of us are dependent on water-flush toilets that merely refine, rather than really rejecting, the hateful custom of dumping our sewage into water other people have to drink. Water-free toilets have been offered as an option for years now. We know they work. Well, actually they tend to need repairs every few years, but basically they work. What is keeping more people from installing them is mere laziness and parsimony. We could make water-free toilets mandatory. Oh, wait...the most functional design for water-free toilets is outrageously difficult for wheelchair dwellers to use, if the toilet is simply plunked down at floor level. We could make redesigning bathrooms as split-level structures mandatory. Local construction contractors would love this idea. I happen to like certain local construction contractors much better than I like certain other residents of Scott County.

Whew. Go away, Satan, you've said enough. Is everyone getting the point by now? Scott County is blessed to have me as a neighbor; Scott County should be grateful not to have me as a dictator. Even nice people who respect others' rights, leave others alone, walk lightly on the land, and try to make sure we have something worth saying before we speak, do not need to be corrupted by the temptation to make plans and decisions for other people.