The Keepers Of The Garden: (A Sort Of Essay Editorial)

The Keepers Of The Garden (A Sort Of Essay Editorial} It should be a sobering thing to cut down a tree-a grandpappy oak centuries old. It should be perhaps even more sobering to use a bulldozer to root away a green mountain. But when the trees are cut and slashed recklessly for a distant market rather than used thoughtfully for some local need, when the dozers exploit minerals for light that does no. enlighten and leave a wasteland behind without regard for human values, when wealth is taken from an area in such a way as to seriously damage the area and impoverish the people and Federal Monies must be sluiced in to keep the area alive, then the vision of man's cupidity and moral corruption becomes a starkly frightening prospect. Whether one likes it or not, this is largely the story of America, and, more particularly , it is the story of Southern Appalachia. It would be hard to find a land more victimized by vast and careless exploitation than Southern Appalachia. Mineral thieves, timber stealers, politicians, song-catchers, tunegrabbers , lore rakers, even writers-and later do-gooders of various brands and labels, and now those who exploit poverty-all have received the varied hospitality of the area. Not all of them were outsiders by a long shot. Among all this mish-mash were some free builders and givers. Praise them. And praise the folklorists and writers. The upshot of it all is that the Southern Mountaineer has been labeled, categorized, stereotyped. A long life time ago he was discovered as "Our Contemporary Ancestors". Recently that catch-phrase has been reworked to Yesterday's People. He has been so stereotyped that the Mountaineer, in order to make identification clear, often resorts to portraying himself as a lanky shikepoke of a man with flopping hat and clothes that resemble some form of home-made overalls and the inevitable brown jug and hog rifle nearby-sensing all the time he is playing a joke on himself as well as on others. He has been victim of the "Noble Savage" bit and the "pure Anglo-Saxon" bit. Limited aspects of his life have been sensationalized to the dissatisfaction of all. He has been made the figment of fantasy. He has been presented as if he were some legendary ghost roaming the ridges between yesterday and tomorrow looking for his lost tailypo. He has been used and abused, and often he resents those he thinks have used him and abused his hospitality, making capital and/or prestige for themselves. But, no matter. Some good has come from all this grabbag of odds and ends. The writers have developed a substantial body of literature, some that must be sorted and read with wary eye, some very good indeed. The folklorists have preserved a rich store of oral literature, a task the mountaineer was seldom equipped to do himself. None of these took from the people what they did not also leave with them. For the creative writer the whole complex maze of the highlands lies before him like a composite of a beautiful dream and a nightmare. The limitations are mainly his own. For the cultural historian there is still the work of clarification and cleaning up the disagreements about the details of earlier times as well as bringing the record up to date through the mineral and timer exploitation era that continues in the present. For the folklorist and word-gatherer the rich traditional lodes have been mined out. The back area out croppings that still exist are hardly worth recovery and add little or nothing to the store, except, perhaps, the novelty of knowing they can still be found. But the oral literature illustrating language change and response to changing conditions remains an interesting and wide-open range for theprospector. And, rather than the proliferation of thirdrate material, a substantial collection 26 A.F.S. compiled from the finest examples of the traditional material would be a valuable contribution. There are still vast deposits of minerals in the highlands and underlying them. You can be sure they will be exploited, although the exploitation may be less vicious and blatant. There is...