by Lee Smith
COWTOWN WAS A WONDERFUL NEIGHBORHOOD to grow up in, roaming from house to house with our gang of neighborhood kids—my best friend Martha Sue Owens, Melissa and Randy and other visiting cousins, Rowena and Bill Yates, Cathy and Russ Belcher, Jimmy Bevins and little Terry Trivett, the Boxley boys who came to stay with their grandmother in the summertime. I ate supper at all their houses. Gaynor Owens made the best cream gravy and cornbread, but the Trivetts ate the most exotic things, even foreign things, such as lasagna and chop suey. I learned to swim in their backyard pool.
Martha Sue and I started a neighborhood newspaper named The Small Review, which we wrote out laboriously by hand and sold door to door for a nickel. I got in lots of trouble for my editorials, such as “George McGuire Is Too Grumpy,” or my opinion that “Mrs. Ruth Boyd is a mean music teacher. She hits your fingers with a pencil and her house smells like meat loaf all the time.” We also wrote news items such as the following: “Miss Lee Smith and Miss Martha Sue Owens were taken by car to Bristol, Virginia, to buy school shoes. They got to look at their feet in a machine at Buster Brown and guess what. Their bones are LONG AND GREEN.”
We kids formed dozens of clubs, each with its secret handshake and code words. We ran our mountains ridge to ridge—climbing trees and cliffs, playing in caves, swinging on grapevines, catching salamanders, damming up creeks, building lean-tos and lookouts, playing Indians and settlers with our handmade slingshots or the occasional Christmas bow-and-arrow set. Every day after school we’d throw down our books and “head for the hills.” We’d stay there until they rang the bell to call us home for supper.
Back in my own yard, I spent a lot of time sitting under a giant cluster of forsythia bushes, which I called the “dogbushes” because I took an endless series of family dogs under there with me—my Pekingese, Misty, and our boxer, Queenie, come to mind—along with an entire town full of imaginary friends. My two best friends in that dogbush town were Sylvia and Vienna (who was named for my favorite food, the Vienna sausages in the nice flat little cans that I used to take under there with me to eat, along with some of those little cellophane packets of saltine crackers). My friend Vienna was very beautiful, with long, red curly hair. But my friend Sylvia could fly. I also spent hours down by the river, where I had a wading house—the understory of a willow tree—which would find its way into my first novel, The Last Day the Dogbushes Bloomed.
I wasn’t allowed to play in the Levisa when it ran black with the coal they were washing upriver. But once Martha Sue and I made rafts out of boards tied on to inner tubes and floated down past the Richardson Apartments and under the Hoot Owl Bridge, around the bend at the hospital and under the depot bridge, all the way to town, where we landed in triumph behind the dimestore. Here we were greeted by a sizable crowd including my daddy, alerted by enemy spies. We were quickly returned, dripping wet, to our worried mothers for a spanking.
THE LEVISA SEEMED SO TAME then. Impossible to imagine that this friendly stream could become a raging torrent as it had done in 1937 and then again in the great flood of 1957, when I found a huge catfish flopping down the dimestore stairs into the water-filled toy section. My little dead turtles were floating everywhere, with roses on their shells. After it flooded again in 1977, I came home to help. I remember gathering up floating pieces of the parquet floor in my mother’s dining room to keep as building blocks for my little boys back in North Carolina. The muddy water had risen above the countertops in Mama’s kitchen. That flood killed three people, devastated 90 percent of the downtown businesses, and caused $100 million in damage countywide. Those were the “twenty-year floods,” but there were other floods, too—Grundy had had nine major floods since 1929. Daddy never slept when it rained. He was always out back with his flashlight, “checking the river.” He had an enormous steel flood door constructed for the back of the dimestore, which was put into place each time the river started rising.
Daddy finally closed his dimestore in 1992 due to lack of business, despite everyone’s pleas that he keep it open. I thought he should, too. Since my mother’s death four years earlier, I couldn’t imagine what he would do when the dimestore was gone. Its popular lunch counter had made it not only a store but also a gathering place, a landmark. But Daddy was too good a businessman to “run a losing proposition,” as he put it. The town population had been declining for years due to the floods and the failing coal industry. There had been 35,000 people in Buchanan County when I was growing up there; the population had fallen to around 28,000. Three thousand people had lived in Grundy alone during the coal boom days of the early 1970s; now there were fewer than a thousand. Unemployment had soared to 16 percent.
Watching my father close his dimestore after forty-seven years in business was one of the saddest things I have ever witnessed; in a way it was fitting that he died on the last day of his going-out-of-business sale. He was eighty-two.
I had been visiting him for a week. Everybody we ever knew had come by the store to pay their respects and buy something, one last thing from the dimestore. All the merchandise had been sold, and some men had come from Bluefield to take away the fixtures, which had been sold, too. They loaded their big truck and drove off. Daddy and I walked out of the store together; he turned off the light and locked the door behind us. I headed back down to my home in North Carolina, and Daddy went back to his house in Cowtown, where he ate the supper which one of the girls had sent home with him, read the paper and the mail, and at some point fell to the kitchen floor, breaking several ribs.
He lay there all night, until Ava McClanahan came by to check on him and fix him some breakfast the next morning. I was back in North Carolina, getting ready for school, when the hospital called. My father was okay, the doctor told me, but they were going to keep him until I got there. I canceled my class, jumped back in the car, and drove that road I knew by heart. I was already planning to bring him back to North Carolina with me for a while, willing or not.
I found Daddy sitting up in bed, ready to go home as soon as they would let him. “I tell you what,” he said, handing me a $50 bill. “These nurses have been so sweet to me, I want you to go over to the Piggly Wiggly right now and buy them some candy, about six boxes. Buy some real good candy, like Whitman’s Samplers. Go on right now, they’re fixing to close.” Behind him, one of those nurses smiled indulgently, shaking her head. Everybody knew what Ernest Smith was like. And I knew better than to argue.
I came back with the candy to a very different scene, the hospital room suddenly filled with frantically busy people, Daddy’s bed surrounded, the doctor running down the hall toward us, his white coat flying out behind him. “Code Blue in Room 112, Code Blue in Room 112,” the loudspeaker kept repeating. “Hit’s a hemhorrhage, honey,” a nurse said, pulling me back, “from his stomach. Why don’t you just stay out here with me.” I knew this nurse from high school.
After that, things happened very fast.
AND THEN VERY SLOWLY, AS Grundy turned into a ghost town. An ambitious plan for flood-proofing the town was said to be in the works, but it was a long time coming. One by one the old stores closed. New businesses would not move into the empty buildings of the flood plain; they became increasingly dilapidated. We gave the dimestore to the community, which used it as a much-needed teen center—one of the few downtown buildings in use at all. Traffic slowed, then nearly ceased. Parking places stood empty. The last car dealership closed. With the coal business in decline, Grundy was being kept alive mostly because it was the county seat; government continued in the old stone courthouse across the street.
The new Appalachian School of Law, which opened its doors in 1995, had brought some much-needed new energy and ideas to town despite the fact that it was very difficult for faculty or students to find housing, meals, or merchandise in Grundy—both of the closest towns, Richlands, Virginia, and Pikeville, Kentucky, were at least forty-five minutes away.
I DROVE THAT TWISTY ROAD again when I went to say good-bye to old Grundy in 2005, a few
weeks before they would blow up the dimestore, which I found already boarded up. I got out my camera and took a picture of it. The dimestore would be demolished along with three dozen other Main Street stores and a score of homes as part of the drastic and daring $177 million Grundy Flood Control and Redevelopment Project, which was finally under way, a historic collaboration among the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the Virginia State Department of Transportation, and the Town of Grundy itself, population by then 1,100. They planned to move the railroad and rebuild U.S. 460 on top of a forteen-foot levee running where the buildings once stood.
“New Grundy” would rise on the newly created moonscape I stood looking at across the deceptively docile Levisa River: thirteen astonishingly flat acres where a mountain had once stood until very recently, when they had blasted away 2.3 million cubic yards of it. The idealistic concept of “raising Grundy” reminded me of that old gospel song, “Lord lift me up and let me stand, by faith on Heaven’s table land . . .” Now a 300-foot wall of rock rose straight up behind the flat area, Heaven’s table land. I took several pictures of the site. New bridges would connect the “new town” with the older Walnut Street and historic courthouse area, I was told.
“Doesn’t it make you sad?” friends asked.
Well, yes and no.
Of course I felt sentimental and nostalgic, but then I hadn’t been driving 35 miles one way to buy a shower curtain. And I’m a merchant’s daughter, remember. Unfailingly civic, Daddy always loved Grundy, and I knew he would have supported any plan to save it.
But . . . Walmart?
Grundy may be one of the only towns in the United States that has ever actually invited Walmart into its downtown area, instead of organizing against it. The moonscape’s new “retail center” would be anchored by a unique Walmart Supercenter sitting on the third floor of a 500-space parking building. Shoppers would take their carts up and down on a giant escalator. A three-story Walmart with a giant escalator! Looking at those muddy acres, it sounded like science fiction to me.
The town fathers had made this unilateral decision themselves; no public referendum or vote was ever held. Though some local opponents formed a group called People Allied for Grundy, led by lawyer Mickey McGlothlin, they didn’t get anywhere. Some merchants simply pocketed their government payouts and closed forever. Some had already moved out of town. Others were moving up the hollers or into a metal-shell building up the road, known as the Grundy Mall. The town offices and The Virginia Mountaineer newspaper were already there, along with Elaine’s Boutique and the Street Law Firm. Terry’s Tobacco had gone online.
“We had to look at it for the betterment of all the people,” Town Manager Chuck Crabtree told me earnestly at the time. “We had to think, how do you bring the people in? We want to reenergize the town and bring the people back. We want to give them a revitalized town to come to, a place to stop and shop. It’s not Walmart that kills your town, it’s the location of Walmart. So we’re bringing it downtown. Our tax base will skyrocket. It’ll be the best thing that’s ever happened to this community. I have staked my whole life and my reputation on this.”
I took a few more pictures of the empty main street and all the boarded-up stores before I left. I was glad my father had not seen this. He never wanted to retire or leave Grundy, and I could not imagine how he would have spent his days when his beloved dimestore was gone.
Now, I realized, his kind of business could be gone forever.
MAY 2012: I HAVEN’T BEEN back home in a couple of years. For one thing, I don’t have any relatives living here now; I go to Abingdon to visit most of them. But today I’m heading up that twisty Route 460 toward Grundy where I will present a program commemorating the fiftienth anniversary of the Buchanan County Public Library; my mother was on its founding board. And also—I have to admit—I am very curious to take a look at that three-story Walmart, which has just opened (finally!) with much fanfare.
The muddy moonscape with its forlorn little sign reading WALMART COMING SOON stood empty for so many years that many people ceased believing in it altogether. Instead of Walmart, the recession came, then deepened. Funding slowed down. Everything stalled. That optimistic town manager disappeared. A huge boulder rolled down off a mountaintop to crush the area’s one remaining movie theater, so—outside of school activities—there’d been absolutely nothing for teenagers to do. They couldn’t even make out up at the coke ovens—they’d closed, too. An entire generation of children had grown up in the town of Grundy, which was no town at all—there was simply nothing there.
But this is a gorgeous Appalachian spring day, with redbud and sarvis and dogwood blooming on the pale green mountainsides and a deep blue sky arching overhead. Speaking of those mountainsides, they look different, I suddenly realize as I drive along. The Beatrice mine tower is gone, along with the other old tipples and trolleys. I remember the slag heaps often smoking near the tops of the mountains, and the little frame houses clustered on the steep slopes below—where are they? And what about the old company towns, gone too? Where is Raven? I wonder as I leave Richlands. Where is Red Jacket? And what was the name of that big company town with the large houses over in the bottom by the river? Deel! What has happened to Deel? To Vansant? All the outlying communities seem to have disappeared as I approach Grundy. Signs read WE BUY GOLD AND SILVER now, instead of WE BUY GINSENG. Sleek metal coal trucks have replaced the old self-owned and decorated trucks with personal signs like DON’T LAUGH, IT’S PAID FOR and names like “Tennessee Stud.” The coal company offices have disappeared or been turned into “energy” companies, i.e., gas, with Consol Energy predominating. I note several locations. The coke ovens are burning again, but now run by SUNCOKE ENERGY, JEWELL OPERATIONS, a sign proclaims. The former bowling alley is a well-drilling business. Big pipes for pipelines lie in stacks everywhere. At Oakwood, the old Garden High School has become the new Appalachian College of Pharmacy, and there’s the impressive Twin Valley Middle School, too.
The closer I get to Grundy, the heavier the traffic is; we crawl along bumper to bumper on the newly widened and raised Rt. 460, which is still under construction. Huge machines lift red dirt and rocks into huge trucks; dust fills the air. My old neighborhood, Cowtown, looks totally shocking. Only my own house has not been raised up to the level of the new highway (it can’t be, I later learn, due to its frame construction). It looks fragile and dingy, so much older and smaller and lower than the other houses, each of them sitting up on its own divot of earth, like toy houses set up on stands for display. At the end of the driveway behind “my” house, I catch sight of the last incarnation of my writing house, poised on the riverbank with a glint of the river behind. The mountainside across 460 where we used to run so wild and free has been sheared off, a red wound with rock at the top.
Finally the traffic crawls around the bend of the Levisa to Hoot Owl Holler, filled with personal meaning for me as the setting for my novel Oral History. A new green road sign reading POPLAR GAP PARK, FOURTEEN MILES points across the Levisa River Bridge and up the mountain, where a large mesa created by mountaintop removal mining has now—in a brilliant stroke of public relations—been turned into a public park. It boasts picnic facilities, athletic fields, playgrounds, tennis courts, and the state-of-the-art Consol Energy Stage for large events such as concerts. Sunsets viewed from atop Poplar Gap are said to be spectacular. Operated by the county, the park was much needed and is heavily used for everything from the “Race for the Cure Relay” to fireworks and horse shows. I have been reading about it in The Virginia Mountaineer, to which I have always subscribed.
Slowly I pass the attractive Comfort Inn at the bend of the river, a new Italian restaurant, and the 24-hour Waffle Shop. I don’t check into the Comfort Inn yet, afraid that with all this traffic, I won’t have time to see “the new Grundy” before my program begins at the library. There’s only the one road, route 460, to get anyplace. Finally the traffic inches down the hill and Walmart comes into view, a behemoth on its bi
g flat lot. It is enormous! Any letter on its sign WALMART is taller than any of the tractor-trailer trucks bringing it merchandise. It looks more like a huge alien spacecraft than like a building. Traffic flows across its bridges, a steady stream in and out of it, back and forth from town, which is still a construction site, though the existing stores and buildings on Maple Street and the courthouse area are busy. The sidewalks are thronged with people, all kinds of people! I don’t see one single person that I know. Finally I find a parking place in the public lot where the old stone Methodist Church once stood. I have to grin as I remember our singing “red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight”—Grundy actually has some diversity now.
“There’s not another town in the nation that has undergone this much change this fast,” my friend Debbie Raines, still the senior high school English teacher, has told me. “It is a totally unique situation. You’re still here, but your town is gone . . . and when you go to the grocery store now, you see all these strangers,” referring not only to the folks who have come in with Walmart but to the influx of new people who have moved in with the Appalachian School of Law and the University of Appalachia’s School of Pharmacy. A new optometry school is planned. Whoever would have thought of Grundy as a college town? The college students are involved in community service projects everywhere, from teaching kids soccer to weatherproofing houses. Newcomers are scrambling to find anyplace at all to live; apartments are going up all over the place. “Psychologically, it’s hard to undergo this much change,” Debbie said. “So many different ideas are being brought into this community, our whole small-town value system is changing. It’s very threatening to our older, more conservative residents. It makes it easier to leave here now.”