scene of successive landscape transformations, most of them traumatic.
Southeastern North America, later ‘‘The South’’ of the United States, has
been home to heartbreak hardly less so than, say, the Italian peninsula.
Consider hundreds of native civilizations gone; the degradations of Afri-
cans and landscapes during two and a half centuries of enslavement; more
centuries of the wasteful slaughter of animals; awful wars waged as much
against forests and farms as people; generations of conscious use of toxic
chemicals, not only in agriculture but in the tanning of animal hides (per-
haps the first serious pollution of streams); mining; and so on. Every time
and human cohort have their tragedies and their nostalgias for places lost.
Some of these are transparent of meaning, but many versions of nostalgia
must be peculiar, arguably, to those with the peculiar experience. Consider
again the making of paper.
The rural coastal South, from West Point, Virginia (about forty miles east
of Richmond), to St. Marys, Georgia, across northern Florida into Louisi-
ana and eastern Texas, is the great piney woods. It is a flat and monoto-
nous landscape beloved to some of us. Beginning at West Point during the
s, the pulp and paper industry was established and gradually grew to
dominate—and pollute—the countryside. Because the reduction of pine
chips into pulp required heavy doses of sulfur, the huge mill region was
known throughout most of the twentieth century by its pungent odor. When
many mills switched from making heavy brown (‘‘kraft’’) paper for boxes
and packaging to white paper, which commands higher prices, enormous
quantities of bleach entered the process—then exited, along with other
‘‘liquors’’ from paper chemistry, into waterways. Since the s much of
the industry has cleaned itself. Filters and ‘‘scrubbers’’ on stacks reduce if
not quite eliminate mills’ sulfurous odors. Progressive managers also oxy-
genated their impounded pools of liquor wastes with fountains, neutraliz-
ing or eliminating bleach and other contaminants before releasing them
into adjacent rivers. By the s many mills had also substituted ozone for
bleach, and the federal government favored companies that used at least
percent recycled paper, instead of trees, as raw material.
I suspect that my father, who was born in West Point in , would have
been a little saddened by the cleanup, especially of the air. Before he was
born, his hometown had been a prosperous rail center and summer tourist
destination. (Two serpentine streams merge at West Point to form the
broad York River and a superb expanse of tidal water for swimming, fish-
ing, and boating.) But reorganization of cotton and other overseas-bound
freight, then a great fire in , reduced the town to near-penury. West