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order to increase citizen stewardship of our environment we need open debate on the issues. i Write: Department of Environmental Quality, Northern Regional Office, 1549 Old Bridge Road, Suite 108, Woodbridge, Va. 22192. Please include your name, address, and phone number.
SALLY MELLO
Rixeyville
County
Urbanizing
To the Editor:
As the season has progressed, and the leaves are gone from the trees, it would seem as if, over the summer, a house had materialised on every Rappahannock hilltop and mountain this side of the park. From U.S. 211, between Sperrvyille and the town of Washington, they are to be seen wherever one looks. At night, their lights define the horizon: hardly the warm, welcoming glow from a mountain cabin window, but, rather, the harsh and total illumination of some commercial or industrial enterprise, as if, having stationed themselves at the loftiest available locations, the occupants have become uneasy about the aircraft approaching and departing Dulles. Suburbia, the seemingly inevitable fate of our land, has attacked Rappahannock County from an unexpected quarter: from aloft! It has conquered the high ground, and has the advantage.
Our supervisors and the planning commission, I think, have done what they could to discourage hilltop development, but it would certainly appear to be a losing battle. Nature, I suspect, will, in time, strike a retaliatory blow which will be at once effective and suicidal, a sortjof kamikaze attack: mudslides. The mountain ecology will take thousands of years to recover, but, at least, some (hopefully, all) of the houses will be gone. Enough damage has been done already that no one alive today will ever again know Rappahannock’s skyline as it was within recent memory, that is: almost totally unspoilt.
As if to rub salt in the wound, to make indelible this remarkably swift conversion of Rappahannock County to suburbia, we have now the new, “permanent” 911 addresses, registering as a strong aftershock on the Richter scale of social upheavals. Whereas, once, I lived at Star Route 1, Box 19, I have progressed through HCR 64, Box 19, to my present, exalted and prestigeous station: 373 Hawlin Road! I have not moved an inch, but just look where I am now!
It would appear that my house is one of at least 373 in a sprawling subdivision occupying both sides of Hawlin Road (once more modestly known as “618”). Keeping up with the “Joneses” is now of paramount importance, as they are witness to my every movement. To accomplish this, the acquisition of a Buick stationwagon and an English sheepdog is ’mperative. I must devote considerable time to washing the former and grooming the latter. The remainder of my waking hours are to be occupied in mowing the lawn and in raking leaves. This is my life, my new, suburban life! Or, is it?
Actually, there are only six families on the four miles of 618, south of
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