The red dirt road

Back when my family's new home was built at the edge of town in 1950 there was a red dirt road along one side of the property connecting with Center Street two blocks from downtown Apex. It left the edge of town and headed out into the county north toward Raleigh and ended a few miles away at the original town water reservoir next to the old water treatment building.

Many times my neighborhood friends and I would ride bicycles down that dirt road to go to the town pond just to wander around the pond or to walk over to the town's water treatment plant and look down into the clean water in the holding tanks after it was processed. Sometimes we would carry BB guns on the journey to do some target practice in the woods near the pond after having a picnic complete with peanut butter sandwiches and a 10 cent coke.

During that time period the town had made an interesting deal with the local fishermen to the exclusion of any of us that did not have the luxury of belonging to the local "fishing club" as dues paying members. No one was allowed to fish in the town pond or venture out onto it in a boat unless they had been granted the priveledge to join the club. Only the local men that had joined the club and paid an annual fee could fish in the pond. Our relationship with the pond consisted of skipping rocks across the surface, walking along the wooded edges by the water and sitting on the edge of the dam watching water flow down into the creek below.

The old water treatment plant is gone now and the pond has been turned into the centerpiece of a community park complete with walking paths, picnic areas and ballfields and is open to all citizens. The town has teamed up with other local communities and gets it water from a new facility built further out in the western part of the county. The land across the road from the pond was developed long ago and now there is a neighborhood of folks living in typical modern homes and the residents likely don't even know what the wooded area was like long, long ago.

As for the red dirt road, it was paved over many years ago, then repaved every few years, widened and then modernized with curbs and gutters required by the town as progress took hold in the area. The quiet solitude of the old red dirt road has been replaced by the daily roar of noise created by thousands of cars and big trucks speeding by several times a day heading out of town toward Raleigh and the Research Triangle Park to nearby places of employment and to the new town high school a few miles out along the road. Another of the old landmarks of this former small town has passed into history in the name of progress.

Oil on the red dirt road and DDT in the wetlands

Back when environmental concerns weren't so much a part of daily living a few things were done that have been completely banned today. I clearly remember two activities that were a routine part of the operating style of the town utilities department that would raise a major alarm in our current society.

One of the rituals of summer living in rural North Carolina, at least in my home town, was the occasional assault on mosquito colonies around town. During the hot, humid days of summer town utility workers would drive into the wetlands down by the creek adjacent to my home with motorized spray units spewing clouds of white "smoke" all over the marshy area nearby. Water that was routinely backed up in the wooded area on my neighbors property provided a large perpetually wet area for mosquitoes to lay eggs in and hatch new waves of insects. In those days DDT was the insecticide of choice for most anything and it was sprayed several times each summer and fall all over town. No one knows what effect it had on the crawfish and tadpoles growing in the creek or the birds and other animals living in the wooded area or the citizens living nearby. As you can imagine this practice has now been outlawed and there jeeps are no longer seen wandering through the woods trailing clouds of insecticide.

Another practice of those days was to scrape red dirt roads like the one adjacent to our property and spray used motor oil on the surface for dust control. The road, muddy, potholed and soft during rainy times, gradually appeared to take on the look and feel of an asphalt paved road at times until the oil soaked in and disappeared. Then the town would return with more tank truck loads of oil and soak down the surface again in a futile effort to reduce dust and try to keep the road from eroding. Although I never saw this practice in any other area it's a sure bet that this was done in many areas until environmentalists ended the practice with modern laws prohibiting oil disposal on roads and in landfills.