Teenagers in the packed-house crowd at Beasley’s Barn on Highway 32 near the Washington-Beaufort county line Saturday night were still children when their parents first heard the news that they might lose their farms.
Their parents were a lot younger then, too – far younger than the six or seven roller-coaster years that have taken a toll on the emotions, finances and resolve of the sturdy folks who farm the rich, flat fields of northeastern North Carolina.
But Saturday night was a party night for about 500 folks jamming Beasley’s Barn. On a concrete floor of a big steel barn that normally houses John Deere tractors and all manner of heavy farm equipment, the folks of Washington and Beaufort counties held a “Blessed Celebration” marking the success of an utterly All-American grass-roots campaign to preserve what they saw as their way of life and persuade the Navy that their homeland was the wrong place to build a practice jet landing field.
The secretary of the Navy withdrew the plan in January after concluding what the local folks have been saying since 2002: putting a jet field so near the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge – with its many tens of thousands of large migratory waterfowl posing a distinct threat to jets and their pilots – was a bad idea.
So Jennifer Alligood and Doris Morris and Jerry and Myra Beasley and a lot of other folks put on the dog Saturday night. They buffed up the barn with enough red, white and blue bunting to decorate a major political convention, arranged for experienced hands to cook chicken and pigs and ribs and got everyone in the community with a recipe for banana pudding or chocolate cake to bring it on over to feed the masses.
And they got the lawyers from the big city: Ray Owens, Kiran Mehta and Chris Lamm from Kennedy Covington in Charlotte, and Derb Carter from the Southern Environmental Law Center. They filed the lawsuit and whipped the Navy in court when they persuaded U.S. District Judge Terrence Boyle the Navy hadn’t met its obligations under the National Environmental Policy Act.
And they let elected officials, volunteers, county managers and advocates for various groups talk about how they had all pitched in to win the fight. It went on a while.
I think Brian Roth, the ex-Navy navigator and mayor of nearby Plymouth, had it exactly right when he faced the crowd to talk about what they had done in putting together a local movement to address what they saw as a threat. “It’s breathtaking from up here.”
I know what he meant. I’ve followed this story since December 2002, and the thought that a coalition of ordinary folks could take on a branch of the Armed Forces and persuade it to change its mind is just extraordinary. These were smart folks, but they don’t usually have to figure out how to run a grass-roots campaign and make the federal government turn the aircraft carrier around. Most of the time they’re working on getting the roots of grains to grow in abundance, which it does up there.
There ought to be a book about the OLF campaign. Some folks think it’d make a good movie. Derb Carter says it already has resulted in the N.C. Symphony developing a new piece: “The Swans of Pungo,” after the tundra swans that fill the skies on winter days. It was those birds, and snow geese, too, that caught the attention of folks across the land so they could finally understood the dangers of an OLF near the refuge.
Ray Owens had a compelling thought about what it meant. “I want to thank the Navy,” he said, “... for bringing us all together.”
