JOHNSTON - In Alfred and Mildred Porter's backyard, the mountain grows — up to 15 feet a day. They cannot see it, but they know it's there.

Fewer than 1,500 feet from their back door is the state's biggest pile of trash, the Central Landfill. Just about everyone else near this humanly created moonscape has sold out and moved, leaving boarded-up houses and empty land that quickly attracts industrial users.

The Porters alone have stayed here, due east of the landfill, in a small white house with a white picket fence. A rented house stands in the distance, but the Porters live closer to the landfill than anyone else, and they are practically oblivious to it.

They say they seldom smell it. They don't hear the hundreds of trucks that six days a week deliver trash, or the earth-moving equipment that buries it — enough to fill a football field 15 feet deep every day. The flocks of seagulls that hover noisily over the trash — and the periodic booming noises the landfill sets off to disperse them — don't bother them.

"I'd just as soon stay here," Mildred Porter said.

"I never tried to sell," Alfred Porter added.

Their closest neighbors are heavy industrial companies, including the truck-repair shops, welding operations and scrap dealers along Shun Pike, the road that leads into the landfill. A 550-megawatt power plant is taking shape a quarter-mile away. Across the street from their house at 294 Scituate Ave., a machine scrapes dirt, making way for construction of a building that will house a heating and air-conditioning shop.

By most definitions, this is no man's land, but the Porters like it here. After 47 years, it's home.

IN THE YARD, Mildred Porter has more than a dozen bird feeders.

"I love to sit in the window and watch them," she said. "There's blue jays, chickadees .."

Four cats roam the yard. And despite the seeming devastation all around, as the Porters talked in their yard last week, pheasants called from somewhere in the wintry trees in a wooded area between the Porters' house and the landfill.

Unlike other Johnston residents, they have not voiced a string of complaints about the landfill and its operations. They have not demanded that the landfill cease operations or that they be bought out for living near it.

"They've never bothered me, so why should I bother them?" Alfred Porter, 86, said with a shrug as he stood in his yard last week under 60-foot pine trees.

He spoke calmly and deliberately as he showed visitors around the yard, pointing out the barn and other features.

In 1955, when the Porters first moved to their house, a former motorcycle-repair shop, the place had three rooms, a well and an outdoor toilet.

They had looked at several pieces of land in the area, but this one had a building on it that could be used for a house.

"I grabbed it," said Porter.

"We added a bedroom and an indoor toilet," said Mildred Porter, who is 82. "We built a barn, too."

The couple had been living in Providence and decided they wanted to move to the country. Alfred Porter was from Vermont, and the Johnston location reminded him of his home state. The Central Landfill didn't exist then.

"I could go hunting up here, and I had horses," he said. "We had chickens, too."

Mildred Porter recalls blueberrying in woods that are now the landfill or industrial buildings.

"We used to get blueberries like you never saw," she said. "There were only three houses up here then. It was nice."

The Porters raised three children in the house. Ronald Porter, who now lives in Cranston, also remembers the area as rural and somewhat bucolic.

"As a kid, I picked beans in the fields there," he said. "We swam and fished in the [Simmonsville] reservoir, too.

"My father really didn't want to change his lifestyle," Ronald Porter said. "He always seemed happy there."

The land near the house, which was owned by Albert and Anthony Silvestri, was just a gravel pit. The Silvestris sold dirt for fill for the construction of Route 295.

The landfill came on the scene in 1968, when the Silvestris started accepting trash, said Dante Ionata, planning and development manager for the Resource Recovery Corp., which operates the landfill today. In 1980, the state bought the Silvestri property and it became the Central Landfill.

THE PORTERS had some neighbors fairly close by until 1989. That's when the corporation managing the Central Landfill, under orders from the General Assembly, started buying about 80 houses and nearly 500 acres of land from people living within 2,000 feet of the landfill.

Under state law, no one may live within 1,000 feet of the landfill. The state took houses within that zone by eminent domain. Those who lived beyond 1,000 feet but within 2,000 feet of the landfill had a choice.

If they approached the state by a certain date, the state would buy their houses. Most chose that route. Many of those houses have been resold to people who accepted covenants in their deeds stipulating that the landfill was close by. Some of the houses have simply been boarded up.

Today, to the southeast of the Porters, the resold houses compose a pretty residential neighborhood, where children play and ride bikes. But this neighborhood, bounded by Central Pike and Old Pocasset Road — where one of their daughters, Deborah DiStefano, lives — is separated from the Porters by the abandoned area. The houses the state took by eminent domain have been moved. Stubs of driveways are still visible.

The Porters, being within 2,000 feet of the landfill, were one of the families that had a choice.

"I asked them about it once," Porter said, referring to the possible sale of his property to the corporation. "But no one ever got back to me."

He didn't pursue it.

The buyout removed the Porters' neighbors. It also removed their other daughter, Donna DiMeo, who had gotten married and moved into a house on nearby DiMeo Drive. She and her husband sold their house to the state and moved to Rollingwood Drive, off Hartford Avenue west of Snake Den State Park.

"That was a real heartbreaker," said Mildred Porter.

NOW IN THEIR later years, the Porters wonder about the future. Their land, which has little value as residential property even though it now has municipal water, was zoned for industrial use at their request, about 10 years ago. At least one company has inquired about buying it.

R. David Cruise, head of governmental affairs for the Resource Recovery Corp., said it is possible the corporation, which is developing an industrial park bordering the landfill, could decide to make an offer.

The state is planning to build ramps to the landfill from Route 295, which would cut Scituate Avenue in two, creating dead ends on both sides of the ramps. The Porters are concerned about whether they will still be able to get to their children's houses and to the commercial areas of town without taking a circuitous route.

Still, they know what they want to do.

"We like it here," said Mildred. "I really don't want to have to move."