Wednesday night, Tom spoke of the beauty of the snow on the trees at sunrise. Here's his picture, which says it all. Thanks, Tom!
And thanks to Ginny for the wonderful story of the birds (be sure to click on the comment to the previous post!)
Friday, March 2, 2007
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Fortunately, I don't have too much active terrorism against nature in my community right now, only the ongoing sorrow and ambivalence of the ski area that's supercharging my own property's value.
Today's practice reminds me, though, of one of the signal experiences of my son Chris/Kellam, whom many of you know. He was 8yo when we moved to Wyckoff from a semirural community in coastal Massachusetts. Chris soothed his homesickness in large part with time down by Turtle Pond, right behind our house and his grandparents'. He had a steady relationship with the big groundhog he called The General, who lived in a tree stump at the edge of the pond. He knew the holes and haunts of a number of raccoons, skunks, possums, and others back into the field that extended behind the pond. And with the rest of the family, he watched for the springtime parade when the one pair of Canada geese who nested on the pond's peninsula would lead their clutch of fuzzy goslings up the bank, down our driveway, and across Quackenbush Ave on the way to Zabriskie's Pond. (OK, we joined the others lamenting the damage the geese did to that overpopulated ecosystem.)
Several years on, however, the owner of the property that included springfed Turtle Pond finally gave in and sold it to developers. The pond was dredged, destroying the peninsula, and an aerator was installed. We no longer heard spring peepers. Chris tried to map the animals' burrows so he could stop the bulldozers. But they knocked down The General's house while Chris was at school.
When they began to build a foundation on the now-denuded near bank of the pond, Chris's heart was completely broken. He went down there one day to mourn and expressed his pain by flinging one of the makeshift sawhorses into the pond. Unfortunately, the developer was standing on the other side of the pond, and even more unfortunately, someone else had pushed over foundation walls a few days earlier. The developer shouted and began his run around the edge of the pond. Chris also ran, up the bank. He could easily have escaped into the house. But he stopped and waited for the man to reach him.
The developer filed a criminal complaint, but fortunately he could not connect Chris to the expensive vandalism. We told Chris how proud we were of his honesty and his concern for what had been lost. The house built there still towers over our garage. My mother-in-law's lush shade garden was entirely transformed by the loss of the trees on the upper slope. But I must say that I giggle at the revenge taken every spring, starting the year they laid sod on the lawn of the 2nd house built at the pond's edge: At least 30 Canada geese accepted the invitation to nest and ... well, you know ... on the fresh, expensive carpet.
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