When I can, I take a little country road back towards my house.
Where we live in New Home is a combination of built out areas and original native landscape. This particular road, which moves along the side of a light industrial buildout is, one of those areas. To the left on this little one lane road are concrete blocks and parking lots while to the right and North are overgrown pastures and fields.
I like to drive it in the dark because the local wildlife is out. I have seen possums and a skunk and baby bunnies scarcely larger than my hand. One time, a buck right at the road line, almost ready to hop out and into my car.
When I get to the top of the initial straightaway and make the right turn, I briefly find myself moving back through time to when there was nothing but cattle ranches and small acreages here. One cannot see the city or the suburbs or the freeway that dominates the part of the city. One can just see the trees overhanging the road and the grasses on the side that wend there way through the sagging rusty barbed wire fences.
Another turn North and I already find myself back in the 21st Century with the water structure looming on the horizon overlooking everything; another turn East and I face the Freeway that dominates my drive five days a week, sodium lights flickering as I see the bar at the corner peering out at me from the other side of the freeway.
I am always glad to drive this way home whenever I can, and worry that at some point it will disappear, being sucked up into yet another housing development or industrial thing that simply does not need to happen. It saddens me because it will mean that those that come after will never get a sense of what the landscape used to look like before everyone came, and what wildlife was here on a daily basis.
It saddens me because a little more of the beauty around us will be stripped away and never return.
I noted with much relief that a couple of developments near our place went on hold in 08 and then totally disappeared after that. Not much outward development around here anymore and several small businesses are still closing here and there.
ReplyDeleteWe are still building like mad around here - I live in an expanding local economy at the moment. Fortunately, the same thing did happen up near my parents place and the developments are slowing down.
ReplyDelete