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June 16, 2005 ~ Destruction, Change
Nice view, huh? The Blue Ridge Mountains certainly can be gorgeous.
There's just one problem. Those shots were taken from Jones Mountain, from my favorite trail to take down the mountain. And that view? It's never been there before.
I was shocked when I stepped from the trees early Tuesday morning to find it. I didn't lose my composure until a red tailed hawk flushed from a tree behind me and glided over the wastes to a clump of trees far in the distance. I'm just so tired of coming across clear-cuts in my favorite hiking spots. again and again and again and now this. Within a year, this will most likely become yet another development.
It is the biggest clear-cut I've ever come across on the trails that I hike regularly, well over a hundred acres, branching off in several directions from the main swath. And there used to be two trails through thick woods where there are now just bulldozer tracks and exposed red clay. I couldn't find where those old trails went. They have been completely obliterated. Acres and acres of thick forests gone, and during breeding season, too.
On Thursday, I returned, this time with Morgan and a camera, to see just how bad the damage was. We picked our way across the muddy mess of red clay. Trash from the people who did this littered the landscape. And puddles of oil and gasoline filled the worst of the eroded spots.
I remembered the warm fall day when he and I had raced up the mountain on our bikes (I'd beat him to the top of Rhododendron Ridge). Spring beauties bloomed on the side of the ridge. We coasted down the steep trail into a small valley, through a tiny wildflower meadow, and down an old dirt path, laughing. Riding back up to the meadow, however, we soon had sweat dripping down our faces. We collapsed together beneath one of the pines and ate wild berries, trying to catch our breath. Sun, grass, pine, wildflowers, berries. Deer tracks in the dirt.
That trail, those pines, the wildflowers, the berries, that sheltered little meadow, all gone, now.
Morgan recollected the time that he'd taken the hardest downhill trail he'd ever tried on his bike, how it rode down the ridge and then along the river, with a lot of deadfall. I knew that trail well, and I had taken it many times. I loved it's shady glens and rock formations, I loved that it followed the river from the opposite side, the less frequented side, where I could find seclusion mixed with the sound of rushing water. When Morgan got his job at the college, I shared a happy conversation with a friend over phone while sitting in a little meadow along that trail.
But the trail and all of its joys has vanished without a trace. How can you find a trail when all of its markers have been destroyed and the earth has been reworked?
For a long time, the Asheville area has been spared from excessive development. The mountainous landscape discouraged it. So the development stuck to the valleys, where the forests were already gone and the mountains weren't in the way. Besides, most of Asheville's economy is fueled by tourism. And the tourists come to see all the forests, hike all the trails, look at the beautiful mountains.
But lately, the developers, having run out of room but not run out of demand for new houses and businesses, have slowly started creeping up the mountains, cutting down the forests, flattening or terracing the mountains. And the tourists, while they want to see the mountains and the forests, they also get confused when they don't see things like Wal-Marts and malls and Starbucks. And sometimes they like it so much that they want to stay, but they need houses and suburbs and big windows with mountain views.
Nothing can stop the chainsaws and bulldozers. Slowly the forests will disappear, the mountains will take on more manmade forms, the trails will be swept away with "progress." This wildness that currently surrounds us, that makes this area so unique, it will slowly be pushed back. Someday, it will become a commodity, just like everything else, just like many places in this country, something in a protected area that you have to travel to in order to go see, not something to live in, to be surrounded by, to experience every day. Unless something happens to drastically change the way that our society works, this change--from us living within the natural world to the natural world being contained and regulated by us (already the state of the world in many, many places)--is inevitable.
I used to get angry every time I found a new clear-cut. I have a very intricate relationship with these woods and mountains that I hike several times a week, and every time when another is cut down, I feel as if I've lost an old friend. Now, I sink into disappointment, deep sadness, grief. I know that I can speak against it. I know that I can do everything I can to lessen my own impact. I know that I might even convince a few people to slow the progress. I do still have hope that we can slow the death of the wild places, at least a little. I have come to accept, however, that this fundamental nature of the human idea of social progress, that is not something that is likely to change.
So I grieve in my own quiet way. I remember the beauty of that little wildflower meadow in the valley, the sweet taste of those wild berries, the sound of the river on that secluded trail. I record what I have lost, what many have lost. I disagree and I fight it where I can. And I hope, hope that there are still some wilds left for my grandchildren. But mostly I grieve. Because, while I know that someday the forests may come back, if humans ever let them, there are many species that will not survive this destruction. The ecology of our forests, of our planet, is irreparably changed each time we cut further and further in.
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