Pave Paradise

Gven and I seem to have a history of putting ourselves in the path of bulldozers. First there was our own little acre of Strawberry Mountain Farm in Walker County, Georgia. In exchange for a year's labor, the deal was that we would receive room and board plus one of the 170 wooded acres. Sweat equity, not bad. It was a beautiful spot in the West Armuchee Valley (that's ar-MUR-chee, Yankee) of northwestern Georgia, roughly halfway between Atlanta and Chattanooga, the site of many good times and learning experiences back when we were new.

I was the resident gardener and she was the resident yogi. We took turns milking the cow in the morning, ran on the trails every day, and earned out keep. We chose a back corner of the property farthest from the road and the main house and adjacent to the Chattahoochee National Forest. Big mistake - one of many in our two years at the farm, and one of those aforementioned learning experiences. We built a tent, the original Om Shanty, on a tiny peninsula at the confluence of two creeks fed by the mountain, just off a hiking trail we cleared where a two-rut road had served pulpwood cutters decades earlier. I wonder what it looks like now, decades later.

What we didn't realize was that the U.S. Forest Service considers national forests to be a resource for the logging industry, and private lumber companies make a living by harvesting those trees from public land, a sweet deal for them. We naively thought "national forest" had something to do with conservation, preservation, wildlife, and all that! Hah. As the head ranger of another national forest told me years later, "If I don't see log trucks rolling in and out of here, I'm not doing my job."

So one morning we awoke to the sound of bulldozers build a road right across the creekbed, maybe twenty yards from our campsite. It looked like an invasion of the Military-Industrial Complex intent on wiping out our remote little retreat. And it worked. Check out Derrick Jensen's Strangely Like War for a well-researched account of the uber-profitable technological assault on forests worldwide. We didn't take it personally, but we were rudely awakened.

Years passed, and we relocated a number of times for a number of reasons, and we managed to stay away from direct confrontations with bulldozers until recently. The reason for leaving Clintonville was the purchase of the house and land we rented by a church (our church!) that turned around and made a windfall profit by selling house and land to Chic Chain Bakery Inc. on the condition that a world-class parking lot replace our house, garden, and wooded acre. Another benevolent nonprofit institution with high-minded principles sees a material advantage and makes a million-dollar deal. We pack up our Grapes of Wrath for leafy Methodistville, and within weeks there's no red brick house, no garden, and not a tree left standing. Those "developers" run a very efficient operation.

I'm having a flashback from 2003 to 1977! Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Granted the commercial development of North High Street is not exactly the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the Golly family is not a displaced community of Palestinians. But I can romanticize anything, especially the house and yard Jessi and Helga grew up in.

Flash forward to this summer as the bulldozers advanced on the schoolyard behind the new incarnation of Om Shanty. Where there were mature maple and oak trees beside a grassy expanse used for recess and soccer practice, we can listen every day to the sounds of advanced equipment building another impressive, state-of-the-art parking lot. I'm sure they have their reasons: traffic flow, long-term growth, infrastructure, blah blah blah. I would dearly love to see a tree planted somewhere for every square meter of land, public or private, paved or otherwise leveled.