What Happened Next

I have been putting off writing this post. Know before you read it that it gets bad, and then it gets better. I always bring you back, don't I? 

I hope you'll go on this walk with me. I have to write about this now, even though it's really hard for me.

September 25, 2014. I knew that was the date. It was the weirdest thing. I plugged in my external hard drive just now and zeroed in on the exact date, the exact event in my photo archives. I didn't mess around. My heart knew when it happened, would never forget, and my hand navigated right to the photos.

It started like any other sunny October walk, with a little black spot bouncing along in my field of view. 

I found a luna cat mortally injured in a fall. A common fate for big silkmoth caterpillars, who get heavy and slip off the leaves. A gravel road is an unforgiving safety net.

I was headed to my happiest of happy places. And I stopped dead there on Dean's Fork.

Where there had been deep water, ducks and kingfishers, fish, frogs and turtles, there was a rapidly shrinking, algae-greened puddle. 

The mighty dam had been blown to pieces. The water had run out of it like lifeblood.

I stood rooted. The beavers I used to wait for were gone. A lone snapping turtle circled listlessly in the largest puddle, eyeing me. It had nowhere to go. A few frogs jumped with a splat into the water. I wept. 

Eventually, we walked on. I knew I wouldn't come back here for a long time.

I found a glorious copperhead hatchling. If you click on the photo you can see the twin pits on its forehead. 

Hearing a rare car approaching, I helped it across the road. What were the chances that I'd be there to save this wee snakelet, just when the first and probably last car of the day came along?

I met up with three of my neighbors, one a township trustee at the time. We talked a long time about what had happened to the beaver dam. Everyone was upset. One had an eyewitness account from her sister-in-law. A local "independent oil operator" was seen dynamiting the dam on the Friday of Labor Day Weekend. Clever man, choosing a time when everyone is celebrating with family and unlikely to catch him at it.  Oops.

The township trustee, my neighbors and I were completely unsurprised to hear the perpetrator's identity. I had had two unpleasant run-ins with him, during which he tried to force me to allow him to conduct his "business" on our land. He had trespassed, prospected without permission, and now here he was on my doorstep, unnanounced, clad only in trousers and a filthy undershirt, trying to shake me down. And under those circumstances, what would he expect me to grant him?  I asked him to put it in writing and ended the conversation. And when he showed up again,  pounding on my door in the middle of the day, I told him to get lost and never come back. 

 The beaver dam this upstanding citizen dynamited that Labor Day Friday, 2014, happens to be on the property of a woman who had been thrilled to play host to a beaver colony. Let's just think about what vanishingly small percentage of landowners appreciate and welcome beavers. That alone is an extremely rare thing. She'd told him outright to stay away, keep off her land, leave the beavers alone. And twice, he'd trapped them, and now he had dynamited their dam on her property. Something about his "right" to access his wells...something about the beavers being in his way. I haven't figured out what they're doing that could affect him at all. None of his wells are anywhere near the pond; they're all below it. If anything, their engineering makes it easier for him to get through.

To turn the home of beavers and wood ducks, belted kingfishers and great blue herons, five species of frog and countless salamanders, newts, turtles and fishes into this moonscape, this devastated wasteland, just because he can; because it works for him...it reminds me of what is happening all around us now. 

He had taken something functional, something beautiful, something carefully engineered,  something many living creatures and at least one wandering naturalist depended on, and he had slashed it to pieces, laid it to waste. 

My anger and outrage and helplessness at finding what this cretin had wrought feels very familiar. Who asked him in? Who made him the steward of someone else's land? Who anointed him Destroyer?

Chet and I said our goodbyes and walked on in the gloaming.

He was more adventuresome then, and he found a door broken into the old black barn.

I put my camera to a crack in the siding and captured him walking a plank, a single beam of light throwing him into relief. How I love that little dog's great heart.

In the dying light, the old gristmill was just a roof peak above the ironweed.

I remembered it when it was whole.  It wasn't entirely well, but it was still standing in October 2009. 

 Everything changes. Much change we experience is natural and expected. Sickly trees will drop limbs and topple. Leaning gristmills will eventually collapse in on themselves, or blow down. And then you have the destroyers, who ruin things just to ruin them. And when an ecosystem is destroyed and its marvelous wise rodent engineers slaughtered, there is no remediation. No mere human can do what beavers do.

There's no legislating humans like these. There's no stopping them. There's no appealing to their conscience, because they haven't got one.  They have no aesthetic, no moral compass. There's nothing inside them  to save or persuade or redeem. It only takes one destroyer to wipe out an entire ecosystem or whatever is intact and perfect that they wish to smash and ruin.

There is evil prowling through this beautiful world.  There are people who take more than their share, who scoff at laws; steamroll along making up their own rules as they go, rules that suit their avarice and lust; who rip through this life, shredding the fabric of society on the way. Somehow we allow them in; somehow we make room for them; some of us look up to their arrogance, ignorance, callousness and selfishness, mistaking it for moxie and leadership, and willingly bow down to them. They're just "tellin' it like it is." It has happened before. It is happening again.

I will never bow to a destroyer.  I'd sooner spit in his eye. I'd rather seek the society of creators, people who devote themselves to making the world a better place; people who contribute to arts and humanities and sciences and thus to the well-being of others; people who care for others and work to help them; people who understand that we've been given this luxuriant, insanely wonderful, irreplaceable earth, and it is not ours to despoil, but to protect.

Great Blue Lobelia Lobelia siphilitica

And then there are the little points of light. You have to turn your back, walk away from the destruction, and keep walking toward those. And you have to trust in nature. Nature remains.

"After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on--have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear--what remains? Nature remains."

Walt Whitman