We only have the rights we defend, as long as we are able.

Feb. 3, 2002 (revised) | First_Salute

[joanie-f]

Allow me a personal aside (focused more on the abuse of human privileges than on the defense of human rights) on a thread whose top-notch essay I’ve already read and appreciated countless times (many thanks for providing that opportunity. :)

This afternoon I took a break from work, house-designing, and teaching tasks and walked up a nearby mountain with our and our daughter’s dogs. I was in one of those need to clear my mind and immerse myself in nature moods.

The path we took is a portion of the Horseshoe Trail, a branch of the Appalachian Trial, which meanders through several hundred (maybe even several thousand) acres of woodland that abuts the house where my Dad used to live, and our daughter now lives. When he was still living (pre-October, 2001), my Dad and I used to walk up that mountain, along with my dog, Beatty, once, and occasionally twice, a week. Upon reaching a clearing at the summit, he would sit on a large, old tree stump and I would sit across the path on a downed oak tree. While Beatty explored the area, my Dad and I would relax there as he regained sufficient strength to start back down the mountain and return to his cottage. We ‘solved’ many a world problem during our long talks in that mountaintop clearing. :)

In the three and a half years since his death, I have only been up there twice – once to spread his ashes alongside his ‘sitting stump,’ as he wanted me to do, and then again maybe a year ago. Today I somehow felt the need to make the trek again (Maybe to experience a nearness to him. Maybe to experience a nearness to Him. Maybe just to enjoy a different kind of exercise, and exorcise some of the anger I have accumulated over the past couple of weeks of following Terri Schiavo’s plight. I’m not really sure.)

The narrow pathway up the mountain measures maybe two miles, and the area has always been thickly forested on either side of the path, as far as the eye can see. Mostly stately black oak, black locust, bitternut hickory, black walnut, sugar maple, and flowering dogwood – many of them (with the exception of the dogwoods) seventy or eighty feet tall. Those several hundred acres are a breathtaking example of nature’s magnificence and God’s awesome artistry.

But sometimes man has other ideas.

Walking that once-beautiful portion of the Horseshoe Trail is now akin to traversing a grotesque obstacle course. I would estimate that a good two-thirds of the trees along the two-mile path, and much deeper into the forest, have been felled. Maybe half of those have been removed completely, but the other half lie there like giant conquered Goliaths. The entire expanse is littered with hundreds of irregular, five to ten-foot high piles of branches and brush and one to two-foot-high stumps that once served as the foundation for the magnificent wooden sentries. The felled trees were not even taken at ground level, but cut several feet higher, leaving huge stumps as the only evidence that they ever existed at all.

And, judging by the appearance, color and texture of the cut stumps, all of this devastation took place many, many months ago.

I know that trees were meant to be harvested, but not in this way. It will be decades before that once breathtakingly beautiful area begins to reclaim its natural splendor.

At one particular spot the Horseshoe Trail now ceases to exist, and is completely obliterated by an enormous expanse of limbs and trunks of downed trees and tangled underbrush. I attempted to circumvent that extremely large area and re-discover where the Trail continues higher up the mountain, but, after spending close to an hour attempting to find it again, I had to abandon the effort because it was nearing time to go home.

So Ernie, Beatty and I never did make it to the summit (although I intend to attempt to do so again soon, when I will have more time to make my way through the thick barriers).

On our way back down to the base of the mountain, Beatty wandered off the path quite a distance and appeared to have ‘discovered’ something (she is eighteen years old, but still has the acute sense of smell of a dog half her age), so Ernie and I hiked over to see what had attracted her attention.

What Beatty had stumbled upon was an old deer carcass. The body was complete – the skull, limbs, and every rib and vertibra were there, and it was also apparent that none of the meat had been taken, but instead had been mostly eaten by scavengers. The antlers had been sawed off at the top of the skull. The deer had apparently been killed simply for the purpose of mounting its rack.

I couldn’t kill a deer, unless doing so were the only means of avoiding starvation. But I would not criticize anyone who does kill wildlife in order to make use of the meat and hide.

I would have difficulty cutting down a hundred year old oak tree. But I would not criticize anyone who did so, provided they left the area clean, and in a condition that would promote re-growth so that that part of the forest would have a fighting chance of reclaiming its former majesty.

The hunter had left the deer dead, but intact, minus its antlers. And the people who downed hundreds, if not thousands, of magnificent trees had no concern at all with the way they left the environment after they harvested what they wanted. Both were examples of a senseless, destructive, and self-absorbed hit-and-run philosophy.

Sometimes that different drummer seems intent on creating a cadence that brutally clashes with the beat that so many others are tapping out in precise conformity.

Anyway … the two dogs got a workout, thoroughly enjoyed themselves, and ol’ Beatty has napped peacefully all late afternoon and on into the night (canine drummers must be significantly less discriminating).

~ joanie

[Minuteman23]

Joanie, this is what you have that I don't. You can take everyday happenings and understand the meaning behind them and then connect them to things in the real world. (I didn't even explain that as well as you would.) :-)

Thank you.