Elegy for a forest
Yesterday I went for a walk at lunch, and I discovered that a forest I used to walk through when I worked at our old building has been torn down.
I felt like I'd had something stolen from me. It was almost unrecognizable - there's literally a pile of dirt where there had been woodlands before. The frame of a building stands on a section of it now, just I-beams and supports and guys in hardhats yelling "Below!" to each other as they throw things to the ground. While walking, I'd seen the corner of this frame over a line of trees close to the main road, and I went to investigate.
Let me tell you what it used to be like. I have no pictures - all of the ones I took of it were on my old cell phone - and I feel like I should memorialize it somehow.
When I worked at the old building, I used to walk a loop (more like a square) at lunch. My building was on a cross-street between two more well-travelled roads, and I'd walk down one to the closest cross-street. I work in an industrial park that used to be an air force base - Rachel was born there - and nowadays it's a patchwork of huge buildings with manicured landscaping and overgrown forests where deer and turkeys live. Roads that used to lead to military housing now disappear into the woods, leaving behind stepping stones of asphalt.
The street with the forest-that-used-to-be is called Oak Avenue (ha ha oh god). I would turn onto it from the main road, which is open to the sun and wind and is lined only with equidistant saplings and a blindingly white sidewalk. Oak Avenue was like walking into the wildwood in comparison. The sidewalk turned to crumbling black tar (where there was a sidewalk at all) and pine trees - immense, towering pine trees - met far overhead to create a cathedral-like tunnel. It was overwhelmingly green and cool, the only shady place on my walk and a haven during the summer. The sidewalk was on the left side of the road, bordering a wooded area filled with more pine trees and a few oaks. There was a considerable amount of open space in it, and I think there must have been small buildings there once, because concrete foundations could be seen half-covered in leaves and blankets of orange pine needles. The whole area was sheltered by trees, though, I remember it as a slightly mysterious sun-dappled place where history lay just below the ground's surface.
There, another horseshoe-shaped street looped up the side of the hill up which Oak Avenue runs, its start near the bottom and its end near the top. This street was named Pinecrest Terrace, and it's fitting that it no longer exists. I never used to walk up Pinecrest Terrace, which brings me to the second reason this turn of events disturbs me. Near the curve in this road was an abandoned water tower - and when I say I never used to walk up this road, I mean that I walked up it once and never did again. To say that the area around the water tower is creepy is a very big understatement. As much as I want to be able to sense things that aren't part of the physical world, I find that I'm a bit dense in those areas; this place is a great big exception. I explored it once, and what I found beneath that water tower was bird feathers and a feeling of intense loneliness and the distinct impression that someone was going to drive up in a black car and dump a body there. I made the mistake that day of trying to walk back to work through the woods on the other side - much denser than the woods that were cut down - and it was right out of Hansel and Gretel or Red Riding Hood, complete with the assurance that something was measuring me up for a sandwich. I have it from several different people - independently - that the area made them uncomfortable too.
And now they're building on top of it.
The woods that are cut down now, my pine trees with the carpet of leaves and needles and acorn caps and violets beneath them, were always a calm, protective barrier between the sidewalk and the water tower. I would greet them as I walked beneath them, sometimes touching their branches, and they gave me their tree-gifts of sharp sunlight on their needles whenever I needed something beautiful. It's transformed now, even the land heaped and churned and flattened beyond recognition. They left three or four of the oaks - one in particular near the road is bare and beaten and has broken branches hanging high in its limbs, like they'd been tossed up by a tornado. Rachel suggested we bring it something (and bomb the place with wildflower seeds later, once the construction is over). I'd like to do that; it looks bereft.
I felt sick when I saw it, dragged down, drained. It must have been that way all winter. Since we moved buildings last fall (and after I broke my ankle), my few walks have taken me in a different direction, and I never even knew it was gone. I'm glad I visited it so many times before it was torn down, but now it's so barren, like it was never there. The only thing I can do is write about it and share a little bit of what it was like with you.
I felt like I'd had something stolen from me. It was almost unrecognizable - there's literally a pile of dirt where there had been woodlands before. The frame of a building stands on a section of it now, just I-beams and supports and guys in hardhats yelling "Below!" to each other as they throw things to the ground. While walking, I'd seen the corner of this frame over a line of trees close to the main road, and I went to investigate.
Let me tell you what it used to be like. I have no pictures - all of the ones I took of it were on my old cell phone - and I feel like I should memorialize it somehow.
When I worked at the old building, I used to walk a loop (more like a square) at lunch. My building was on a cross-street between two more well-travelled roads, and I'd walk down one to the closest cross-street. I work in an industrial park that used to be an air force base - Rachel was born there - and nowadays it's a patchwork of huge buildings with manicured landscaping and overgrown forests where deer and turkeys live. Roads that used to lead to military housing now disappear into the woods, leaving behind stepping stones of asphalt.
The street with the forest-that-used-to-be is called Oak Avenue (ha ha oh god). I would turn onto it from the main road, which is open to the sun and wind and is lined only with equidistant saplings and a blindingly white sidewalk. Oak Avenue was like walking into the wildwood in comparison. The sidewalk turned to crumbling black tar (where there was a sidewalk at all) and pine trees - immense, towering pine trees - met far overhead to create a cathedral-like tunnel. It was overwhelmingly green and cool, the only shady place on my walk and a haven during the summer. The sidewalk was on the left side of the road, bordering a wooded area filled with more pine trees and a few oaks. There was a considerable amount of open space in it, and I think there must have been small buildings there once, because concrete foundations could be seen half-covered in leaves and blankets of orange pine needles. The whole area was sheltered by trees, though, I remember it as a slightly mysterious sun-dappled place where history lay just below the ground's surface.
There, another horseshoe-shaped street looped up the side of the hill up which Oak Avenue runs, its start near the bottom and its end near the top. This street was named Pinecrest Terrace, and it's fitting that it no longer exists. I never used to walk up Pinecrest Terrace, which brings me to the second reason this turn of events disturbs me. Near the curve in this road was an abandoned water tower - and when I say I never used to walk up this road, I mean that I walked up it once and never did again. To say that the area around the water tower is creepy is a very big understatement. As much as I want to be able to sense things that aren't part of the physical world, I find that I'm a bit dense in those areas; this place is a great big exception. I explored it once, and what I found beneath that water tower was bird feathers and a feeling of intense loneliness and the distinct impression that someone was going to drive up in a black car and dump a body there. I made the mistake that day of trying to walk back to work through the woods on the other side - much denser than the woods that were cut down - and it was right out of Hansel and Gretel or Red Riding Hood, complete with the assurance that something was measuring me up for a sandwich. I have it from several different people - independently - that the area made them uncomfortable too.
And now they're building on top of it.
The woods that are cut down now, my pine trees with the carpet of leaves and needles and acorn caps and violets beneath them, were always a calm, protective barrier between the sidewalk and the water tower. I would greet them as I walked beneath them, sometimes touching their branches, and they gave me their tree-gifts of sharp sunlight on their needles whenever I needed something beautiful. It's transformed now, even the land heaped and churned and flattened beyond recognition. They left three or four of the oaks - one in particular near the road is bare and beaten and has broken branches hanging high in its limbs, like they'd been tossed up by a tornado. Rachel suggested we bring it something (and bomb the place with wildflower seeds later, once the construction is over). I'd like to do that; it looks bereft.
I felt sick when I saw it, dragged down, drained. It must have been that way all winter. Since we moved buildings last fall (and after I broke my ankle), my few walks have taken me in a different direction, and I never even knew it was gone. I'm glad I visited it so many times before it was torn down, but now it's so barren, like it was never there. The only thing I can do is write about it and share a little bit of what it was like with you.