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Requiem for The Woods

 

The time was spring, 1973.  When my parents took my sister and me to see our new house being built in Kettering, we spent very little time looking at the skeletal beginnings of where we would live for the next 8 years. Instead, we heeded the siren call of the Woods that seemed to stretch into infinity behind our meager lot.  The Woods were cool, green, alive, and full of the promise of wild freedom that our European ancestors must have sensed when they first set foot on these unspoiled shores.  My sister and I wandered happily for what seemed like hours.  Suddenly, we happened upon the ruined remains of an old cabin deep within the forest.  Just then, we remembered our own house, and realized exactly how lost we had become deep within the green dreaming.  We ran and ran until we heard my father's voice bellowing our names in the cracked tones of anguished parental worry. Relieved yet triumphant, we ran out of our first adventure back into our everyday lives.

 

After we moved in to our new home, I spent many endless childhood Saturdays exploring the Woods, building forts from the huge cylindrical wooden spools left behind by the electric company, and using my imagination to devise endless games with my friends within the solace of the trees.   Before Playstation and Nintendo, kids actually played outside all day; before the neighborhood turned rough in the 1980s, parents didn't hesitate to allow their children to roam unsupervised through their neighbors' well-watered yards and the coolness of the sheltering Woods from morning until nightfall.  As I grew older, the human male instinct to imprint one's presence upon the environment led me to rake complex trails within the Woods, which I named after forest animals and species of trees.  Using graph paper, I would sit at night in my room and map these trails from memory, as if to reinforce my naïve sense of ownership over this hallowed place. 

 

Every season had its mysteries.  Winter brought snow and ice storms to transform the Woods into a crystalline cathedral of gently hissing wonder.  Spring coaxed wild dogwoods into creamy bloom, and drove the alien-looking May Apple plants out of the warming earth in profligate profusion.  Summer ushered in the reign of the spiders, sadly (I am severely arachnophobic), but also heralded the return of the contralto glory of wood thrushes proudly proclaiming their domains deep within the forest's echoing halls.  Many hours I lay in the sun, foolishly and vainly attempting to darken my painfully pink skin in the summer sun, while reading Arthur C. Clarke to the hypnotic accompaniment of forest birds and distant lawnmowers.  Autumn was the best season by far. As soon as I got home from school, I turned my back to the stark western power lines and ran joyfully eastward into the welcoming arms of my best friends, the trees.  With my limping beagle, Gigi, by my side, I looked up in wonder as the scarlet gold leaves wafted lazily downward from the gently moving branches, which seemed to wave a wistful farewell to their summer raiment as they contemplated the return of winter's cold discipline.  I would walk and walk until I reached the eastern edge of the Woods, where I sat with my dog to look out over what seemed like miles of happy verdant grass belonging to the turf farm behind the Forest. There I contemplated my life and my future, and composed earnest teenage poems which strove to translate the Trees' majestic, subliminal voices into the inadequate crow marks of human language.

 

My father once told me that the Woods were owned by a local Catholic school, which had promised to keep them inviolate forever.  Long after my parents divorced and we lost the house to the bank, long after I had moved away from Maryland to pursue a career in the military, I thought often of the Woods, and of the time capsule I had left there in 1981, to be found one day in the distant future by my starfaring descendants.  Then, one day in the late 1990s, I woke up in California from a horrible nightmare.  The trees of the Woods seemed to call to me from three thousand miles away, crying for mercy in shock and disbelief at their betrayal by the little two-legged creatures that had for so long moved swiftly yet benignly beneath their sheltering arms.  In my dream, I saw raw stumps and red earth scratched bare of the dark, fertile humus formed from hundreds of years of self-sacrificing leaves. I saw feral yellow machines ripping the trees bare from my old backyard clear to the now blindingly bright horizon.  I was suffused with dark sorrow and a bitter anger, as the remaining trees watched helplessly as the merciless machines, coughing pollution into the once-fresh air, closed in to slaughter them, root, trunk and branch.  I awoke crying in disbelief, comforted only by my assumption that this was just my subconscious telling me how important the trees were to me, even now, twenty years later.  However, the next time I traveled back to Maryland to visit my family during Yule, I saw to my shock and horror that my dream had been true.  Acres of my precious Woods had been assassinated to make yet another concrete and tar dwelling place for my species.  Worse yet, a huge, garish, multi-colored christian (sic) church had been deposited like some kind of hulking alien mothership on what used to be the endless green grassland behind my Woods.  Once again, my human race had acted out its hard-wired compulsion to imprint its will upon the face of Nature, without regard for the irreplaceable beauty of the ancient Trees of my boyhood. As a grown man, and now father, I wept for the loss of wonder.

In 2000, I moved back to Maryland.  I was glad to see that much of the Forest remained intact, even though a 10 foot wide path had been rudely sliced through the Woods 100 feet from the yard of my former home.  From time to time, I have revisited the Woods in various seasons; I make it a point to drive past them twice a day on my way to and from work.  Twice now since that time have the trees called to me for help in my sleep.  Each time coincided with a fresh slaughter stemming from expansion of the development behind the Woods.  The latest, and perhaps final nightmare was just last week.  I stood in what had been the Forest looking up at an unnaturally bright sky bereft of sheltering leaves, while the few remaining trees droned ancient lamentations beyond sorrow into my consciousness.  The next day, I almost crashed my car when I drove past the complete annihilation now occurring.  In full polyester and corfam military uniform, I stepped over the low, black fence into the sickening orange mud left behind by the machines. As the now unnaturally bright sun beat down upon me, I saw that not one beautiful tree was spared within the scope of the wanton destruction.  Squirrels ran in panic among the carnage, searching madly (I sensed) for their missing young ones as my parents had searched desperately for my sister and me.  After apologizing to the Trees and their denizens for my species' arrogance, I said a simple prayer for their lingering spirits, wishing them a peaceful departure from the cool silence they had known in this sacred place into their next incarnation.  I consoled them with the bittersweet thought that, at this rate of despoliation, my species will not last much longer.

 

As I left, I spoke with a lady reading in her backyard.  She said she had lived there since 1978, and that the developers had had to cut down the trees because their previous clearcutting had led to severe water ponding and mosquito infestation.  Essentially, disruption of the balance of nature demanded even more disruption in a blind attempt to fix the problem. When I asked if she had known that the trees would be cut down all the way to her yard, without any intervening forest buffer, she said that the developer had promised to replant trees to create a 100 foot buffer.  I shook my head sadly, knowing that the trees would take hundreds of years to return to a mere shadow of their former glory, and that this woman and her children and I would be long dead before that occurred.   My hope of bringing my grandchildren to walk among these murmuring giants is now destroyed, uprooted by belching, clanking yellow machines created by men who know and care nothing for the green dreams of trees.   Sadly, the Forest will live on now only in my memories.

By the way, if any of the workers now murdering the trees under orders from the developer finds my simple childhood time capsule, you will see from my grade-school ID that I used to smile the innocent smile of a boy who naively believed that some things, like my parent's marriage, our comfortable house, and the welcoming Woods, were forever.