Too Late?

By Bill Coolidge

If it’s wild to your own heart, protect it. Preserve it. Love it. And fight for it...It doesn’t matter if it’s wild to anyone else: if it’s what makes your heart sing, if it’s what makes your days soar like a hawk in the summertime, focus on it...If it’s wild, it’ll mean you’re still free." (Ric Bass, Wild To The Heart.)

"Well, why didn’t they just go and buy a house in one of those new subdivisions that haven’t got any trees anyway?"

My neighbor, Mary Beth, and I are watching the great steel jaws grab a pine and rip it out of the earth, as puppies yank at old socks. Shake, jerk, and growl. Mary Beth is angry. She’s lived in this neighborhood for more than 40 years. We’re standing at the beginning of my driveway looking at the corner property which has been clear cut. The white house sheared of its canopy of trees looks out-of-place, forlorn. The 50 to 60-year-old swamp and red oak trees bordering the lawn were cut down first so the "timber monster" could go in and gobble up the backyard pines. My wife and I moved into Lakewood Pines because of the narrow streets and the ancient trees.

Two weeks of chainsawing and then the mournful thud of falling trees. Unrelenting. They finished just as the rains came in mid-November. The lawn is muck, interstitched with huge dripping stumps. No more trees in the front or backyard. This morning I saw the sun come up for the first time in the 15 months we have lived here. No red, orange, amber leaves to block my view. I felt somber, not celebratory. I’d do without seeing another sunrise for the rest of my life if I could view those magnificent oaks once again.

"Well, you know they had a big limb fall on the garage roof during Hurricane Floyd. You don’t think that’s the reason they did this?" Ralph, another neighbor, scratches his chin. He was the first to build out here; back then Evans was a two-lane street and out in the country.

When Karen and I were looking for a home to buy in Greenville, North Carolina, we stayed at Home Towne Suites. Each morning, I’d jog around Ellsworth Lake and marvel at the trees, the water and the cemetery on a small bluff. One Sunday morning, I ran down a muddy path and discovered two guys sitting on upturned white plastic buckets, two red bobbers floating in the water. A great blue heron shuffled lazily above us, a kingfisher ranted as she swerved away and fled past the island. It was a quiet, wild, oasis from the traffic of Greenville and Memorial Bouvelards.

On a bright day in March 2002, I brought my canoe to Ellsworth Lake. I put her in near the rickety dock and paddled off toward the fishing path. Within moments I felt different. Looking around, I noticed that on my left, I could see all the way uphill. The trees were gone, clear cut. After paddling around the island, I hauled the canoe back on top of my truck and walked around the corner.

An island in a swath of mud and water, a cluster of trees survived because it bordered the cemetery. The handful of tombstones protected these hardwoods, spring budding, now the remnant of a 10-acre grove.

Later that month, while biking down Evans just past Arlington Boulevard, I looked over to my right and stopped. When did that happen? The land at the corner of Evans and Clifton had been clear cut. Shaking my head in anger and disgust, I got on my bike and rambled over gravel, sand, and trash from the clear cut, heading toward Green Mill Run.

I keep telling myself that I’m new in town and need to learn more about the city’s approach to planning, the protection of trees and greenways, and the sanctuary of flood plains. But here I am standing at the corner of Lakewood and Pineview viewing my neighbor’s desecration of his property. Which birds established a home among all those pines and hardwoods? Now where will they find a space for themselves, their nests, their offspring? I’m too late.

"If it’s wild to your heart, protect it..." I have seen the copperhead snake, deer, fox, the red tail hawk, and pileated woodpecker along Green Mill Run, which borders my backyard. At 3:00 a.m. in October, I think I heard the night scream of a bobcat. We still have wild places in Greenville.

Charlotte’s City Council recently passed a resolution requiring all developers to leave 15 percent of the trees on a lot. Trees are indispensable in so many ways. Habitat for wildlife, root systems for good drainage, shade from the sun in the summer, and on and on. But in Greenville, I believe trees are seen as an obstruction. Something in the way that needs to be removed for a new apartment complex, commercial property, a road, or in the worst case imaginable, cut down because limbs can and do fall on roofs.

As I finished writing this, I checked my phone messages: "Hello, this is Jon Day, I want to talk to you about a commercial development going in across from your property on Arlington Bouvelard, housing for 500 college students and a strip mall."

"If a tree falls in the woods

And you are not there to hear it;

When will we be listening

To the choir of leaves,

To their spirited songs,

And at last singing our own?"

Pete Upham