It’s All Gone, Forever

I grew up on a small farm on the Oregon coast. My family owned 30 acres and those fields were my private playground as a small boy, especially a marsh which I had to cross to get to the forest, and in the forest, a small meadow. I can smell the marsh as I write about it. The smell was sweet and friendly. Amidst the acres of cattails Redwing Blackbirds nested, along with the elusive American Bittern, sometimes called the “stake driver” because the mating call sounded exactly like someone hitting a stake with a hammer. The frogs were a massive chorus in the evening.

If I stood in the marsh and jumped up and down the whole area around me would move like a wave. It was obviously a mat of organic matter floating on top of water. Occasionally one of our cows would venture too far into the marsh and get stuck in the mud. We would pull her out with ropes before she disappeared into the muck.

A stream wandered through the area and my father built a small bridge over it so the cows could graze in the meadow beyond and I spent many hours on the bridge watching thousands of salmon fingerlings headed for the ocean, about a mile away. I knew that some of them would come back in time and I would find their bodies along the edge of the stream higher in the forest after they spawned.

To get to the meadow I would follow the trail used by the cows and once there I would either hike farther up into the forest, following the same stream, or I would lounge around the meadow in the sun, making small boats out of sticks and leaves and watching them disappear downstream. Deer shared the meadow with our cows. There were great climbing trees, and always berries to eat. I once encountered a black bear, sleeping in the sun. He, or she, got up and wandered away into the woods, seemingly disinterested in my presence. I was glad that my dog was not with me that day. Bears do not like dogs.

I would guess that I spent several hours in that meadow two or three times per week during all the summers until I began working away from home around age 14, and it became the most fondly remembered place of my childhood. I can see it, especially the pools in the stream, the sun on the grass, the dark coat of the black bear, the large berry patch around the alder tree. It is as vivid a memory as the faces of my parents and sister or the first time I saw each of my three children.

I loved the place. If there is any place on this planet that is truly my home, that meadow is it, and now it is gone, obliterated, erased, buried beneath thousands of cubic yards of fill. On that fill there is a paved street and an RV park. In a way this is inconceivable to me. I know the economic dynamics of why things like this are done. I understand that someone was able to buy the land, see it as a good place for an RV park, manage to ignore any regulations against destroying wetlands and make a profit.

The destruction of my marsh and meadow is a tiny event in a much larger, global, ecological disaster but for me there will always be a deep sorrow when I remember that it is gone forever, and always the question, "how could this happen?"