she's
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Today the sun was playing peek-a-boo in and out of the clouds, so I decided to start on a project I'd been planning.

The local neighborhood association has been working to derail some plans that are being made for 42 vacant acres of land directly across the street from my apartment complex. The city's Planning Commission has already recommended a zoning change for the lot from residential to industrial. (If you've ever played Sim City, you might understand why this would be a Bad Thing.)

What's planned for the acreage? Offices, warehouses, distribution plants, small factories... Lots of truck traffic. The road that my complex sits on will be widened. Two houses down the way might be bought and torn down. And they want to drain the lake that sits hidden in the lot.

The law here requires that a developer make two acres of wetland for every acre that it destroys. However, man-made wetlands don't do as well as natural wetlands. If the new wetland area was meant to be a wetland, it would have been a wetland naturally.

The lot is big and varied. Open brush shades into thick brambles at the side of a small lake. There are blackberry bushes, and the kids from my complex often fish there in the summer. Keeps them out of trouble, you know? Deer browse in the bushes, and lots of birds nest there. And there are beavers.

Beavers in the city. How could they kick out the beavers? Beavers! Come on!

Anyway, I went to take pictures. I'm no great photographer, and all I have to use is my old point-n-shoot camera that's had cough syrup spilled in it ten years ago. But the pictures - for the most part, anyway - turned out ok. I'm planning on picking out the best ones, making copies, and sending them to city council before they meet to finalize the plans for the lot.

It was pretty muddy, but I didn't mind. I actually prefer wild areas like this to manicured parks with gravel paths and mowed lawns. I prefer to fumble my way through the underbrush. I think that's because I'm not as likely to meet up with anyone while I'm wandering around.

Now, that's not to say that I didn't see evidence of humans about. This lot is far from pristine. Beer cans litter the ground and float in the lake. (I think the beer can on the tree pictured above has been there for quite awhile - the can looked awfully faded.) Shattered glass is puddled here and there, and some trees were painted with red lettering that I couldn't read. Below, you can see two of the three large heaps of rusted metal that I found; it's a dryer (left) and a washing machine (right). ...(They are laying bottom to bottom, face down. It took me a while to figure out what they were.)

I got scratched and mosquito bitten and bruised. I almost wandered into someone's backyard at one point, and I almost fell into the lake at another. But I had fun. I walked all the way through to the other edge of the lot, where it borders alongside a set of railroad tracks. I could see the bone-white gravel through the leaves, and when I found a path through I took advantage of it.

(The sun had dipped behind the clouds again, so these two pictures were rather dark. I fixed them up as much as I could, which is why they look odd.) I walked along the tracks under the overpass for the highway that runs perpendicular to my road. You can't see it in the picture, but someone had mowed the name "RICK" into the grass under the roadway... Who RICK is and why his name is there, I'll probably never know. The graffiti on the bridge supports ranged from artistically ornate to childishly simple.

I walked further, knowing that I was invisible to the people speeding by in their cars. I stopped when I reached the local park, just visible through the trees. Children played on the swings and adults walked the carefully cultivated grass. I turned around and went back the way I came, wanting to be alone with the wild bits for just a while longer.

The mud showed the tracks of deer, rabbits, raccoons, skunks and turtles. I kept my eyes to the ground for most of my walk back, looking up only when bird song caught my ear. I was tired and my legs hurt, but I felt a sense of peace... Strange, knowing that in a year this wonderful hidden wilderness will probably be destroyed.

I will, however, do my part and send off these pictures and a letter to the city council. They have to know what it is that they are destroying.

My favorite picture of the day: I found a puddle by the lake that was filled with tadpoles and clouds.