Outside the warm March wind whips the naked limbs of trees and shrubs threatening to strip away incipient buds before they can burst into flower. The sun drenches the greening landscape momentarily and then recedes into the dark frowns of clouds wrinkling their faces in displeasure as if they disapproved of spring’s approach. The open pasture outlined with trees has gone. 72 acres of farm, pasture, trees, and the familiar cacophony of cows bellowing their ardor as winter slips silently into the stirring woodlands were bartered away. Four years ago one more housing development invaded a quiet rural community to bring the soporific élan of idealized country living to urban dwellers fleeing the stereotypical artifice they had made of their own lives.
Of course someone profited from the sale of the land. The owner who, ironically, had no family, bought the farm years ago as an investment, indicated privately to neighbors that he never intended to sell the land, right up until the signs went up! Machines moved in, mostly yellow behemoths that scraped and torn at the land, while others, equipped with great pincers grabbed trees and cut them off as effortlessly as I might snip daffodils for the morning table. Noise and clutter muttered constantly, the air choked itself with the iron rich dust ground from the red clay soil of North Carolina. And when the machines grew quite and their pungent perspiration of diesel fuel and motor oil no longer fouled the air, cadres of workers punctured the silence with staccato rhapsodies of nails and saws and hammers and a babel of emerging languages.
Industry was everywhere. Motion, sounds, whirligigs of energy transforming raw materials into houses. Structures arose from the surveyors’ multicolored flags, which carried the special coda for water, electricity, sewer lines, dimensions, grew like fractals incapable of infinite variation: a marker of the successfully safe is minor variation that does not obstruct the painless palliative of sameness. Slowly the houses sold, men half my age became instant country squires on a vast parcel of land straining in the most extreme cases to nearly one half of an acre. Sprinklers slithered out despite the drought North Carolina had endured for two years and lavished the rich bounty of our precious aquifers on patchwork lawns as neighboring cities enacted increasingly stricter measures to conserve water–alas, no such rules apply to county dwellers beyond the city limits.
And so it goes. As I watch the wind scour the land and trees, two men prepare two houses for public auction. Two houses vacant for nearly two years, never inhabited, stoically touting price tag of $370,000.00. Ironically, two houses which are occupied, flank the dour giants, and in fact dwarf them in both size and cost: one nicely over $400,000.00; the other pushing $500,000.00 or more. In time I will get to know my neighbors, even the impact of the unknown that a public auction may intimate will find its own surcease. I already miss the quiet, the sound of no sound–not the constant drone of something always working, a vehicle insidiously announcing its coming and going, the spill-over pollution of sound from highways and roads no longer insulated by tracts of acres and acres of trees, the chillingly plaintive soprano of emergency vehicles marking their procession to or from some tragedy as one stirs with a shudder that one is unable not to ponder its destination. The price of our desires is inflated with hidden costs that no amount of collateral can offset.
Red-Shouldered Hawks still scream as they circle above the receding woodlands, they perch in the oak outside my window and watch for prey or glide to an apple tree for a different vantage point. Sharp-shined Hawks maneuver through the throngs of pine limbs in hot pursuit of a hapless Cardinal. Fewer deer drop by to inspect my vegetable garden and the great drum roll of the Pileated Woodpecker no longer echoes during a mid-morning calm. The Great Horned Owl has become less vocal while the Barn Owls seem to have disappeared altogether. Wild Turkeys haven’t done their usual job as gleaners and given my fallow garden a once over–I’ve had a flock of more than two dozen scratching and preening about for winter rye that failed to germinate. It’s difficult for the Fed to broker a bailout for a crisis when we are unable to see the forests or the trees!
