(HOST) Commentator Willem Lange watches spring arrive and wonders how much longer it can remain unchanged.
(LANGE) Early mornings, we can hear Canada geese in the distance, talking to each other. Late evenings, if I step out to check on the waxing moon or the fading of Orion from the evening sky, I can smell my neighbors’ wood stoves, shut down to hold a smolder through the night against the chill. That sound, and that aroma, captivated me when I first came here almost sixty years ago, and I thought they’d never change. But they’ve begun to.
I’ve cut a big ash tree into chunks, and spend a few minutes most days splitting them with a maul and a wedge. The “pink” of hammer head on steel reminds us that autumn is only five months away. And the perfectly stacked wood pile beside the house is a man’s signature.
A partridge in the swamp is advertising his virtues. Like an old one-lung engine, he starts beating his wings with a slow poom-poom-poom that within a couple of seconds speeds up into a solid sound. He waits, and then does it again. I wish him luck in love, and a safe place to drum, for him and his future generations forever.
For all its reminders of the way this part of the world used to be, this is anything but a pristine setting. Seventy years ago this was open grazing land. In the last twenty years so many houses have sprung up in the woods that the trails the dog and I used to follow now traverse driveways and mowed lawns, and encounter yellow Posted signs. Like the deer and bear, we don’t go there any more.
It’s a phenomenon most easily seen in the commercial zones of our towns. But it’s happening in the rural areas, too, and ironically, in the most attractive towns. A lot of people want to live here; and out-of-town and even out-of-state capital is moving in to build large housing developments. (Was ever a word so misused as “development”?)
They often clear-cut the trees, blast and level the ledges, and fill the resulting devastation with cookie-cutter houses better suited to the strip between Atlanta and Chattanooga. Many downtowns, now oriented to upscale trade, are jammed with traffic and increasingly irrelevant for us locals. As Huck Finn says at the end of his Adventures, I reckon I got to light out to the territory. But just where that may be, I don’t know.
Meanwhile, at dusk on still spring evenings here on the hill above the cold water swamp, we hear a tiny, almost inaudible “peet!” Suddenly a lovesick woodcock bursts out of the underbrush, spirals up, clear of the trees, almost to invisibility. His wings flutter unbelievably fast; then down he comes, chirping, in a great swooping zigzag. That cry, and that performance, have been part of these woods since before we ever came along. How much longer it — or any of this — will last, it’s impossible to say.
This is Willem Lange up in Orford, New Hampshire, and I gotta get back to work.