You may remember a few days ago when the heavens opened (to coin an original phrase). Rain really poured and the winds made themselves known and there were strikes of lightning. Wow! In the calm the day after, Jeanie and I could see that Wright Park was a mess. You can imagine: leaves blown all over, branches littering the place. There didn’t appear to be any trees down, thank heaven, but the park was unsightly.
By the end of the day all was in order. The park staff had cleaned it all up. This is an urban park, after all, not some forest primeval. It is a place for people, a place to run and walk and push strollers and have picnics and family gatherings, a place to meditate on 125-year trees. Fallen branches can be obstacles. Too many leaves can be slippery. This is a park.
Many years ago, where we used to live, wandering arborists frequented our driveway and offered their services. One time a man stopped by and said he could make our place look like a park. “Tell him to scram” said Jeanie, actually using more colorful language. “I don’t want our yard to look like a park.”
Ours was a place with wild spots. There were several stumps left over from the logging of the area in 1920. Many of the trees were over 100 years old. The rhododendrons had taken on a life of their own. There was an abundance of ivy and salal. There were the usual wild animals – squirrels and birds and raccoons and coyotes, and, rarely, a deer and a fox. We had a couple of small fruit-bearing bushes which we helplessly recognized as the province of birds.
Naturally, when there were storms, we cleaned up the branches and other detritus. We didn’t want to trip.
In a way, we were managing a bit of the wild, but mostly it went its own way. We knew that in the real wild when trees and branches fall in storms nobody cleans up. That’s the way it is. We are fortunate enough to live on God’s green earth of parks and the wild.
~William Tudor
