Life Goes On
On the east side of town, fifteen miles beyond the Chickasaw Bluffs, where the Chickasaw and Hernando de Soto once trod, beyond the mighty Mississippi and the dark, fertile Delta, the Caterpillar 854G diesel engine roars. Smoke billows from its 880 horsepower engine as the 200,000 pound machine lumbers across the land, pushing dirt into huge piles in preparation for the final, human assault.
First came the speculators. Then the engineers and the bankers. Followed shortly thereafter by lawyers, more surveyors and government lackeys. All for their piece of the pie.
Many of the animals, veterans of earlier takeovers, moved early. They’d seen it before and instinctively knew it was time to move on. But to where? Others, less experienced with the invasions of featherless bipeds, stayed. The raccoon waited until night, scampering backward down the tree and across the forest floor, moving northwest, toward the Wolf River, turning east, following it for almost a mile looking for food and a suitable place to nest. Finding none, it traveles another two miles before it stopping again to rest and survey for a new nest.
For those that dallied or waited for the forest machines to arrive, the scene is horrific. The big CAT snaps trees like matchsticks in a terrifying cacophony of noise and violence. The nuthatch and cardinal make a hasty escape, along with the Morning dove, fleeing as a group. Chipmunks, slumbering in their winter dens beneath the soil, are crushed under the weight of steel and wood and compacted earth.
At night, the place seems devoid of life except for a few colonies of unicellular and multi-cellular organisms surviving in the soil and puddles of water created in depressions of mangled earth. It’s deathly quiet, and you can feel death all around you.
During the day, it looks like someone dropped a bomb. Twisted clusters of trees, piles of earth, the smell of diesel fuel. The former home of various forms of life turned into a horrid wasteland so a privileged few can pocket their precious profits.
After the 854 completes its work, an army of concrete workers and carpenters take over, building a human conclave of dizzying proportions. Hundreds of homes, thousands of square feet each, packed with modern conveniences designed to eliminate even the most cursory amount of effort on the part of its pampered occupants. Lights that turn on by themselves. Auto-play art that changes depending on who’s entering the room. Fireplaces that start with the push of a button from a remote control. Bang & Olufsen theaters. Four car garages, pools, fountains and sprinkler systems that suck water from the alluvial plane in such prodigious amounts that the once seemingly endless supply of cool, clean water in the Memphis Aquifer is threatened.
A gluttonous feast for mostly wealthy white folks, built at the expense of the former inhabitants and with cheap, Mexican labor.
It’s a strange juxtaposition we have here in the Delta between the natural and the unnatural. Between life and lifestyles. Life hanging on in the midst of creeping industrialization. The Delta is a immensely beautiful and mysterious river valley characterized by vast broadleaf deciduous and needleleaf evergreen forests, fertile soil and widely varied fauna and culture. It’s home to the great Mississippi Flyway, the longest avian migration route in the Western Hemisphere. We have clean water, good soil and a moderate climate. But it’s also home to an absolutely, positively completely and irreversibly fossil fuel dependent corporation that helped create and enable the “gotta have it now” mentality. There are hoards of intermingling developers, bankers and lawyers doing unnecessary, profit soaked deals in private clubs, deals designed to keep the non-sustainable machine moving forward.
Some call it progress. I call it hell.
Back in the Delta, just south of downtown Memphis and the industrial quagmire on President’s Island, a Brown creeper makes it way up a towering American elm searching for insects. Urocyon cinereoargenteus, the Common Grey fox, stops to smell the base of a Southern Yellow pine, eventually marking the tree with its urine, its ears and nose alert to any potential predator or prey. There’s also a vast pool, created by a small tributary of the river, where a mallard drake calls to his brothers and sisters, encouraging them to land and congregate with him, wisely avoiding the flooded and decoyed rice fields just four miles away.
And soaring above it all is the Red-tailed hawk, carefully surveying the landscape with its keen eyes for wintering juncos in a small clearing between the river and the forest.
Life, in its simplest, rational and most glorious form, goes on.
Just in time for the End of the Age of Oil! Smart fellers, huh?
Just think what will happen to this development when The Economy tanks! All that debt will be called in, the developers will go bankrupt, and the weeds and trees will take over again.
Think of it as a sporadic fire, setting succession back to the start, increasing biodiversity.
Long live the weeds and the wilderness!
the spirit of abbey lives on….