Paradise Lost and Found

Lately, when I’m at the cabin, sitting on the back porch, another place of natural beauty haunts me. It was the first place I felt touched by nature--a cabin on a lake in the north woods of Wisconsin. When I bought my cabin in Colorado, it was with some desire to recreate the place that I had fallen in love with as a child: the same knotty pine walls and ceilings; the same smell of the pine trees; the same chipmunks and other animals scurrying in the grasses; the cries of birds echoing through the forest.

But it’s more than the sum of all these bits of nature that connects these two landscapes, which are more than a thousand miles apart. In both places the forest is intertwined with summer cabins, so there’s a sense of being on the edge of nature, of getting a glimpse of wildness; one foot in the civilized world with the other in a place that whispers of a life beyond civilization, something wild and unknown, with possibilities I can only imagine.

But the sadness for me is that the place I loved so much as a child doesn’t exist anymore. No, Thunder Lake wasn’t drained, but much of the forest around the lake’s edges has been replaced by big houses made of brick that would fit right in suburbia. Wild blueberry bushes, scrub oaks and wild grasses have been pushed out by artificially green lawns. What to me, a child of suburbia, was a bit of wilderness has been refashioned by those who see it as an extension of their suburban life, an opportunity to play with their outdoor toys: motorboats, pontoons, Jet-Skis, ATVs. I think they appreciate the beauty of the lake but want to enjoy it in air-conditioned comfort, with satellite TV service, big kitchens, and granite countertops. Gone are the days of living simply, when we bathed in the lake, used the outhouse to supplement the single toilet, and kept cool at night by opening all the windows.

With the now sterile lakefronts, the frogs and chipmunks are gone; I no longer hear the lonely cry of the whippoorwills at night. Gone too are the places we hiked to in the woods—replaced by chain-link fences with “no trespassing” signs, a product of a new culture that doesn’t trust anyone else.

That’s why I treasure my cabin here in Colorado so much. There’s still a lot of wildlife: rabbits, chipmunks, ground squirrels, chickarees, occasional sightings of bear, elk, deer, even last week a female moose and her young one.  Most of the cabins in Meeker Park are the originals, when people built small cabins to fit into the woods. And not many people would attempt to put in a lawn in this rocky terrain.

And yet I can’t help but grieve for Thunder Lake, for what’s gone, a place and way of life that has been pushed aside in our quest for comfort, civilization imposed on a place that was beautiful, fragile and tender.

Comments

[shoney]

Beautiful post. I agree with you that many people "love nature to death"....it is as though they want to put as much padding between themselves the natural landscape around them. How to cure this? In terms of Wisconsin, I think it is more than just in the north---I noticed downtown Madison was so dirty, many buildings are empty, the lakes are overgrown with toxic weeds. I'm an optimist but wonder how/where we start--within, I guess.

[Melanie Mulhall]

Kathy,

Thank god there is a Meeker Park! And thank god you're willing to write about it. This issue of loving nature to death hurts my heart. I live simply. I don't have a cabin in the woods, but like you as a kid, I don't have air conditioning. I open my windows at night. I don't have a smart phone and I don't have cable or satellite television. So much of what complicates life for nature complicates it for us humans, too. I like comfort, I admit, but some of that comfort, for me, is found in the sights and sounds and feel of nature.

Thank you for your posts. They are lovely reminders of what is important.

Melanie

[Laurel]

This mirrors my own experience too well. I fell in love with the natural world at a lake called Shuswap in British Columbia. We went there for summer holidays when I was a child. Beautiful cedar-hemlock forest, crystal clear water, waterfalls and salmon spawning rivers feeding the lake, white sand and pebble beaches. It was paradise. But now it is a zoo overtaken by houseboats of drunken partiers (houseboats with granite countertops, of course!), jet skis, loud music, and development. The word desecration springs to mind. As you put it, it has become an ugly extension of suburban life.