Fragments From Floyd

From my biweekly column, The Road Less Traveled, in the Floyd Press, May 12, 2005. In light of the previous entry topic from yesterday's paper, this little essay was timely. I thought I'd share it with the internet audience as well.

Before we moved into our first home in an older neighborhood of Wytheville long ago, I had never owned a tree. But then on that first day as new homeowners, eighteen trees belonged to us in a personal forest out our back door! We could enjoy their foliage as it changed colors through the seasons. Or I supposed that we could cut a tree or two, or all of them, for firewood--as we, the new land owners, saw fit. Ownership, so it seemed, had made us masters of the tiny bit of nature we had come to own by signing the deed of possession.

A few years later, we moved from town to the country, and that first tiny forest of eighteen trees was surpassed on our little farm by a woodlot of twelve acres. My wife and I and our two children lived in those woods and in the pasture and garden as much as we lived in the country farmhouse. The land soon became much more to us than real estate we had purchased. Living in nature's cycles and seasons, we understood that owning land was both a relationship and an obligation: yes, we owned the land but we also owed back to it. We loved and cared for the place over several years, and we cared greatly about what would happen to it in the hands of the next owners. They could and would do with it whatever suited their values and their own particular land ethic. It grieved us to know that our influence on land we loved would end the instant we signed over the deed to others when we moved away.

And now in our settled years, we have come to rest on Goose Creek in Floyd County. Our valley bears a thin sliver of open pasture surrounded by a vast forest on ridges that go on beyond our boundaries as far as the eye can see. We walk the trails we've worn beside the creeks and along the ridges. Soon now, once again there will be blackberries to pick behind the house from the timbered clearings where a young white pine forest grows with adolescent vigor. From the top of these hills in every season we see beyond us the grandeur of what John Muir called "a cathedral made without hands." This is the land of which we have become a part; it is the world to which we now belong.

But, as I've come to think since living under those eighteen trees, maybe we don't really own trees or land in the same sense that we don't own the air we breathe or these borrowed bodies. All of our material possessions of body and property seem more like a loan to us for our short time here. To my way of thinking, we are obliged to care for nature's resources and gifts with a vision that extends beyond our short lives and short-sighted self-interests. Without thought for protection after we're gone, this beautiful rural land could all become nothing more than a commodity--a real estate jewel to be cut over, then dissected into smaller and smaller tracts over the years.

I think you'll agree that we are abundantly blessed with nature's resources in southwest Virginia. But it is a precarious wealth, and once lost, there will be no paradise regained. There are unfortunate examples in many mountain communities where haphazard growth has forever altered the rhythms and scale of a pleasant place.

But the good news is that it is not too late to think together about the ridges, vistas, forests and watersheds of Floyd County that could be sheltered from damaging and unintended change. I have the hope that if we put our heart and our minds to it soon, we can achieve a healthy balance between land use for the common good and land protection for the longer view. It will depend on how we come to understand the personal rights and public obligations of ownership. In the end, maintaining the rural lifestyle and charm that we love about this place may just come down to how we regard the eighteen trees or eighteen acres out our own back doors.