These Your Kids?
Yesterday morning as we headed down the first long hill into the ravine for our usual ramble, we saw a tree across the path leading to the left. It isn't that unusual to see trees fallen across any of the trails, since age and the weather conspire to cull the forest from time to time. This, though, was a lovely 30-ft tall, very bristly-green fir. Didn't take long to ascertain cause: axe marks four feet up the trunk. From time to time we see things like this in the ravine. Usually such incidents correspond with high-school kids freed for the summer, and already bored out of their skulls. Strange that anyone could equate chopping down a tree with any kind of thrill, but then you never know.A few weeks earlier, on the last quarter of our hour-long loop we came across the charred remains of a bonfire just over the last of the bridges fording the creek. Strewn around the burned logs was further evidence of a really fun evening. Fast-food bags and beer bottles. None of the bottles were intact, as all had been tossed into the creek with the obvious intent of targeting logs and rocks, and we could see the predictable results. When our little black dog Button was a few years old we used to let her run about to her heart's content in the creek on hot summer days. That's how she got one of her back legs cut badly enough that it required an emergency visit to the veterinarian. We warn other dog walkers but they have big Labrador Retrievers and Golden Labs and German Shepherds and those dogs just cannot be persuaded not to have a good time in the cool creek on hot days, other than being leashed and having their freedom completely curtailed.
A few years back a very rough shelter was put up, hidden in the wealth of trees, obviously put up by teen-agers looking for some privacy. Because they love the woods? I guess not. No one is ignorant of the odour of pot and that's where they felt secure enough to dabble, dibble and puff. And so what? Well, how about this: last year the younger children on our street erected a wooden shelter with discarded wood (from one of the children's father's shed-building efforts) and about four boys were proud to call it their hideaway. Not that secret that they didn't want to show it to us. Although it had no roof, it had a door. A birdhouse that one of the boys made at school hung from an overhanging tree branch. It's no longer intact, and when I asked the boys why, they said that teen-agers had destroyed it. Pity.
This ravine is a truly priceless place, beloved by most people who walk its trails, and whose companion dogs look forward to daily ambles. So, it's with a bit of sourness that we see some kids have been busy with their parents' long-handled shovels and spades, digging up the heavy clay on the trails and depositing it carefully in the centre of trails to form ramps. Takes some determination to dig up the heavy clay on these well-trodden trails, let me tell you. But what fun it is for these egotistical little slobs to race their bicycles down the hillsides over these ramps. How irritating it is, if not downright dangerous in the frozen winter months for hikers to negotiate these ramp-hills and depressions. When we can, we try to restore the integrity of the trails.
Can't help but wonder what the parents of these children were teaching them in their formative years. Respect for public property? Sound values? Ethical behaviour? Did it all fall on deaf, bored ears, or did these parents forget about the need? What a busy world we live in. Too busy to ask what's going on, kids? Why're you taking the axe into the woods? How about those shovels...what do you need them for, huh?
posted by Pieface @ Friday, June 03, 2005
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