M.N. Shand

M.N. Shand

Woodland Preserve: Homes in the High 800s

I don’t know much about a lot of things. I don’t know about construction, or housing developments, or zoning regulations. I don’t know how much it costs to bulldoze a forest, to terraform the surface of the Earth, to consult with landscape architects to build terraced pedestals for eight hundred thousand dollar homes. I’ve seen it happen though, just around the corner from my apartment complex.

Someone, probably some rich old white guy named John Wieland (credited with inventing McMansionized suburbia in the southeast) must have gone to city hall or something with a big bag with a dollar sign on the outside, and in exchange got a piece of paper with some words on it that more or less gave him permission to do whatever he wanted with one of the last little shreds of wild-ish space around here.

I didn’t see that part happen. What I saw was the next part, the part where giant yellow destruction rigs roared around the woods, tearing stuff down, tearing stuff up, moving massive quantities of earth around. Who knows how many insects they displaced? How many different types? How many thousands, maybe millions, maybe more, scrabbling through raw dirt exposed to the baking sun in heaps that get slapped with tools to shape it suitably for human homes. Well, that was probably the plan, anyway. They finished the development half a year ago, but not a single house has gone up.

Maybe it has to do with the very active railroad next door? Or maybe it has to do with how many other empty developments there are now, scattered around metro Atlanta? Maybe it’s an inflated housing market, another bubble waiting to pop? Maybe it’s stagnant wages or millennials who don’t want to live and work and die in the same spot over the next 40-50 years? Instead of eight hundred thousand dollar homes, there’s empty streets marked with spray paint glyphs I cannot decipher. There are poles and bundles of cable protruding from the ground, sewer covers that tell you the storm water drains into local waterways, so don’t dump here. There are lumps of dog poop, half-buried styrofoam cups, and single-use plastic water bottles left over from the mercenaries who wrecked this place. There are stop signs that don’t stop anyone, and street signs letting you know the name of the empty, untrafficked stretch of concrete you’re walking on.

I walk here a few times a week, towards the end of the day, when the heat is draining out of the world and the sun is collapsing behind a line of trees that haven’t yet been sundered. I come at dusk, hoping to catch sight of some of the refugees that linger around this place, wandering around the scars of what used to be their home. I catch a glimpse of white-tailed deer, scampering at the

sight of me, and I can’t blame them. People that look like me did this, hairless upright apes just following orders for a paycheck. I can’t blame them either.

The front of the place is built up with fancy fake brick buildings that must house generators or something, because they’re too small for anything else. Where did the stone come from that built these? How far did it have to travel, from where it was quarried, to where it was cut, to where it was sold, then laid down to form this ostentatious entryway to a woodland preserve that didn’t preserve shit? I don’t know the answer to that. I just walk past it all, looking at the pale white paving cement of the sidewalk, watching hunter spiders scurry away from my feet. I duck under a cable stretched across the road, meant to keep vehicles out of here I guess. Why? I don’t know. What more could humans do here that hasn’t already been done?

I pause at the stormwater collection retaining pond, where dragonflies laze across the surface of the stagnant green water. It’s surrounded in black chain link, otherwise I would go down to the water’s edge in search of frogs or other living things that might call this place home now. I keep going, deeper into the devastation, finding a puddle formed from the hammering rains of the past week. There’s a broken hand mirror at the bottom, but the water is teeming with tadpoles, tiny inky circles with squiggly little tails. There must be a hundred, maybe more. Do frogs know that puddles go away? Will these things survive? I don’t know. I feel like I’m looking through the window of a nursery, a hundred cribs with a hundred babies, knowing full well a bomb is about to hit the place in a couple of days, and all these babies are going to be dust. But these aren’t human babies, they’re just tadpoles. So I walk away, over to inspect a mega mailbox tucked into the corner of a rectangular patch of blacktop. One of the doors is open, a hornet’s nest hanging precariously from the inside. At least someone has moved in around here.

All around me, the grasses and plants are thriving, mini-meadows, islands of green separated by a baking black river. A flight of birds kicks up as I walk past, their sudden chirping and flapping wings almost exploding my heart. Laughing and clutching my pounding ribs, I watch butterflies flit through the weeds on gossamer wings, as songbirds perched on needless lampposts sing lovely little tunes.

There are gaps in the wrought iron fence that line the perimeter of the preserve, through which you can see the rest of the forest this place once belonged to. There are paths into the dark wood beyond. Maybe someday the people that live here will walk those paths, glancing between and up into the trees for signs of life, life that they didn’t want to live among, else they wouldn’t have clear cut it away and put up fences to keep it all out.

I usually don’t see other humans when I walk here, but today is different. There’s a guy walking his dog, and he says “Evening” as he strolls past. I want to say “A shame about this place, huh?” or something like “This reminds me of when I visited Hiroshima.” But instead I just wave and say “Hi.” When he’s

gone, I skip rocks off the road, listening to cicadas and birds and the rumble of the train as it goes by. One of the cul-de-sacs literally butts right up next to it. If I had eight hundred thousand dollars, I would not build a McMansion next to a railroad. I wonder if John Wieland thought about that before he destroyed this place? I don’t know.

On my way out, I see cracks between the curb and the road, where ants march in imperial lines. Beneath me, there’s probably whole empires of the little guys, along with all sorts of other things that live in the dirt, or reside there temporarily in burrows and tunnels. I see a large, fragrant plant, with three different types of wasps or hornets crawling all over its leaves, gathering food or whatever it is wasps or hornets crawl on plants for. I want to know their species names, to know what this plant is called, but I don’t have my phone, so I can’t take a photo or look it up. I want to remember them. I want to remember what this place looks like now, how nature rebounded to begin to reclaim what was lost. I hope it gets a chance, that trees return, that their roots crack the concrete and rip through the pipes the humans buried here to push their shit around underground. I want to come back in the spring, to see wildflowers lining the terraced hills, to see bunnies and butterflies and bumblebees.

My fear is that the next time I come here, I will see wooden scaffolding sprouting from the ground. I will see white tyvek nailed up to the skeletons of homes. I will see pickup trucks full of empty soda bottles, hairless upright apes walking around with shiny plastic hats. My fear is that this little ecosystem, this little scab of life, is going to be picked off for profit. That this woodland preserve will finally get built. That humans will spend eight hundred thousand dollars to live next to a railroad.

Then I will have to find somewhere else to walk, some other little patch of wild-ish space to look for living things. Until then, I’ve got Woodland Preserve. Thanks, John Wieland.