Susan Meeker-Lowry [01/18/2006]

By Susan Meeker-Lowry

I read the 2005 year-end wrap-up article of the development in the valley with dismay. So many changes in such a short time. And more planned for 2006. Its all about bigger. Better. More. Get rid of the old. Tear it down for more cookie-cutter-pseudo-country buildings. The powers-that-be feel a need for more chain hotels, restaurants, outlets. Open space thats not floodplain must be allowed to fulfill its highest destiny: development.This area has been subjected to such progress since the mid-1960s at least. There isnt much left. I have to ask: Are you not dismayed by the voracious drive to build to profit to destroy in the name of more? Do you see beauty in yet another huge parking lot surrounding yet another gas station/convenience store/bakery or mall or whatever? Of course now with unreliable winters its about 50 degrees as I write this, a beautiful spring day and more rain is on the way skiing is hit or miss so its the shopping that will save us.Are you not also dismayed by the sameness wherever you go? Unless you enter the very heart of towns or the remote, unpaved back roads (of which there are fewer and fewer) its the same, the buildings are the same shape, color, height. Despite regional differences in names the stores are virtually identical east, west, north, south. In cities, full-priced versions of the outlet stores that crowd the outskirts and make up places like our strip are increasingly displacing independent retailers who are finding it harder to survive.Do you sometimes wonder where all the stuff goes that we dont buy? The stuff that women and often children in so-called developing countries make for slave wages and to the detriment of their health. The cheap stuff made of plastic and other synthetics the manufacture of which causes the release of millions/billions of pounds of poisons every year. And obviously theres more and more of that cheap stuff being made because existing stores expand and more stores are built. We know were depleting Earths vital resources to make all this junk, and we know that the processes used to make it are polluting air, water, soil and causing climate change with its own repercussions. Yet we dont stop.I moved here in 1955 from Connecticut. My father fell in love with the area on high school Boy Scout camping trips. As a young man he visited as much as he could, and when I was barely 2 he and my mother took me on my first camping trip. We stayed at the Dry River Campground. I remember some of that trip as well as others to the area until we eventually moved here. My father loved the woods as much as life itself, and my mother understood. So did my grandmother who sold her house so they could move. Like so many others who came in the years that followed, we came for the beauty and a quality of life impossible in the city. It wasnt long before newcomers and locals alike realized there was money to be made and no shortage of people who wanted to make it. So here we are with little open space left. And this year, as in all the years past, decisions will be made about what will be forever altered or destroyed and what will remain -- for a while anyway.A few days ago I was cleaning a drawer and found a yellowed, typed article I wrote in the days before computers were commonplace. It was about a phone conversation daddy and I had shortly after the decision was made to allow the building of the White Mountain Hotel. I remember it as if it was yesterday. The other night daddy called, I wrote. A developer won the right to put in a golf course, a hotel, and 130 condos just this side of Echo Lake the woods he loved. The woods hed take me to as child and teach me the most important things: animal signs, the names of trees and plants, what the deer fed on and the bear, not to be afraid of bears, how to listen. In these woods lived a friend of his Hunky Dick we called him. In a tiny log cabin next to a brook miles in. He pumped water by hand, had an old Victoria and liked his home brew. I loved being there. Hunky Dick is dead now. The cabin has long since collapsed. And soon even the trees will be gone. It hurts, Daddy was saying on the phone, It really hurts. I know, I replied.And it still hurts.While skimming the current issue of Orion, a picture caught my eye of a barren looking landscape of flat roofed outskirt-type buildings. In the foreground was a sign depicting the Statue of Liberty and the words: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Real Estate. The article, Progress Hits Home," was about the changes in a place called Montrose, changes the author, Melissa Holbrook Pierson, laments. She writes of yet another development near her home: When they start building, the age-old dark of the hillsides night will be swept away in lights and noise and car exhaust. It is funny how the sound of the well digger foretells the final loss of a galaxy. We are some of the lucky ones, to still have our Milky Way when we step out on the back porch, but it is there for only a little while longer. Only a few more houses on our road, only a few more developments in the next town, and it will be gone, after billions of years. You can practically count the days. Susan Meeker-Lowry is a writer who lives in Fryeburg.