Eco-Fascists: How Radical Conservationists Are Destroying Our Natural Heritage by Elizabeth Nickson

Author:Elizabeth Nickson [Nickson, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062080035
Publisher: Broadside Books
Published: 2012-10-15T22:00:00+00:00

An Abundance of Frogs, Snakes, and Water

In the meantime, I wait. And wait. While money trickles away. To the banks, to consultants, to the five1 lawyers I have to hire, in the incessant demand for fees from the bureaucrats, surveyors, and engineers.

One day, when Kathy visits to talk about the salmon creeks, I mention that I’ve seen several small, sweet, blue-listed, red-legged frogs in the past weeks, and those blue-listed, sharp-tailed snakes? There could be a few less of them.

“Oh no you didn’t!” she shouts at me as we trudge up the trail.

It’s a joke, I think, so I laugh and persist. “Oh yes I did.”

She turns around and for once is stern and direct. “No, you didn’t. And don’t tell me—or anyone like me—again.”

I get it. My restrictions would proliferate. But if I, a rank novice, nearsighted and usually lost in the clouds, can find endangered species so easily, how much of this species death is real?

Every morning, after staring at my list and calculating whom I can call without being moved to the nuisance list and further punished, I slide down the hill with the dogs to the sixteen acres I will keep. Work on my lowly patch is progressing. Today the salmon pond is being dug, and the water witch is coming.

I hear the racket halfway down the hill. Close to the road, an antique orange ten-ton excavator is slicing long curls of black dirt, thicket, and brush out of the future salmon pond. Mint fills the air; it was one-half of the pond-site cover, and it had gone to flower. Over it all, the roar of compressors and the crashing as small trees break and fall, hovers the essence of what is dying most and fastest.

I cut broom at the back of the meadow until Albert Kaye arrives.

One possible bankrupting expense is the new well that must be dug on the new property. The islands are notoriously dry, or at least so goes the propaganda. I have called around and found estimates that range from $4,000 to $15,000 and have chosen, of course, the former, the longest-established driller on the island. Like his father and grandfather before him, he also witches water.

Albert climbs down from his big truck, looking for a moment like any other tradesman in middle age, thickened around the waist, with roughened skin and well-worn clothes. Then he turns and beams radiance. His face is soft and round, seemingly shining with innocence, with big blue damp eyes that are very kind.

He traverses the meadow while I follow him. “I’ve dug almost all the wells up and down this road,” he says over his shoulder, while he saws a forked stick from a tree with something so small, it looks like a penknife. “This place is crisscrossed with underground rivers.”

Then he starts to pace the land, holding out the stick. From time to time, it flips down and points at the ground. Albert flags the spot. I think he’s faking until he lets me hold one tine of the fork while he holds the other.

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