When I moved twenty months ago to this property
with a 4-acre lake created by a man-made earthen dam, I felt compelled to spring
into action. To do something, to do stuff.
Of course, the recent disastrous floods and dam failures
in Columbia, SC played a role in my earnestness, and so I checked the FEMA
watershed flood map and contacted the state only to be told that my little dam
did not meet the new legal definitions of a dam. My little dam is, but isn’t.
A neighbor who lived closer to the dam than I do
explained that my irregular property lines came from a scheme to create a dozen
home owners to share the lake, but no one was interested. She went on to tell
me how in 20 years the dam remained untended and so covered now by trees, and
the beavers then as today managed the spillways.
Didn’t stop me from excavating material off the top of
the beaver dam half a dozen times only to find my efforts repaired by the
beavers overnight. Didn’t stop me from installing a drain pipe—really too small
to make any difference—which led to a 2’ beaver dam downtrickle.
Flash forward: One of my neighbors and I will sometimes
stand along our respective fences and look out over the lake and the
surrounding woods. Sagely we observe each time that the woodland mulches and
prunes itself, the understory thriving and dying back seasonally, and how all of
natural landscaping seems to work out for the birds and squirrels and muskrats
and beavers and fox. The geese have their young this spring, and so do the
herons. Eagles and anhingas and deer pass through.
Passing through, like me. And so I think this little
pocket of life a haven for the wildlife as more and more homes locally are
shoehorned into wooded hillsides, the landscape bulldozed away, lots created so
small that a crape myrtle looms like a willow oak.
I paddle the lake, I walk the woods. Perhaps I will bear
witness to the lake becoming a wetland. Or perhaps the lake will endure beyond
my passing.
A better phrase, then. Benign respect.
