Benign Neglect

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.