Beauty That Must die

"She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips..." In my 51 years of living, I have witnessed an incredible amount of Beauty that died. The Beauty I refer to is Beauty in the natural world. And most of it did not have to die. It died because the species Homo sapiens are, by and large, blind and unfeeling idiots. I have always been an animist by instinct. Weeds, scrub trees, lichens, wild plants, bushes, shrubs of all kinds have always delighted me beyond any reason. The phrase, "my heart leaps in gladness" applies whenever I am wandering down roads or in fields and come across a little bog with some jack-in-the-pulpits or elderberries, or when the first goldenrod blooms every Lughnasadh or when I see something I've never seen before. But this joy and gladness has inevitably been accompanied by aching pain and unassuageable sorrow, because there are very few places in my life that I have loved -- and when I say loved, I do mean love in the same sense I would use for my husband, friends, and family - because someone has inevitably come along and wounded or outright murdered these places in the name of --what: money? Safety? Industry. Development. Progress. I mourn people I have known who left this world too young. I also mourn the slope of swamp behind the house I grew up in that every spring was covered with hundreds of tiny wild irises. It was drained for cheap housing. I mourn the mixed old forest near my house that was logged. I mourn the hundreds-year-old oak tree that was cut down in Bridgeton so the road could be widened - Doug and I went and hugged it and sang to it and asked its spirit to leave the night before it was killed. We have a piece of its wood on our ancestor altar. There is a special place near my house, an old one-lane road, a brick road with a thin veneer of asphalt. It gets very little traffic and only a handful of houses; it's mostly wild forest and farmland. Little Swift Creek runs beside and through it, and there is an old beech forest (rare in eastern NC) and a lot of interesting and secret places. The road has 8 feet of shoulder on either side, then a ditch, and then on one side a strip of trees, and then a railroad. The Gods have visited me on this road. I have had ecstatic experiences while doing walking meditations. Hawks and cranes have visited me with messages. Gentian, Joe-Pye-Weed, boneset, lobelias, irises, skullcap and dozens of other wildflowers grow along the slopes of the ditch, and I have come to know them as old friends by greeting them year after year. My dogs can run wild along this road. Today the State Department of Transportation decided that a few shrubs and branches growing 12 feet from the road, and across a ditch, were too much and so they sent a big ol' tank of Murder out to poison the foliage with 2,4-d and Garlon. These are herbicides, which are surely among the most heinous spawns of human design. That special verge where flowers and shrubs and small trees grow so freely will have their cells mutated to grow uncontrollably (that's what 2,4-d does: induce plant cancer, essentially) while the Garlon comes along and kills it a different way. So this entire, wonderful little ecosystem is going to be shut down in poison that will last for up to a year. I have seen what happens when this kind of murder is imposed. Nature is wonderful in that She always recovers, but there is "scar tissue" -- She will regrow the more vigorous plants, such as poison ivy and invasive non-natives, and those will dominate while the few stands of wildflowers or native plants such as buttonbushes will disappear. It's like flesh: it'll grow back, but it'll be scar tissue, which does not have all the desirable properties of normal muscle, fascia, and skin. I called the Department of Transportation's 'Landscape' Department and asked what kind of science they had upon which they were basing their decision to do this. The nice gentleman had none, of course, although he referred me to his boss. Basically they have a mandate to kill brush back on one-third of the county's highways and secondary roads. Apparently how the roads are chosen are by request of the mowers and/or by random. I don't get the sense that the state is evaluating each road to determine how wide the shoulders are, how much brush is encroaching upon traffic safety or electrical or phone lines. What is really going on here is a mechanical and automatic pattern of department funding and spending and self-perpetuation. Having worked for state government, I know that each department or agency gets a certain amount of money each year. If you don't spend all that money, the following year you get less money. (Nope, no reward for frugality!) So there is an incentive to do work that does not need to be done and spend money that does not need to be spent. I have NO DOUBT WHATSOEVER that the mowing patterns, which cut and scrape away excessive amounts of plant material far from the highways, and these herbicide-spraying programs exist entirely to spend and therefore justify this agency's budget. I have no doubt that this department or agency, like much else in the US and the Western World - hell, the developed world -- is committing this atrocity of needless death and destruction for no good reason whatsoever. We are locked in patterns of harmful absurdity and insanity, and yet those of us who protest are considered insane. Talking to the nice man on the phone, I could tell he thought I was a kook. And according to the anthropocentric, capitalist, dominionist culture I find myself in, he's right. But I think he and most everyone else in this madhouse are insane. I won't visit my road again for months. I will not be able to bear the life-force of Spring arising and seeing the dead and dying plants unable to participate in that dance. I will not feel comfortable for my dogs to wade in Little Swift Creek and drink from the ditchwater. I'll stay home and mourn, or hook them on a lease and go parade around the asphalt of New Bern and call that "good." But I will mourn, and I will grieve, and I will cry because once again, Beauty must die, and Joy has bid adieu.