With the most recent attention from the news media regarding the global warming I was inspired to contact author, D. Grant Haynes for commentary. His website address is below the story which I recommend that readers give some considerable thought. - Laurie Foston
Childhood isn't what it used to be...Snakes, frogs and small mammals were a part of the childhood of any American boy living in a rural or suburban setting 50 years ago. Now, however, man's greed and avarice have seen the destruction of so many habitats that these interesting and harmless creatures have all but disappeared in many locales.
When I was a child in Georgia in the middle of the 20th Century, snakes, frogs, lizards and small wild mammals were a part of my experience every languid summer day. They were everywhere. They were my companions--a part of the comfortable and comforting world I considered to be my home.
Though I approached snakes with caution, knowing, as every boy did, that two poisonous varieties--diamondback rattlesnakes and elusive little coral snakes--were indigenous, I seldom saw more than a king snake, a black racer, or a small green "grass snake" as they were called colloquially. I respected them. They respected me. We coexisted in peace. I would never have considered getting a hoe out and killing one merely because it was a snake--the epitome of evil in the minds of the ignorant and the tradition bound of my Bible Belt world.
Toads graced every suburban lawn to such an extent that lawn mowing without killing one was difficult. I always attempted to anticipate them and was heartbroken the few times I filleted an innocent toad with the whirling blade of my latter day human machine of noise and fumes--a veritable wreaker of mayhem in their microcosmic lawn universe. (I no longer believe in lawns and should I ever be fortunate enough to have a home of my own, the setting will remain entirely natural with no lawn mower on the premises.)
A nocturnal drive down any two-laned suburban or rural roadway during those idyllic days of my youth inevitably yielded glimpses of cottontail rabbits, "possums" , striped skunks, and even an occasional gray fox, should one be especially fortunate.
Yes, even then some were seen only as smears of "road kill", the butt of many crude and offensive jokes in the years since. But festering road kill at least gave one a sense of the continuity of the natural world--that man and his machines were not alone--that immediately beyond the headlight beam lay another coexisting universe that had remained the same for millions of years.
Not so any longer.
In my youthful naivete I could not foresee that I was witness to the end of an era--that the two-lane roadway already claiming victims nightly presaged an ominous downturn of fortunes for the natural world.
Two lanes would soon become four lanes and then six lanes and half a century later mankind's greed, brutality and indifference to his fellow travelers would see the harmless creatures with which I had coexisted in my Georgia childhood disappearing at an alarming rate throughout North America and the world.
Now an economic prisoner doing time in industrialized Northwest Arkansas, I never see a wild animal, dead or alive, other than an occasional hapless possum that has dared to venture across a roadway into the path of an onrushing $50,000 SUV, the GPS (Global Positioning System) of which probably does not take into account humble pregnant possums.
I have not seen a snake or a toad since coming to Arkansas five years ago. This is not to suggest that they do not exist here still, but it is to say that they are probably much less plentiful and common than they were 50 years ago here, as in Georgia and throughout an ever-more-industrialized North America.
Oh, there are sense impressions aplenty available in Northwest Arkansas still, however.
I smell the acrid mercury-laden smoke of a coal fired steam plant to my immediate west.
I smell the scalded flesh of tens of thousands of chickens that are "processed" daily around here.
I smell the stench of feed lots and of hog farms and of industrial incinerators.
I smell pesticides and herbicides that are spread where I live, lest an errant weed or cricket dare venture onto the manicured lawn.
I smell diesel fumes and hear the roar and whine of a thousand 18 wheelers that pass within a quarter mile of my apartment daily.
But I see none of the harmless reptiles and small mammals that were my friends and compatriots on those blue sky summer days of a 1950s Georgia world before a pall of pollution and vile man-made vapors killed the blue of the summer sky and the joy of being a child in America.
D. Grant Haynes
The author of this article may be contacted by going to the link at cswnet.com. or writing to LaurieFoston@aol.com. All comments will be forwarded. More articles written by D. Grant Haynes can be read at the link below.
The opinions and views expressed in the article above are in agreement with those of the author of this blog. Laurie Foston, editor of Authors' Crossroad, a think tank for authors.
