Wassail, traveler, and welcome to The Gable Grey -- a place of retreat, of renewal, and of resistance: a tree-shaded refuge in Dark Times. Now pass the threshold, and rest from journeys! For a cold wind is blowing; and here, if you wish, you may hear tidings of the world without...

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Orc-work

I caught four surveyors out along our property line last Friday.  They were not particularly friendly.  When I asked them what they were doing, they only replied that they were performing an "easement" for the Headrick Sign Company.  The result of their efforts is a corridor hacked through my neighbor's bamboo mini-forest and some neon-pink ribbon and paint along my back border.  Adding to my worries is new-found knowledge that the empty house behind ours is a foreclosure, making the eastern edge of our Angle -- the little strip of land "Across the Water" (our creek) -- vulnerable to forays of this kind.

Surveyors are never a good sign.  Their associated chain of events goes like this:  first, the survey; then, some kind of "legal" notification to the target, which means that the latter must inevitably get the hell out; then chainsaws remove the large old trees; then bulldozers push off any remaining brush, structures, and topsoil, leaving a gaping hole in the earth; the hole is filled by truckload after truckload of a sterile medium, usually red clay; sewer and gas lines are installed; the area is covered in concrete; and finally, the intended structure rears its head, the result of all this so-called economic "growth." 

It is not Growth.  It is Death. 

I fear the Shadow grows on my borders.

Wassail. -- C.

4 comments:

  1. I think that bastard Headlick is the devil. Makes sense; he spends all his resources getting out the "word" and gaining peoples trust. And then, just look at the guy. Those piercing blue eyes; there is no kindness in them. Not that I have ever seen. Evil incarnate. I have spoke my piece.

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  2. "Headlick." Funny! Yeah, he wants us to look up at his signs while whacking us on the head with his big Bible. I count him one of the Enemies.

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  3. You should join me up here in West Emnet; Gondor is much too close to Mordor. I'll take my chances with Isengard.

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  4. Aye, I'd rather deal with errant Dunlendings than these maggot-folk of Mordor any day... just mind what trees you take your axe to. :)

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Whiles carried o'er the iron road,
We hurry by some fair abode;
The garden bright amidst the hay,
The yellow wain upon the way,
The dining men, the wind that sweeps
Light locks from off the sun-sweet heaps --
The gable grey, the hoary roof,
Here now -- and now so far aloof.
How sorely then we long to stay
And midst its sweetness wear the day,
And 'neath its changing shadows sit,
And feel ourselves a part of it.
Such rest, such stay, I strove to win
With these same leaves that lie herein.

-- William Morris, from
"The Roots of the Mountains"