distressedThey're hacking at a stand of several huge cedars right now, one of which is at least 100 years old, the rest pushing 70 or 80.
I'm told that replanting, post-building, is "required". BFD, if I may be blunt. A brace of saplings instead of canopy trees, and a McPalace parked where the big trees used to be. In thirty years, I am told, this will again be a "nicely wooded area". FIrst, it won't, because even 30-year-old trees don't look like the ones they're cutting down right now - and they are talking about 30 years as though they will pass in the blink of an eye. Tomorrow... next week... in thirty years. In thirty years I will be seventy three years old. In thirty years the guy directing the slaughter right now might be dead.
I hate them. I hate chainsaws. I have half a mind to go and stand for the neighborhood association board and court ulcers and migraines - just so that I could sit there and vote NO NO NO NO NO NO every time a new house is mooted which destroys more of our woods.
UPDATE
We ran away from home.
rdeck was upstairs, with the window tightly shut, and I was downstairs but we could still both hear the whine of the saws and the thuds of the dying trees as they hacked chunks off them. We have a phone that doubles as intercom - I picked it up, he answered, and I said, "Do you want to go out?" He said, "There's stuff I have to..." There was a particularly heavy THUD I could hear right through the phone. "Let's go out," he said. We were out of the house, trying not to look at the lot across the street, in less than ten minutes. "Let's make a day of it," he said, a little desperately. "They'll be finished by six."So we went out, and bought a cheap laptop to replace the one I gave my Dad - the one on which I was teaching him the Internet, and which died a hard death about a week ago - and took it over to him, and then decided to go out and have dinner at our favourite restaurant, and then... then we went home.
The hundred-year-old cedar is a pathetic stump. I burst into tears.
At least I didn't have to watch it die.
