Watch that first step

Land 'o Goshen! I saw two prancing deer skitter across the road today on my way to work. This is unusual because they were running through a particularly urban part of town. This is in the Medical Center, where hospital buildings abound and natural wooded areas are scarce. It was like they escaped from a zoo truck or something, because their normal habitat shouldn't involve running across six lanes of traffic and through a CVS parking lot. Poor little guys/gals; I hope they made it home safely, wherever that might be.

I read an article about a pristine natural area just outside of town called Government Canyon. It's a state park and is actually pretty wonderful. It even has areas with hanging moss, precarious ledges and crazy contraptions. The article's author inserted a snarky comment about the prosaic name of the state park and the descriptive natural names of the housing developments on the way out there, fast encroaching - places such as Deer Creek, Deer Trail, Deer Ridge, Pine Trail, Sparrow Field, Eagle Crest, etc. The point of his comment was that the housing developments' names describe the (desired) natural place that they evicted to build tract housing. (Making them two stories with a generous back yard doesn't make them any less of a stamp.) But hey, people have got to live somewhere, right? However, it is silly to think that you are moving out to the country if you are living in a walled and gated community with three hundred other families up to their eyeballs in consumer debt.


I can't judge, however, because I'm sure that every generation that stretches its borders through history faced opposition from people who were very comfortable in the middle of town. It's not that they are moving out there, but that we aren't doing much to compensate for the loss of what once was. In the meantime, though, we should support our state and national parks.

One thing that I have learned from being a librarian is that people don't care about things that are free. They really don't. The other day I was giving out raffle tickets to people on campus to celebrate National Library Week. It was difficult getting people to understand that we were giving away an iPod, for free, no strings attached, all just to draw attention to the library, an embedded resource to campus. One girl in a group acted like she didn't speak English, because she wasn't responding to my offer even though she was looking right at me. One of her friends took her by the arm and cautiously guided her away from me like I was a pervert or something. Well, they didn't win the raffle, needless to say. The same thing goes for parks. They are mostly free, but sometimes charge a minor fee to recoup costs of patrolling and maintenance. If they added some dinosaurs and charged fifty bucks a pop, then I bet people would come and support them by the thousands; but as it is, there usually aren't too many cars in the parking lot.

The lack of company in a park is actually nice, because then they won't distract you from all of those leaves. However, they need attendance to justify their existence. If people keep building houses around them and no one goes, then the houses will take over and twenty years from now everyone will wonder, How come we don't have any parks? Where can we go outside and walk and play? My guess is that we'll have invented a virtual park game for Nintendo Wii and Playstation XII which will totally kick ass and no one will care.