SAVE OUR PLANET

Ken Wade 2016

Before moving to rural northern Virginia I spent my first eight years in Atlantic City, the famous resort barrier island off the south coast of New Jersey.

Atlantic City had lots to offer a small boy; The Boardwalk, Steel Pier, The Miss America Beauty Pageant, and of course, the Atlantic Ocean. But the island was treeless. Indeed, the only tree I ever saw before Virginia, was at Christmas time.

In Virginia, we were surrounded on three sides by miles of thick first growth forest. I loved the woods, and spent many happy hours running along soft black dirt paths, climbing as far as possible, up tree trunks, wading into creeks with frogs and snakes, never fearing or taking any precautions, I was at home in nature’s kingdom.

Early one morning on my way to school, I saw scores of workmen rolling into the woods on bulldozers, and dump trucks. Big men with chainsaws slung over their shoulders. That afternoon as I made my way home after school, the forest was nothing but a broken tangle of fallen trees. In less than a day, they had clear-cut my sacred woods and were already burning trees, upturned root structure’s and ground vegetation.

My eight-year-old heart was broken. That night after dinner I wondered alone into the smoldering remains trying to find some semblance of places I had been only days before. What, I wondered, had happened to the birds, rabbits, the fox and the flying squirrels?

The next morning I woke up gagging for my life, it was impossible for me to breath. My face and the entire surface of my body was covered by a red rash, my eyes were no more than two swollen slits. Growing up a block from the sea, I was never offered immunity to poison ivy. The doctor in the ER said the smoke fumes had not only completely covered my flesh from head to toe, but had entered into my eye sockets, inside my mouth, up my nose and into my lungs. It was, he said, a miracle that I woke up at all.

I believe our earth must come first and have often thought back to the evening when I stood in that smoldering dead forest. What happened back then seems slight when compared to the horrendous destruction that now threatens our planet. Only the motivation remains the same.