Nature ALWAYS wins in the end.
While nowhere near so dramatic, and sorry I don't have photos of it, but there is a dramatic confirmation of this at hand almost everywhere.
I live in North Western New Jersey which is still pretty wild with lots of woods. Up to 40 years decade ago there were more cows than people in Sussex County.
My house and property backs up to a huge hunt-club- fish and game reserve. I take occasional hikes in the woods. By following small game rails you will eventually come to these long, low stone mounds that run for miles through the woods. Many of them are so high you can't see over them. These are the remains of the ejecta from the fields heaved up by the ground for centuries. Each year the farmers would go out into the fields with their rough sleds (not sleighs, but low lying heavy oak structures, like pallets with heavy skids on hem. Here they would go through the fields each spring and pick up the stones and rocks that the ground heaved up and put them on the sleds, and had the horses and oxen drag it to the edge fo the field where they were piled up. (You can see the remnants of this in the"Oxen Pulls" at many state fairs). Over the years the rock piles became quite high. Those that aren't so high have been studied and many of them are six feet deep! Showing how much the soil has built up. Anyway these rock piles run for miles through the woods, skirting what were old fields (now entirely overgrown with forest not cut for over a century. Occasionally, next to the pile you will find a flat space for a few yards which is easy to walk on. Should be, it's a road long gone to seed, a road no one remembers the name of any more and is not on anymap.
Occasionally farmers would take the stone and to squeeze more space for their fields would build a stone wall along the field. One time I was walking down one of these long-forgotten roads and came to an intersection with another forgotten road. On each side were tall fieldstone walls, standing six feet high, framing the indersecton, there, in the center was an enormous White Oak, at least six feet thick (or so it seemed) and towering to the sky. A true giant of the forest, A vivid example of the power of nature.
It is a very humbling experience.Made me think of
Ents.
Occasionally something happens to vividly demonstrate to you the "Long Effect" of history. A few months ago I decided to plant a row of decorative pines in the back. I had nine of them. I began digging. An hour later I had made the first hole, which was deep enough for the bucket of earth in the tree to rest in. After I had dug through the roots of the grasses and weeds, I het a layer of hard yellow clay. This was so loaded with stones and rocks I had to use a pick, a long pinch bar, and several other tools to dig the hole. Then I found that once I separated the rocks and stones, and even with dropping the root ball into the hole I did not have enough dirt left to even fill the remaining space half way. I had to dig a SECOND hole to get enough dirt! I lay there after three hours gasping and sweating and completely done after ONE FREAKING LITTLE TREE. It was a beaufiul warm spring day so I wasn't too bad, but in a flash it all came back to me, the tremendous, agonizing, back breaking work the Swedish and German farmers who first colonized the upper Delaware Valley, did, and the days of grim work they had to do every year to bring in enough food to keep body and soul together. The care of the animals, the severity of the winter, the endless rain and cold.. And those rocks, and always the weeds, the trees, and the animals infiltrating the edges of the sown, and making the first inroads into the reclaiming by the wild.
I realized then that almost no matter what our job or trade is, we live with the ease and leisure of Oriental Pashas or Lotus eaters compared to our forefathers.
Read Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's "The Midwife's Tale: The life of Martha Ballard: Based on her diary 1795-1812" when you think you're over worked and have it bad. It's not a novel! It's a history of life on the Frontier (in the East in Massachusetts) in the colonial times. There's no fiction here.
Otto
