Enchanted Days

The world once held enchantment and I was lucky enough to live in it.

Just down the street lived a thick woods and a swamp where cattails grew tall. The swamp was long ago drained and filled, and what remains of the woods – what hasn’t been cut down and paved over – is a ghost of its former self.

As a boy I loved the woods and often spent hours exploring it. It was filled with mystery and delights waiting to be discovered. An ancient artesian well in one place (how did it come to be there?), an old, half-decayed cement structure in another place (rumored to have been a gunpowder plant during the Civil War). There were vast fields where one could find Minié balls that had been lying on the ground since the day some Civil War skirmish had put them there. I always picked them up and put them in my pocket, and I developed a small collection of Minié balls which I kept in a little cardboard box. Most of them had struck something and were deformed but they were still interesting to look at and to think about how they came to be where I found them.

There was a dairy farm that delivered milk to our house. The dairy, too, is long gone, though the subdivision that replaced it still bears its name.

There were streams of pristinely clear water that sparkled under the summer sun and crusted over with ice in winter. In the streams one could find crayfish and salamanders and tadpoles and minnows. The streams are gone now, having long ago been forced to flow through cement drainage pipes out of sight below the ground.

The solitary woods, the quiet meadows, the hidden bowers of wildflowers I knew in my youth have been bulldozed and paved. In their place stand shopping malls, convenience stores, parking lots, tattoo parlors, pizza joints, gas stations, housing subdivisions, all laced with roads and traffic jams and noise and crowds of humans casting their litter onto the land, making the already graceless landscape still trashier.

I know we’ve gained some things, but I think we’ve lost more. We have video games and sixteen screen cinemas and the World Wide Web, but we’ve lost  enchantment. It’s something no one can put a price tag on, but bit by bit, acre by acre, that is exactly what we did. We sold our enchantment to developers, who made fortunes transforming it into monotonous, uninspiring brick and asphalt. And we are poorer for it.