"It's horrifying...."

I had an experience yesterday that I can't shake.

I was driving home from Beaver Lake, which is north of Issaquah, which is east of Seattle, where I was playing for a music contest. The Issaquah area is growing faster than any other place near here, with new housing developments going in faster than people can physically move into them. California style housing developments, where lines of "homes" take up every available inch, small patches of lawn in front and back of each complex are the only thing standing for a yard. Rows and rows of track housing stretch up side hills, clear cut and leveled off months before. I'm not a big fan of that kind of development. One time while in California, I was standing on the top of a hill looking down at these developments and had the visceral feeling that they were all scabs on the land, some sort of growth covering up healthy ground underneath. It was disturbing.

As I was trying to get back to the freeway I was told "Left to I-90 West" by a sign I had never seen before, though I'd been on that road a number of times. So I turned as it told me to, thinking, "They must have built a new on-ramp." I was in a small ravine at that point, on a wide new road that soon began to rise up into a clearing. The first thing I saw was a huge parking structure, called the "Issaquah Highlands Park and Ride." It was about five levels high and stood there, a monstrous metal and concrete box surrounded by more paved parking lots. The thought passed my mind that that seemed like overkill for this area, which seemed sparsely populated at best. I was tired, the brand new 4 lane urban highway I was on should have given away what I was about to see.

I drove up the road another 100 yards, nearing its peak, and I suddenly had an unobstructed view all around me. I was top of a small hill, surrounded by machine flattened land, land that fell off behind, in front and to the right of me, and rose up through more hills to the left. This area certainly used to be all pine trees; you could see where the clear cutting had stopped at various clumps of dense trees. Farther in the distance all around were beautiful green hills and mountains, the foothills of the Cascades.

It was as stunningly beautiful place, except that is was not. Track housing had been started up the hill to the left, all the other land was green grass covered flattened lots, prepped for building, to the right some digging had already begun. A shopping center/mini mall was already built and running, and wide roads connected everything. I soon dropped down the hill in front of me, down to the freeway and back to Seattle.

I'm sure you've all seen the third Matrix installment, “Revolutions” (if you haven't you should, it's pretty entertaining, though in no way ground breaking like the first movie). There is a scene near the end where Neo and Trinity send their hover craft flying in a steep arch up through the cloud cover, up away from the black wasteland that is Earth, and they suddenly break through the violent clouds, into the bright sunshine, where they hover at the top of their arch, Trinity whispers in awe, "it's beautiful....," before they plunge back into the black. I had the same feeling yesterday, only exactly the opposite. I rose up out of beautiful countryside, up into horrifying human sprawl, into land that was once spectacularly beautiful, but was now defiled. The curve of the road was a perfect arch, man made to resemble the path of some flying projectile. I felt like I had entered some terrible fantasy land, poked my head up above the clouds, and 30 seconds later descended back down.

From my view on top of that hill in California a number of years ago I had the feeling that if I just reached down I could scrape off the human scab that was creeping up over the land, expose the earth again which would soon heal itself. I sometimes feel that we are a plague on this earth, eating it up one acre at a time, blissfully jaunting to the local mini-mall hub in our giant SUV’s, uncaring about the destruction that we wreak as we go. It’s going to come back to bite us in the ass though I fear, sooner or later, and I won’t be able to say we don’t deserve everything we get.