I shifted into a sitting position around 4:30 A. M., turned on a light, and thought about going for a walk. Almost every day, I'd take one through Valley Forest Estates, passing houses in various stages of completion. Many were done and landscaped, like ours; others looked nearly finished but lacked lawns and exterior details like light fixtures. Sheets of drywall lay stacked out in front of several others. There were the skeletal homes, nothing but wood frames that allowed you to see through the entire structure, and finally, at the furthest reaches of the development, there were huge holes in the ground, some with concrete basement floors poured. Beyond that, fields, and a pathway that led down to the banks of Willow Creek, home, evidently, of the soon-to-be-extinct Mississauga salamander.
It was, I decided, too dark for a walk. And besides, it was better to save it for when I most needed it: that time of the day when I'd be staring at the computer screen, unable to write another line of dialogue or describe the workings of an alien monster's digestive system. Walks were the best way to work out plot points.
These walks, to some degree, had gotten me interested in the community, at least to the point of reading what was going on in it. There's a tendency among us suburbanites, especially those of us who have moved from downtown but still have strong ties there, like Sarah with her job, to not give a rat's ass about what's going on in our own backyard. The suburbs are just the place where you live, but the city is where everything happens. So you read about what the downtown mayor is up to, even though he's no longer your mayor, or the police chief, even though he's no longer your police chief, because city politics and city crime are always going to be more interesting than suburban politics and suburban crime. First of all, there's more of it. And it tends to be a lot sexier. No matter where you live, you probably know the name of the mayor of New York City. But who's the mayor of White Plains? Who presides over the council of Darien, Connecticut? And who cares?
Three times a week, a local paper - called, appropriately, The Suburban - would land at our doorstep, free of charge. It was nearly as heavy as the sport utility vehicle that shared its name, thick like a weekend paper. But there was no magazine, no book section, no Week in Review. The Suburban rarely got above twenty pages, but it was stuffed with enough flyers to wrap an entire English village's fish-and-chips orders for a month. The news stories most likely to get in were also those most likely to attract ads, so the opening of a new restaurant or hardware store always rated a few inches of copy. The Suburban's editorials were of the "on the one hand this, on the other hand that" variety, and went to great pains to offend no one.
The only thing consistently worth reading was the letters page. There'd be someone ranting about high taxes, maybe a letter from a local politician defending himself against a taxpayer rant in the last issue, someone else complaining that the whole world was going to hell and someone ought to do something about it.
So, having decided against an early morning walk in the dark, I grabbed some unread Suburbans that had been stashed on the lower shelf of the coffee table, and leafed through them. I spotted a familiar name on the letters page. There was a submission from one Samuel Spender, who identified himself as president of the Willow Creek Preservation Society.
When will this council, and in particular the members of the Land Use Committee, recognize the importance of the Willow Creek Marshlands, and prevent the destabilization of this environmentally sensitive ecosystem? Development has already been allowed to encroach too closely upon this area, but there is still a chance for the council to do the right thing and stop the approval of the final phase of the Valley Forest Estates development. This phase, if allowed to proceed, will put another hundred homes within a pop can's throw of the marshlands, threatening the homes, and the very survival, of a wide variety of species, both land-based and aquatic.