A Community Impact Statement

I live in a modest old family cabin that we have been lovingly, and painstakingly fixing up ever since about three years ago when my wife and I decided to move here permanently. It perches on the top of a craggy end of one of the steep mountainous forested ridges overlooking the San Lorenzo Valley in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California. For more than a decade it sat virtually empty of human life, after those who had been visiting it most, my father and mother, began to go through the illnesses and physical decline of advancing age. In and out of hospitals, their lives were just too fragile to allow slipping away to their pastoral retreat.

Meanwhile, I had been working at a psychiatric hospital across the bay from San Francisco, unknowingly preparing to meet my wife, and rounding out what had been about twenty years in the helping profession. There was a period of a year or a little longer when I would take a few days off from work, and come down to the cabin on my own where I could 'hole up,' and uninterrupted, keep myself focused on the painstaking research and writing of what was to become my doctoral thesis. All this, of course seems secondary to what I really want to explain, but it is important, because there was a huge shift going on for which I was primarily responsible, but about which I was almost completely unaware.

I would enter another 'community': a whole bustling world of beings with lives somewhat stabilized through the years of the cabin's disuse. But I didn't really know this. From my human standpoint, arriving after a long drive in the late evening after leaving work, I would see this dark, silent, cold cabin, looming up before me as I climbed to where it stayed. Whether it was raining, misting, or just plain cold, I would hurriedly pull out the key and work my way through the blackness with my little flashlight to the breaker box. Flipping the switches, life seemed to flow back into the building. Lights turned on, I could see my breath in the cold, and I opened the door to the living room that and rested on my haunches before the pellet stove. Grab a handful of pellets, put them in the cradle, pull out the starter gel, squirt a dab across the top of the pellets, find a match, strike it and lay it on the gel... It was a familiar pattern. As I would warm myself next to the strengthening flames, I was pretty much ignorant of the many plants and animals who were and would have their lives drastically changed by my decision to spend time here. I was going to impact a community that I didn't even know existed. From my perspective, things began to brighten up, and lovely heat began to permeate the cold. The cabin, having stood silent and still, seemingly forgotten up here on this hogback ridge, now seemed to be coming back to life.

At first, I had not been aware that my parents had not been visiting the cabin. They seemed to have been doing it regularly, every couple of weeks it seemed, though I could have been wrong. I didn't really know when they started not coming to the cabin. When this came to my attention, it had already been several years. Under the jurisdiction of nature, the cabin - and the surrounding landscape - were practically free from human intervention.

When I became aware of the cabin's emptiness and first started visiting regularly, I was met with many wonders, usually not encountered. There were the large mice or small rats (I never knew exactly which) that would run up and down the trunks of the smaller trees, scampering busily going this way and that. There was the large cat - I never knew whether it was a bobcat or a mountain lion - who had been sleeping on the porch when I made my way up the stairs towards the front door. All I saw was something large and in the dark, a sliver of gray beneath the moon, as broad, softly padded paws leapt past me and over the rail to disappear heavily but gracefully, into the woods beyond.

That is also when there was a family of very old, spindly oaks along the west side, just beyond the kitchen window. Alas, knowing they were preparing to topple with age, I reluctantly agreed to let them be cut down this last year, a matter that I have mourned ever since. They were part of the community before I got here.
I don't see the large mice or small rats (I still don't know) any more. There has been no more scurrying up and down the smaller trees. My guess is probably not a very astute one, a 'no-brainer' that the three cats we brought with us have chased down a fair share, and that the rest have wisely withdrawn. I haven't seen the bobcat or mountain lion, though I hear that the latter still pad through these hills and are occasionally spotted. And the oak trees? My goodness: it took them longer than I've been alive to grow anywhere near as tall as they were when they fell. They are either gone, taken by the woodsmen who cut them, or are haphazardly laying in small piles nearby, with the fungi busy at work helping them to return to the soil.

There was a large band of some kind of winged things living behind the light on the bathroom wall over the sink. I can recall one day they started spewing out of a tiny hole up there, seemingly by the hundreds, until I plugged it up. Also, when we first moved here, my wife opened an old chest to discover to her horror, a vast nest of little six-legged crawling things, and quickly the vacuum cleaner came out and they were whisked away. Also, I remember there used to be spiders: huge spiders, and a lot of them, who would find their way in through the many gaps in the siding and walls. Quietly, they would tiptoe across the ceiling, or work their way amidst the curtains to give me a start. So I sprayed beneath the floors from the access below, filled in the cracks, and laid a new membrane across the kitchen roof. Now the spiders don't seem to find their way in as often. I wonder if the cats chase them if they do.

But what has shown up are more banana slugs. I started watering along the front of the building, putting in a few new plants, nestling a few new bulbs between the rocks in some dirt, and the combination is proving just too delectable to resist. Now I find banana slugs, often in pairs, gliding by, which I counter by lobbing them into the ivy a short distance away.

The deer seem to be not coming around any more or less frequently then if I was not here, but then, how would I know. I do know that I have been watering the ivy, that it has been growing, and that the deer come by and then eat it. They wouldn't be eating it if I was not here watering, as it would probably not be here in as lush and tempting a fashion as well. So: are there more deer or less deer? I would bet it is an even draw. Our dog - yes we have a dog who is part of the new community as well - doesn't chase the deer. He just watches them, with more or less interest, as they gently step along, foraging as they go.

When the oaks came out, and a couple of old firs who were threatening to fall as well, a lot of light came in. With it, came scores of little grasshoppers, who now leap around the hillside, something the cats just love, who leap into the air fruitlessly after them, just hoping they might catch one. Also came the Scotch Broom, that threatened to take over the hillside until I went out and kept it at bay. I must have pulled up an easy hundred of upstarts ranging from 8 inches to about 4 feet tall. There were three scraggly adolescent redwoods that never seemed to get any higher than about 6 or 8 feet beneath the darkness of the fir and oaks that once towered above them. However, with these gone, these little redwoods are just beaming with discovery, and developing so fast you can almost see them grow. There are vast numbers of little bushes and clumps of softer-tissue plants that are also taking advantage of this ability to see the sun. They are starting to fill out the hillside, even clumping with almost a grin on top of the oak stumps.

And I think to myself, what a surprise. When I moved here, how many beings did I displace in my human-centered near-sightedness? Though my focus was on restoring this cabin and this land, from my human-centered perspective, I overlooked so much. There was life already here: the bobcat (or cougar), the bugs in the wall and in the chest, the spiders on the ceiling, the rats (or mice) dancing in the trees, and the old, towering but spindly oaks who were spending their last remaining years enjoying the Santa Cruz mountain rain, mist, and sun.

My coming to re-inhabit this old cabin, and bringing with me my wife, our dog and our three cats, has destabilized an entire community filled with different species who had found its way to a reliable way of relating. I probably don't know even one percent of the effect of our presence on the many plants, animals and insects who would be living here differently, if we - my wife, myself, our dog and three cats - were not. It is not so much that I feel it is wrong that we are here, quite to the contrary. I love this land, and in my heart of hearts, I want to steward this wonderful little corner of our planet, and help it thrive. However, I am somewhat uncomfortably aware that just my presence has already affected it in a huge way, and not all of it has been happy.

I am now walking with an increased sense of responsibility. OK, you might say that my impact on our little cabin and hill is a small thing when compared with our overall impact on the Earth, but it is hardly small to the many beings who try to live here. Even trying to do things well and right, we sometimes err.

It's a big learning curve we're on, and we are all on it together.