The More Things Change, the Less They Stay the Same

11-26-09

I haven’t been on the water in ten days, and today I hiked the southern bank near Germantown Road.  This is a place where I used to go to when I was younger.  These were the woods of my childhood, and they have changed a lot in 25 years.  The most noticeable change of course is the paved trail, the iron bridges, the parking lots, and information signs that beckon visitors into the woods.  The wild riverbank that creates the northern border of Germantown is now a tourist park.   Once my secluded refuge is now an exercise gym for joggers, bicyclist, strollers, and dog walkers.  The path is blacktop and as wide as a lane of traffic.  It mostly stays on top of the spoil bank between the river and the borrow pits.  It uses steel bridges to cross creeks and oxbow lakes barely making notice of the water features.  25 years ago, dirt paths traced the water features and only crossed at certain low spots.  Thick hedges and large trees also altered the path.  The woods seemed like a series of rooms with oxbow lakes and privet hedges making the walls with a ceiling of sycamore and oak canopies, spreading and green.  Only emerald filtered sunlight made it to the forest floor.  It took a lot longer to walk those forest trails when compared to the asphalt jogging paths where suburbanites power walk past the oxbow lake that used to create the fortress island of my youth.  The important features of the woods were now ignored and no longer impede a walkers progress.  

My turn around spot today is the history plaza.  The place that used to be the only wilderness left in the area now has a series of plazas.  The history plaza had pictures from the 1930s.  There used to be shanty towns in the river bottoms.  One pic has a for sale sign with the S facing backwards.  Another has a young girl in front of a house boat.  The description has these people in living in shacks and houseboats with fishing, odd jobs, and moonshine being the main occupations.  A quote from the paper of the time eulogizes the river people.  There seems to be a romance to these people, living on the fringe of society, a border line criminal community.