This is where I grew up.

The artless fools who took the photos and wrote the ad of course know nothing about the beauty of this place. It is an untouched corner of our country, the same place the indians knew. Every moment of my childhood which I remember was spent in these trees, bridging the streams and building cathedrals from logs and stones; sitting on the great boulder, big around as I was tall, which rests resplendent in the pine-filtered light, left there by the Wisconsin glaciation. That other stone, the great sheared surface hidden in the tall grass. The one where my sister and I would sit and play when it was warm with sunlight in the summer months, and the tiny little jumping crickets, the color of grass seed, filled the first few feet of air like dust motes. Fishing, with my father, when after several hours our dog would swim to the middle of the lake to join us for awhile, before swimming off again to the far shore to stalk birds or rabbits or do whatever it is that dogs do when left to their own devices. Maybe he just sat at the top of the ridge and listened to the wind in the quaking aspen, like me. I passed hours walking the well-learned trails through those trees, most of which were forged by the deer and the foxes, probably the same trails they walked since the lay of the land last changed; probably the same trails they've walked since that great stone was laid. I walked those trails, hunting for mushrooms, and for burial mounds, and I understood what it would be to die there. Sometimes, a holler would call me back. Sometimes it wouldn't.

And now it's on the market for a cool million, someone who doesn't know the half of it struggling for words and giving into defeat with "YA JUST GOTTA BE THERE." You do, I suppose, but I hope you won't — I hope it languishes in these Difficult Economic Times, and is overgrown to the extent further possible, and forgotten by time once again. Then I will return, and it will be mine and mine only, once again, like it was back then when I was naive enough to not know all the ways in which it wasn't. My cynicism drives me, it is true, but I cannot escape this conviction that something awful will happen to this place, like happens to all the other places; some keen businessman will write that cool million in his ledger and in three summers there will be groves of vinyl siding sprouting from the soil, forty feet apart exactly, and they will sit there for a few more summers, losing fifty percent of the little value they had to start with. Then some desperate souls will file in, as this sad modern affair with which we debase the term urbanism encroaches a little further, and these people who had been living something they understood need to move a little further away. The place they knew will be paved over with a new version, which comes with all the usual promises but is so deficient in all the ways not easily marketed, and so as the dependence of these souls on this new promise is cemented, their hearts will fill, more rapidly every day, with the desire for escape.

So they move out to my eden, but they bring all those awful things they are running from with them, because they don't know better. And thus their fumbling hands crush the beautiful as they try to embrace it. I don't expect these refugees to damage beyond repair, because I know their intent is not malice, though they depend on so many who rejected their responsibility for good or bad long ago. I expect them to despoil, in their naive way, in a way not unlike the naivety with which I soaked this landscape into my bones. And then it will be finished, it's fate sealed when those new addresses are amended to the books, the ever-advancing Frontier advanced a few Standard City Blocks further, and regardless of what value is impregnated in it, if any, a wild place will never be wild again. I want to scream and throw fire, at these innocent hoards advancing down the line, advancing twenty or fifty years hence, advancing with greater speed and the same inevitability as the glaciations. I want to write letters to them, I want to listen to their stories and explain all the holes they contain, and explain how trespassing on my lost birthright will not fill them. And yet also I want them to inherit that splendor, which I tended to once and so long ago, and to know it like I knew. I want them to know, in that innocent way which you are certain is right, because you felt it even before you learned the rules of right and wrong. But they are human, they are old, they are defeated and resigned in countless ways. They are ignorant and beautiful, and this place is good enough for them, but they are not convinced, and never will be. They will be happy with the shreds which remain; not happy, exactly, but close enough. A forgotten memory will tell them, sometimes, when alone or troubled, driving in the car, that the feeling of wholeness sometimes accompanying the act of love used to be, could be, all around.They will feel that lack of completion, the missing something, undefinable. But that definition will elude them, because so few are bothering to define it, and so they will try to be good; they will try to respect what meant so much to me. But they will be incapable.