“Busy as a beaver!” I chirp to my grandchildren, Lucas and Sofia.
They indulge us grandparents when we show them the fresh shavings of a sawed-off tree on the shores of Lake Lehigh.
And then the search begins. This time, on the other side of the trail where underground streams emerge, and trees of all sizes are being felled by an industrious lot.
We clamor over rocks and logs to inspect what looks like the making of a beaver dam and speculate where they live, what they eat, and how on earth could they manhandle trees that reach so high into the sky.
Brian and I tell them the sad tale of our newly planted aspen and willow trees, our voices dropping low as we depict the beavers as villainous creatures who snapped their trunks as easily as toothpicks.
The last straw was a mighty cottonwood. Now, we encircle every sapling with wire.
But I have a feeling it’s fruitless.
After Thursday’s trek, I’ve boned up on beavers. Their iron-sharp teeth — truly, the tooth enamel of their incisors contains iron — grow continuously, and it’s by cutting down trees that they keep their teeth from growing too long as well as providing them food and shelter.
But they’re also valuable preservationists, unknowingly thinning overgrown tree stands and creating dams that help prevent eroding stream banks by slowing down fast-moving currents.
Sofia takes a stick and swirls it in the frigid water. Lucas stuffs his pockets with the wood shavings, still soft from the morning’s labor. We’re silenced as we watch a noisy flock of geese skim the water’s surface and fly off into the distance, postulating that they’re heading to a nearby field to forage for dinner.
I marvel that how as a kid this land was off-limits, and how after the Lehigh-Portland Cement plant shuttered its operation in 1970 it became wilder, so overgrown with vines that it took machetes to cut your way through.
Thursday evening, I read how the Trump administration is stopping all efforts to control pollution-emitting industries, saying their effects on the climate and our health are unsubstantiated.
“We are officially terminating the so-called ‘endangerment finding,’” of climate change, the president said.
Before federal environmental controls were enacted on our local cement plant, my mother had us “wash” our windows with muriatic acid and razor blades, the cement dust was so thick.
That was the air we breathed, of course, and which contributed to creating the “hotter” climate that today is wreaking havoc on our environment.
Lee Zeldin, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency called the decision “the single largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States.”
As I get older, I feel time slipping away, not necessarily for me but for future generations if we allow our leaders to turn back the clock on efforts to protect the planet from manmade pollutants.
