Speaker 1: Hey, thanks for being a part of the conversation. This
is Forest Stories. I am the Poet in the Forest,
a children's series that I pinned out in the nineteen nineties. Now,
none of it would be possible if it wasn't for
this forest right here in South Charlotte, North Carolina. I
talk about it so much that I thought maybe it's
time that you get to know what has inspired me
for thirty years. Thanks for being a part of the conversation.
Welcome back to the forest. The creation of the canal.
You know when man thinks it's smarter than nature, because
we have that big drop off from the front of
the forest to the back, to that slow moving stream
moving toward this beautiful lake, I thought, okay, well I'm
going to control the water. Because we get so much
runoff from everything above us. I will be in control
of how this water moves. So I created a canal,
complete with river rock, everything out there, day after day
digging trying to make it to where the water would
flow in that direction. Because you know, if you can't
just have level land when it comes to moving water,
there's got to be a motion of moving downward into
that slow moving stream. I was out there with my pick,
my shovel, everything, my gloves, even gigantic waffle stomper type shoes,
just so I could look like and feel like that
construction worker that was in control of Mother nature. I
was going to win this. Now. Why did I want
to do this? Well, because I had put in a pond.
You know, you go to Low's and Home depot, you
buy a pond, a plastic little pond. And I put
the pond in with the goldfish. And what happens after
the first rain, that rain from that hill, that ninety
five foot drop lifted that pond full of water and
dumped it and there went my goldfish. So I decided
with my waffle stoppers, it was time for me to
create the canal. I was going to be in control,
not mother Nature. So as I dug and dug into
the earth, I started realizing that what am I doing.
I'm creating a scar here, just like I did on
the other side of the forest with that other hill
that drops and that. I wanted to put in an
underground culvert to deliver the water to the slow moving stream,
but I didn't want to ruin the land on top.
But I had to ruin the land on top in
order to get that culvert in. Yeah, creating the canal,
and there it was, it was finished. It looked horrible
because the once rolling hill that was part of this
beautiful forest now had a scar like that of something
that you would create if you cut yourself, or if
you fell and you scarred yourself from a bike ride,
a motorcycle ride. All of a sudden, the land had
a scar. Was the water moving never once? Never once?
As much as I put in it into the creating
of this canal, And to make sure that the land
was not as balanced as what everybody thought it should
have been, I created the downward motion, but the water
didn't go that way. The water had a mind of
its own, and that canal. What did I do? It
took me about three years to go out there and
cover it up. But every now and then when I
take a walk through that part of the forest, I'll
stub my foot. I'm part of that river rock, the
creating of the canal. Hey, thanks for being a part
of the conversation.