Remember San Diego’s fires of two years ago?
After the fires many publications and broadcast outlets said it would be possibly generations before any of the burned area grew back. But there were other voices — voices saying (in the wilderness) that Mother Nature occasionally destroys her trees and wonderful wildlife and they do come back faster than the experts often quoted had said.
Those other voices are right.
Yesterday TMV’s foster son and his two invited him on a LOOOOOOONG hike up a mountain at Mission Trails Park near Santee. TMV (who likes spagehetti) quickly accepted. And we walked along many areas that had been burned out.
These areas were no longer dark, ugly, and literally and figuratively reeking of death.
Greenery — sometimes lush grenery — has been growing in many of these areas. Out of death, into life.
We walked for hours up and down paths that had signs warning walkers not to stray into burned out areas. And there were some areas still a bit bare. But so many of them had started to grow in quickly, making fools of the experts who had said it’d be 30 or 40 years before the charred ground and hills began to return to their healthy green.
Mother Nature knows best.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.