Incident at Brown Bark

Just a few months ago, there was a change in the landscape here in sleepy little Brown Bark Park. For those unfamiliar with this part of Greensboro, Brown Bark is a large open field bordered by four neighborhood streets with a creek running down the middle. It is nearly a mile around and offers some of the best winter sledding in town.

I always think it's best to leave well enough alone, but construction crews set up shop and proceeded to pound, scrape and dig with every piece of heavy equipment in their arsenal. Nearly everything heavier than 5 tons and painted yellow came traipsing across our quiet little field to attack the creek. Their ultimate goal, I found out, was to fashion a new, more natural sort of waterway.

I was told by an officious acquaintance that the whole boondoggle was actually a wetland mitigation and restoration project. Sounds expensive, doesn't it? I learned that the project was designed to improve our water supply. As a good citizen, how can you argue with that?

The path of this creek, as natural as it appeared to my uneducated eye, was formed by the results of careless construction practices in past decades. Streams were molested and bullied by coldhearted developers until they no longer travelled a natural course. This creek was meant to meander through the landscape, twisting and turning and filtering our water along the way. Ideally, the sand, rocks and plants all do the job of removing harmful debris and chemicals from the water.

That all sounds great, but in the final analysis, I think it’s nothing more than one of those deals where the federal government won’t give the states any money to combat same-sex marriages unless they fix their streams. So the states strong-arm the municipalities and we get what everyone in the world is hoping for; restored and mitigated creeks.

When four months of dust finally settled there was an amiable little creek with some added boulders, twists and turns; it was really quite nice. Once the equipment cleared out, some type of mesh and seed material was laid out all along the banks of the creek. After a few weeks we had a tall stand of wildflowers and grass, all part of the restoration project and that all-important filtration process.

And so the story of tax money spent on a questionable venture has a happy ending. The creek looks a little nicer and now we have some pretty yellow flowers. But this isn’t Hollywood or even one of those popular “reality” series; Municipal Park Make-over with your host, Ty Pennington. No, things don’t always work out so well here in the real world.

Doing my best to stave off inevitable obesity, I sometimes walk my dog along the well-lit sidewalks surrounding the park. This puts me in close proximity to the results of the stream restoration. You see, in some places, the tall yellow flowers and grass grow just a few feet from the edge of the sidewalk. Maybe, as my therapist likes to point out, I’m a little paranoid, but sometimes I picture wild animals laying in wait for a night when I might be a little overtired and unable to fend off a sneak attack.

One evening, I’m walking my dog along a particular stretch near the overgrown flora and I notice two young possums emerge from the jungle and then cross the road. My dog came upon them suddenly and they scurried under a small bush next to someone’s mailbox. Well, I have to say, possums are hateful and fearsome creatures with very sharp teeth, but, just like nearly every other animal on God’s green Earth, they still manage to have cute young’uns.

I was lost in this thought when I suddenly found myself face down on the sidewalk. Now, I’m not graceful by any measure, but neither am I notoriously clumsy. It seems I tripped over what turned out to be the mother possum running out from the cover of the grass. She was, understandably, concerned about her offspring wandering away and was chasing behind, as mothers will do.

Of course, I didn’t figure all this out right away. I was dazed and concerned about the gathering pool of blood on the sidewalk. No, it took me a minute to piece this one together. Shortly after coming to the conclusion that sidewalks are not very forgiving, I noticed that my dog was in an agitated state. So, too, was a rather upset mother possum.

As I was lying on the ground inches from the ensuing melee and considering my strategic vantage point, I had one of those rare moments of clarity. Staring at the overgrown vegetation, I thought, “wouldn’t it have been cheaper to just add another filtration device to the water treatment plant?”

It’s been a few days since my ordeal and I’m getting used to the idea of a restored and mitigated stream in Brown Bark Park. The doctor says he may have to take my leg, but I only have four more rounds of rabies shots. Quite a few folks have visited me here in the hospital; everyone offering their condolences on my circumstances and, of course, the dog. Some of my more considerate friends bring in tall yellow flowers to brighten my mood.


David Theall is now limited to cruising the sidewalks of Brown Bark Park in his Rascal motorized mobility chair.


© 2005 David Theall