I don't even know where I am. I just

Saw this place, broad trees and a bit of grass

Pulled the cord.

So I could sit somweplace outside

Now, while the sunlight still holds

Pink and hazy

 It is house number ten that is being built closest to my house. My mother and I walk down the path, past the apple trees and the blueberries. Sword ferns and bracken fight for light among the ever-higher riot of salal. It’s almost a tunnel; we clip back the bushes, but their vibrance is indomitable. The only way to keep our trails is to run them, walk them, chip them, clip the bushes back– but we do. This is home; we make a thread for ourselves through the hundred-foot trees.

Fall is beginning, and mushrooms spring up along the path. Outrageous and ephemeral, gray caps fan over implausibly skinny stalks. Orange twig-like fungi stick up through path-side moss.

We wind back past the swamp, out towards the development.

The edge of our property is abrupt. The woods stop in a straight line: six inches of bare dirt, then pavement– new and clean, an unlined cul-de-sac.

We step out. I’m almost used to it; it’s been cleared for twelve years, paved for two or three now. But the foundation just across the street is new. We pause at the signpost: For Sale, and an artist’s render of the house.

So far, it’s a pit, basement walls clean lines of cement, but it’s growing fast. The builders, cheery, wave us over. “Míren, come and look!”

It feels good to make progress. It still feels like summer– daylight long, no rain. With conditions like that, you can just keep working, keep building 

They have been there since seven in the morning, and since the day has been warm, no rain, twilight lasting, they're here yet. It feels good to make progress. Twenty-five days and they'll have finished their part. Two and a half months until it's move-in ready.

We walk the roads back here like we always did.

When I was ten, this land was logging roads grown over. A couple of wrecked cars still rest beside the mossy path. They're objects of mystery: how did this get there? They could never fit now between the trees. But the huge old stumps are giveaways: this land is held not sacred.

There's something important about a big space like these woods. It's a place you can go to be alone and have nobody hear you: to scream and rage, to hiccup sob, to walk serene and uninterruptible. I used to come back here to sing loud, to silent cry, to meet my high school lover in a space that could be ours.

We come hold acts of quiet claiming. Down at the reservoir pond, we snap off twigs of the planted rosemary to bring home. We let ourselves into the half-built houses before they yet have knobs on the doors and tramp around: this must be the master suite; this, the bathroom with its twigs of plastic pipe inset into the floor.

We rummage in the dumpsters, one at the curb of each rising mansion, full of offcut rubble. These tiles, they could be a tabletop. We'll take them home.

Have you ever been alone in a big, dark woods? When I come back after days away, it is the quiet that's most striking. I'm alone tonight, in front of the wood fire, and there's nothing but the creak of the iron expanding, the crack of resin popping through the fibers of wood.

The light, too. On nights when the moon is full, it shines through the skylights of my room onto the pillow beside my face. I stare, sleepy but not wanting to question the wholeness of the sight. But other nights, it's dark– full dark, in the house in the woods in the valley. In a city, you have to put up blinds, close the windows if you need darkness to sleep. But my room here is all windows. There are blinds in my first-floor room, but I leave them open, crack the window to breathe night air. If rain is coming, frogs sound it out in a chorus through all the bushes and trees.

They were testing the soil for the site, back when I was in middle school. They dug these perfect graves by the back of our property, rectangles six feet deep– it must have been proscribed by the site geologist. Morbid children that we were, we'd lead our friends out towards the back line, flashlights in hand.

I'd run ahead, never more fleet than in my bare feet on the soft wood chips. Cool air streams back your hair, brushes the round apples of smiling cheeks. Good mischief is a little scary– my night vision is sharp. I'd disappear around the bend, find one of the graves, climb in, lay down. Wait for the giggles and shrieks of the other kids, the kids more used to streetlights, trusting strength in numbers if not in my older brother to lead them true.

Close enough, and I, down in the soil sample pit, start quiet:

"As I passed Saint James Infirmary..."– a ghosting blues song from the bottom of a grave, rising into the still of night, making something to be afraid of, because the dark woods themselves– they're all right. They're home, and harmless enough.

My cats disappeared this summer. There were two, just a year old, and they died within a month of each other. These clever, brilliant just-more-than-kittens were eaten, we suppose, by the coyotes that roam here.

We've seen bobcats on the back trail, coyotes on the driveway. Our neighbor's chickens get stolen. From the other way, sometimes we hear gunshots in the night.

Our cats are clever. They're athletic, hunters. They have a place to hide inside our house. Cats have been the normal state of things in my home. We've had them all my life: happy creatures appearing out of high-bushed salal and chasing bees. There's Denali crouching wild-eyed over a squirrel. There's Rainier, proudly carrying a shrew into the center of a crowd. There's Marshmallow, lazily licking up a line of ants as they march by.

This fall, the cats are gone. They live fifteen years, usually, out here, not always as old as indoor cats might get, but full and happy lives rolling on the wood chips, emerging from under the porch all covered in spiderwebs. It took only a year, this time, and the cats are gone.

We know that when the woods are taken down, the wild creatures find someplace else to be. They flee noise, cease to distinguish between their once-homes and the places people are. It's all striped with pavement, and now the place I live is the wildest place around. The big woods are gone, and all the animals are here. So it's no wonder the coyotes came and ate the cats now, with the big houses going up in the woods that used to home them.

I work in climate change. As my job, I watch the way the government handles environmental data. In my free time, I read about the systems of change: the clearing of overburden from the Alberta tar sands. Deforestation in the Amazon, in Borneo, the way that people in a place let the tangible but un-enumerable wealth of the woods be stripped away into columns of profit. Everybody's got to eat. Individuals watch their own gain first. Can we stop this? I wonder, I hope. What would I need to do to save that faraway growth of lovely trees? Can I start this business, support that charity?

But trees are taken everywhere. It's this specific woods I want to save, but I am powerless to stop it. How can I save the world when I cannot even save my home?

Light comes into the swamp which used to be a seasonal lake where ducks could land. Our neighbor cut the tall trees which once were shade, so now the swamp is full with leaves and big green bushes that were never there before.

The developer bought this land more than a decade ago. "Quinn's Crossing," they called it, and they put in the Street of Dreams– young architects' excesses, high-columned three-story things featuring front-entrance waterfalls. I was in seventh grade.

We walk that land every day, but we don't own it.

Squatter's rights only hold if you leave a permanent trace on the land: some built-in failing of our system to recognize that you can love a place without scarring it, that you can need it without building upon it, that needing a place and relying upon it for years can serve a purpose beyond economic value.

In The Monkey Wrench Gang, a misfit crew of strangers fights the flow of progress, blowing up logging equipment in national forests: "National? That's publicly owned, and I want you off my land."

A group of activists, citizens and scientists, held a valve-turning. They planned it well ahead with the idea that the extremity and urgency of their actions should be commensurate with the urgency of the problem of climate change. The Valve Turners discovered the sites of valves on a pipeline, and coordinated, halted oil flow. They called ahead to make sure nobody got hurt, and they were arrested. Their cases rest on self defense: they are materially threatened. Their values and way of life are held hostage by this sticky flow. They stopped it for a few minutes.

The Street of Dreams was burnt down. I was sick that day, home in bed, and heard helicopters overhead. Those monuments to wealth and dreams– charred husks of pillars stood tall. But the trees stood taller. ELF claimed credit, the Earth Liberation Front. Their initials were spray painted on the site, and a few choice words. Whose dreams?

We don't live in a pure democracy, but even if we did, the form is disenfranchising. The community is enormous; the only way to have impact is to perform an outsize action. Voting is a theoretical construct, but it's not exactly an empowerment; you are smaller than the buyer of a lottery ticket. We say that your vote matters, and it's not a lie completely, but it's also not strictly true.

And even casting aside the issue of votes, not all options are available. Quinn's Crossing? It's not for me to decide. Someone else owns this land, and I have no say here.

Trees are sacred in my family lore. The cedar tree is taller than my house– one time, I climbed all the way to the top. In the garden, there's a yew. My parents speak of these specially, plan the gardens around these certain trees, though we're crowded with vine maple and Douglas fir.

My father is not a spiritual man, but he saves the little cedar trees where they're growing up between the alders. Alder grows fast, almost weed-like, quick to settle in earth that's been torn up.

That's why they grow along roadsides, and there are so many back by the pond at Quinn's Crossing on the new-made land. But it's slated to be churned again: six years' growth allowed but a house will go there too. So my father "saves" the cedar saplings there where they sprout. He digs them up when the work crews are gone, brings them home.

My father worked his whole career selling timber, so it's funny to say he loves trees, but he loves them like: he'd go on trips to China and come back with pictures of timber yards.

He loves the trees like summer, when he's out there climbing the hill with a bucket, five gallons at a time to keep his cedar saplings moist on hotter days.

My father brought a cedar tree to me in his carry-on when I went away to college. My parents didn't visit often, but he brought me this western red cedar because he must have known I couldn't breathe in a dorm. I'd go out barefoot into the land beyond the campus lawn to Parcel B, the undeveloped place, and I'd lay down even in that tick-infested clutter these Eastern trees strew about the woods in fall, because I missed forest, and this was deciduous but more than nothing.

When I am home now, my father and I will tour about the trail, looking at treetops to find the standing dead. This one, not a trace of green, we'll fell it. This one, living but crowding that other, stronger patch. We take chainsaws to our own trees, but it's not like "progress".

My father managed an island to sustain the ecosystem there so they could harvest and sell timber that takes 100 years to grow. Alder is mature in 20, and at our place we take the alder trees down one by one as the cedar grows, slowly opening out the space so it unfurls, twenty years of a tree at a time, magnificent. We burn the trees we fell in winter, to keep us happy when we can't spend all day outside.

It isn't remarkable that these houses are going in behind mine. "Raises the property value," visitors remark. Progress like: well, don't we need more housing around here? Six years before light rail comes and brings a slightly shorter still-need-a-car commute to here. We don't need more housing; we need fewer people, or people happier to take less space, or: why can't the woods be the space everybody needs? 

These houses are 4,000 square feet, three floors of big rooms. The only reason you'd need a house that big is to feel a sense of privacy, aloneness, in these squished-together culs-de-sac that replace the deep woods.

I hope that families move into these houses and imbue them with love and memory. I hope that the Earth Liberation Front comes back and burns the whole thing down. I hope that at least these houses sell, after all this effort and noise. I hope that the lawn grows through with marsh reeds as the houses sit still and empty on the wetland, and that the trees slowly grow up and through. I hope the forest takes back the land, in my lifetime, leaving only one or two odd structures as curiosities: proof that these woods are strong.