The Ravine Demographics

Our little family of two seniors and two little companion dogs use the ravine daily as our recreational paradise. It brings us immense pleasure. It offers us seasonal delights of nature. It assist us in maintaining our physical health and psychological equilibrium. It offers to help us entertain our two little dogs who require daily exercise and the exposure the ravine offers them to inexhaustible opportunities to revel in verboten fragrances otherwise not accessible to them.

There are many other such individuals who value the ravine and its exploring-of-nature opportunities, its physical enterprise, aside from us. There are older couples, long retired, or freshly retired from the confines of a daily working life who venture there for relaxation and pleasure. There are young families who live nearby who on rare occasions to mark the changing of the seasons, take "nature" walks to remind their offspring of our obligations to and recognition of Mother Nature.

There are the hordes of young children who use the ravine and its many entries and exit offsets as short-cuts on their way to school, morning and afternoon. On foot or by bicycle. Theirs is but a brief transit. They manage, however, too often to leave a deleterious mark on the landscape. These are the children whose parents have somehow escaped the necessity to teach their young respect for the environment.

In their wake are left the vestiges of commercial consumables, wrappings and containers for food and drink. Many of these children pick not one or two examples of the many beautiful wildflowers that decorate the ravine, but full handfuls of them, then discard them carelessly on the trail, since it's too much of a bother to take them home and give them temporary respite in a vase of cool, clear water.

They may be the very same children who eventually grow to become quasi-adults, ungovernable teens who enjoy breaking saplings in half, who distribute the results of their dusk-and-dawn partying over the trails and into the creek in the form of soft-drink tins and beer cartons and bottles, some smashed on the rocks beside the creek, the better to harm carefree dogs seeking some relief in the creek from summer's heat.

We've just had occasion to meet and to thank a man who has taken it upon himself to patrol the ravine. He has stopped youth from attempting to burn down trees, and to chop them down with axes brought from home. We've seen the results obtaining from such enthusiasm left unchecked. Just latterly he's been attempting against all odds, to shore up a vulnerable portion of the creek bank from again collapsing into the creek.

And each time he has spent hours of hard physical labour collecting old fallen limbs to line them against the lip of the bank, he has discovered that they've been tossed into the creek in defiance of his attempts. We wondered what had happened to his work when, after the day we met him and he'd explained his enterprise, we saw it entirely undone.

Just as we wondered about the mindset of the young people who, at refuse collection day, brought a vegetation-full compostable sack into the ravine, set it beside one of the main bridges, and set it afire.

It burned, it would appear, just long enough to confer incendiary enjoyment on them as they sat and drank their beer, leaving in their wake the large black ugly scar of their party.