How many of us take the time to look beyond the beauty strip? How many of us really want to? Aren’t many of us, much of time, content to avert our eyes? After all, what you find around and beyond the strip of natural beauty can be painful. If you ride a bike on our public roads, hike the trails, walk to do your shopping and pick up mail, or paddle on public waterways, then maybe you’re less likely to look the other way.

I’d like to encourage everyone to look through the beauty strip. To that end, every third Monday Outside Up North publish a new Beyond the Beauty Strip feature. Here’s this month’s edition.

 
Wilderness is a state of mind, but wildness is almost everywhere, even in urban and industrial areas. The abandoned auto junkyard below is a case in point:

 

 
Mother Nature is steadily reclaiming what she can of the lot. Grasses and trees are growing through the cracks in asphalt, breaking it apart and grinding it into small pieces that will eventually become intermixed with rich soil. Black locust, birches, aspens, maples, and ash trees have overspread the boarded-up garage and the sagging, rusting wrecks that are all that remains of machines that fostered the dreams of yesterday’s drivers. As spring advances, this woodland is vibrant with new growth, and the trees resound with the songs of warblers, wrens, grosbeaks, and robins. Gray squirrels forage for food among the wildflowers, and make their spherical leafy homes high in the trees. Despite the ugliness of the disowned motor vehicles, the land is alive and welcoming. But instead of clearing out the eyesore which is the junk yard, most turn their backs on this wild beauty in our midst, and soulless vandals add to the litter:

 

 
A toppled shopping cart, the ubiquitous beer can, plastic bags, and crumpled papers mock nature’s attempts to shuck off thoughtless abuse.

 
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