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.

 
Spring is a special time of year, especially after the hardships of winter. Cycling on quiet roads with woods and meadows pressing close is one of the best ways to enjoy the reawakening of the land. Seasonal songbirds sing their joy at having finally arrived after the arduous journey north. The air is perfumed with the scent of new greenery and ephemeral blooms, like these dogwood flowers alongside a quiet road on a favorite bike route:

 

 
It was my first visit there this spring, and I looked forward to every bend in the road to see what new vista of beauty awaited me. Here’s a shot of quaking aspens with their fresh, new leaves:

 

 
Warblers and white-throated sparrows sang, woodpeckers tapped out their territories, and even a few butterflies flitted on the light breeze. But as I approached the distant point in the photo above, the songs diminished, the butterflies disappeared, and there was soon silence. That’s when I discovered this:

 

 
The woods had been stripped of their trees sometime between November and April. This wasn’t responsible logging, but a wholesale ravishing. Delicate moist woodland soil had been gouged down to a depth of at least two feet. Trees had been snapped through and hauled away with heavy equipment, leaving a splintered, rutted swath of mud and debris over several acres of land. A few trees had been spared, and they stood like sentinels among the ragged stumps of their kin. As if this devastation wasn’t enough, louts had come by to dump their garbage. This is only one of the piles of trash thrown here by slobs:

 

 
Paper and plastic trash is bad enough, but discarded motor oil and bleach containers further poison the land. Sadly, what the British call “fly-tipping”—the illegal dumping of garbage—is not uncommon along the rural roads of northern New York. Although legal disposal of waste at recycling centers is inexpensive and often free, some prefer to foul the countryside. Their motivations are hard to pin down. Laziness probably plays a roll. Contempt surely does, too. But despite the best efforts of fly-tippers, the land endures and fights back. A week after shooting the pictures above, I returned and saw that marsh marigolds had blossomed throughout much of the torn landscape:

 

 
In time, if the land is left alone and further erosion isn’t wide-spread, the soil will recover. Ruts will fill in with leaves, fallen branches, and other organic material. Soil microbes, insects, worms, and small animals will help regenerate the rich wetland and woodland duff which was so easily ripped by thoughtless people. We can hope so, anyway.

 

 
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