![]() The buzz of chainsaws and rumble of equipment echoed through the Perkiomen Valley as people began the work of clean up and damage assessment. Wandering the trail a few times in the summer after this storm and tubing down the center of the creek behind homes I was able to see the large mounds of leaves that were once 100 feet in the air now cluttering the understory, the creek edge and the yards of many homes. Drabble’s statement above – in this case the landscape changed drastically and quickly. Homes along the Perkiomen Creek were particularly hard hit by both flooding and the strong winds toppling trees. Luckily, my woodland home was spared damage from downed trees, but the same cannot be said for many in the area. The storm also came with flash flooding of the Perkiomen Creek and the many other smaller tributaries coursing through the region. While away visiting the big trees of northern California at home destruction was being wrought by straight-line winds gusting up to 110 miles per hour. But I have not witnessed anything so drastic as the change I saw upon returning to my favorite local outdoor place in early June this year. It changes seasonally, trading carpets of spring ephemerals for the russet and burgundy of fallen leaves in Autumn. ![]() In the 9 years I have walked and biked the trail it has changed. The 20-mile trail is a place of recreation, exhilaration, peace, reflection, solace, and education. The Perkiomen Trail is close to home and a regular haunt for me. ~ Margaret Drabble A Writer’s Britain: Landscape in Literature This is one of the reasons why we feel such a profound and apparently disproportionate anguish when a loved landscape is altered out of recognition we lose not only a place, but ourselves, a continuity between the shifting phases of our life. The landscape also changes, but far more slowly it is a living link between what we were and what we have become. The past lives on in art and memory, but it is not static: it shifts and changes as the present throws its shadow backwards.
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