Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, December 21, 1993 TAG: 9403180048
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By LIZA FIELD
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Schemes to make some bucks off the mountain come and go with regularity; perhaps they shouldn't surprise us. That the place is a wild mountain at all - a sanctuary of trees and wildlife, as well as a pure, spring-feeding aquifer - shows the extraordinary foresight of its donor, J.B. Fishburn.
Had he not given this old mountain to the city, one can guess what it would have become: a Lookout Mountain, Tenn., perhaps? A "See Rock City"? Instead, visitors on the mountain find songbirds, wild turkey, deer. They can walk in the forest, breathe, fly a kite, and see a few (real) stars.
Such a preserve within a city, in the 1990s, is a pearl of great price. That we are still trying to sell it, however, displays a basic poverty of mind.
Only two years ago, a citywide survey showed that Roanoke citizens did not want more development of their public park. This poll thwarted plans to top the mountain with a private high-rise hotel and restaurant-for-the-affluent - at least temporarily.
Undaunted, the zoo has now proposed - and the Mill Mountain Committee has approved - a $2.8 million plan for a parking-garage complex wherein to house fund-raisers (which will be sorely needed) and 300 more cars.
One need not point out the mental poverty undergirding such a fantastic proposal: nearly $3 million worth of concrete, erected on a mountaintop in order to raise money.
Reckoning the cause of this poverty is another matter. I can only guess that the desire to build giant parking garages on top of any mountain results from a form of insanity. I would imagine that the crafters of such a plan have grown out of touch with reality.
True, this form of mental malaise has been common throughout the century, but we now know how dearly it costs us. The same mental illness has put our world in its present state of physical disease: an altered climate, poisoned waters, vanishing forests and birds - we all know the list. No half-grown child with some respect for life and property would engineer such wreckage. But children, of course, have the ability to see what actually exists, rather than their own plan for something different.
The naturalist John Muir was one of the first white men to recognize our blindness, our insensitivity to the very land we lived on. Repeatedly he called for us to return to our senses, walk on the ground, learn how to "think like a mountain" in order to see again (re-spect) the value of the creeks, bluffs, and birds entrusted to our care.
Muir, like the Native Americans and first settlers, realized that we were living in a natural paradise. If we couldn't be happy here, no amount of revenue and concrete could help us.
I know three individuals who regularly visit the mountain: a housewife, a homeless woman with a Bible, and a learning-disabled man who climbs the mountain to pray. These people may come on foot, with no vehicle to park in a garage or admission to the zoo. Yet each, I suspect, knows the mountain more intimately than any of the committee members rearranging its landscape.
Interestingly, these three, in their old clothes and on foot, don't seem to need more cement and cages; they are able to receive the mountain's native treasures (including wisdom and humility) that continue to elude the movers and shakers.
The main motive behind the plan, as usual, is to attract more tourists to the mountain. Perhaps it's a sad comment on our dullness that we imagine our many big-city visitors ascend Mill Mountain for the sight of a parking garage or the caged wildlife they can see in their own urban zoos. For many visitors, an undeveloped mountain, particularly in a city, is an unbelievable rarity, of value in itself.
Perhaps if we were more tuned in to our own natural wealth, we might create walking and nature trails, and cultivate the mountain's unused back road as a bike lane and footpath - at perhaps $28 and some volunteer work rather than $2.8 million.
Two middle-school kids, in fact, recently proposed trails for roller blades and mountain bikes. However, these weren't moneymaking ventures. The development committee said that these simple trails probably wouldn't jibe with the ``design guidelines for the mountain"; an immense parking garage, however, will.
The next decades will see more plans for the mountain come and go. One can only hope that in spite of our tampering, the mountain will retain some of her wealth until long after we're gone; in the end, it's we ourselves who will have become the poorer.
For until we learn to see the mountain - not a convenient moneymaker - we'll continue living in mental squalor. We will disfigure nature from within office buildings. We'll remove the habitat of our native bluebirds and waxwings in order to haul in foreign, caged creatures, and we will call this beauty.
And we'll wonder why we still aren't satisfied.
Liza Field, reared in Roanoke and now a Wytheville resident, teaches and helps operate a land trust
by CNB