Erosion

When I was growing up, we had the luxury living next to a lush patch of jungle that was full of wonder and adventure for the young rambunctious boy I once was. Maybe some older kids had known about it, and surely the old man whose house was a lot closer then my apartment knew of its existence... at 7 years old I found the crown jewel in that patch of jungle, our beloved local waterfall and swimming hole.

I got home and my parents were worried sick, apparently I was supposed to do something else that day, as well as being an absolute mess of red dirt and cuts... I was not allowed to enter the jungle any more. As time wore on, my parents seemed to forget about the day and allowed me to start venturing back into jungle and I frequented that waterfall every opportunity I had.

The jungles of Guam aren't always peaceful, in memories that are reminiscent of Goonies movies, I scaled cliffs, climbed trees, jumped into rivers, fell into mud slides that in turn shot me into rivers that rivaled the water slides at PIC.

In my teens I had moved away from that apartment complex, but luckily a couple years after I left, my dad who didn't live with my mom and I moved back into that complex and I had access to it on the weekends again. When I was able to drive I started taking friends there, these guys by Guam standards were kind of city boys.

We continued adventures at this somewhat sacred ground to me at this point well into young adulthood. That also happened to be when the changes really started to happen as people started buying the plots of land and building houses on them. Something I was weary of as a child in fact, as I have many memories of trying to disrupt land surveyors buy stealing their markers when they weren't around. Whether or not I was effective in my attempts or did any good at the time are debatable. 

I haven't been there in years, I heard the waterfall was filled in with a backhoe. It had been eroding inward for years making the river noticeably more shallow every visit I made. I guess it became a safety issue, or maybe people didn't like mosquitoes breeding near their homes. Who knows?

It's a shame though that the kids growing up there aren't privy to the adventure I had growing up. I fancied myself a Goonie that would never die, or some sort of mix between Tom Sawyer and Tarzan. Of course, they have grand adventures of their own, in city's far away or even planets across the universe on that game system. Maybe they wouldn't notice anyway.

But the erosion of the land is still a concern of mine. What happens when 20,000 to 80,000 more people hike in the unstable red clay. What happens to the rivers then? Where do I go to escape the heat of concrete and asphalt? 

I hope there is a point where people says enough is enough. My dad would always look at the development around the island as I was growing up and say to me "some people won't be happy until this island is one giant parking lot." I sometimes fear he's right.