Planting something new

We were visiting relatives in Davis, California when I shot the originals of the dilapidated barn on Covell Road. Tucked in among burgeoning suburbs, here the not-so-distant agrarian past still existed and on a quiet morning while the others slept I slipped out with my camera. I parked in the shopping center parking lot across the street and walked a good length of each of the cross roads where the barn is to see where m best shots would be (I'm not big on trespassing). It didn't take long for me to get my quarry and save for a few foxtails and stickers which I brought home, it was an otherwise uneventful outing.

I don't think it was more than a few weeks after I had posted my first renditions that my sister-in-law sent me the newspaper link saying the barn had been torn down to make way for a mixed-use development of residential and retail buildings, open space and an "urban farm." Having grown up in Southern California, I know that the landscape will change, that the old will be replaced with the new (with a few worthy exceptions). I can't really say I am okay with it, but I accept it the same way I accept my ever graying hair (with purposeless muttering mostly). A former boss used to say about land that it should be developed to its "highest and best use." And from a profit-and-loss perspective, I get it.

But I still wince for the loss of something that can never be again. A hundred years from now, long after I am gone, perhaps someone new will be standing at the corner of Covell and Pole Line Road and wince when the mixed-use residential and retail and urban farm are turned under to plant something new.

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