“We once lived in a forest…”
Over the past year, my family has watched houses sprout up in the forest behind our brick house on the Argentine coast. For years we’ve been on the frontier. Behind our house stretches a forest and sand dunes with intermittent meadows stretching until the edge of the next town down the coast. But this is Pinamar, and it’s getting more popular. And without much town planning, developers are expanding at the edges, creeping further and further into the forest and the dunes to sell more land and sell more dreams of your own house on the coast.
We’ve watched one project in particular. It’s a corner house on the frontier of southern Pinamar and the wilderness. It’s a log cabin, a large one with a small fort doubling as a water tower. Most houses in Pinamar are made of brick or stucco. This one looks right out of the Wild West, only the logs are glossy.
It is aptly placed, in the far south of our neck of the woods, seemingly to keep a watch out for intruders. You could sit in a rocking chair on its wide porch and chew tobacco with a rifle at your side in case, just in case villains fall upon you and your neighbors. Yet it might prove difficult in a gunfight to smash through the double-glazed windows to shoot from within.
Yet the villains and the baddies are not slinging guns. They are not on horseback. They are not out to kill. But they are out to destroy.
They are the developers. They are felling trees and leveling sand dunes that once lay virgin as a paradise for riding horses and for my children to race up and down, hooting wildly. Now it is being diced up into lots for homes and new dreams.
I look at the super-sized log cabin as I walk out to the forest with my three children for an adventure as the bulldozers, diggers and chainsaws make haste through the forest and dunes and meadows to lay streets and map out lots for their enrichment.
Yes, I think, the owners of the log cabin have aptly chosen the name for their house: “Dances with Wolves.”
