Marshmallow Beach

A black salamander with a bright red stripe the length of its back skittered out from under a rock and headed toward the water. I was walking on "Marshmallow Beach," a narrow strip of pebbles, mud, and small weeds near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, bearing no resemblance whatsoever to its name. My sisters and I had named this stretch of earth bordering Marsh Creek some 30 years ago.

The creek and the seven acres of wooded land surrounding it, owned by my grandfather, were our childhood playground. We spent countless hours climbing the rocks, sending sticks shooting over the rapids of the rushing waterfall, and wading in the creek's shallow, sunny pools filled with minnows.

The large rocks were just as I remembered them. One resembles a whale's back, with a hollowed-out spot where I placed handfuls of grain and birdseed as soon as I was old enough to walk through snow. And the "Old Man of the Falls" remains steadfast, a profile in rock who still grows bushy eyebrows of moss above his sharp nose every summer.

Daffodils form a bright yellow carpet in spring, the children and grandchildren of the first flowers my grandfather planted three decades ago, flourishing as they spread. And the land still holds the delights that he first introduced me to—the mitten-leaved sassafras with its sweet-smelling bark; the myrrh with a halo of seeds and a root that tastes like licorice; the clean white Indian pipes that grow buried under leaves; and the mayapples on the underside of broad plants that look like umbrellas.

This quiet place brought back memories of him. My grandfather was a collector of things. He had treasure boxes filled with Indian arrowheads, colorful marbles used for playing Chinese checkers, rings and cards for magic tricks, and old coins—among them his "special pennies, " including one that had been flattened by a train and another that he had touched to President Dwight D. Eisenhower's pew in a Gettysburg church. And by sending off self-addressed, stamped envelopes to postmasters all over the country with a request that they be mailed back, he had acquired a delightful assortment of postmarks from places such as Accident, Maryland, and Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania.

He was an expert on the Civil War. He never tired of telling my sisters and me about how the Confederate soldiers came into Gettysburg looking for shoes, and how the terrible battle was won by the brave Union army. When I was 10, we watched a frightening re-enactment of Pickett's charge—complete with horses and guns and uniforms—at the very place where it had happened 100 years before.

I will always remember the day that my grandfather promised my older sister and me a trip by helicopter over the famous Gettysburg battlefield. When we arrived at the airport, I was told that I wasn't old enough to ride in a helicopter. I was crushed. But my grandfather told me to go back with my grandmother and wait near the pond in the large field in front of their home.

I waited. And after a while a helicopter appeared overhead; my grandfather had convinced the pilot to divert from the usual course. He and my sister waved and then threw a ball out of the helicopter with a message attached. I don't even remember the words now, but it was like a special gift from heaven just for me.

MY GRANDFATHER IS GONE NOW. The field is a subdivision; a row of large, brick homes with colonial-style pillars, each with a driveway and at least one fancy car out front, winds around the pond on the new "Lake Vista Drive."

My grandparents' simple home remains, looking oddly out-of-date. The woods behind it where we fed wild geese have been cleared away. Time has wrought its changes at Marshmallow Beach as well. There was once a small island, carved out by a swift-moving channel that surrounded it like a moat, which my sisters and I challenged each other to jump across every spring. But in recent years, the stream has displaced earth and filled in our moat.

Not long ago the ancient sycamore tree, on whose sprawling, gnarled roots we had sat while dangling our feet in the stream, gave up its life and fell to the earth. The crash must have sent a tremor through the land. So old and large was this tree, when I stand now on its fallen trunk, I cannot reach to the end of its roots.

But the saddest changes are those that are not of nature's doing. Spying several sturdy, old walnut trees on the land, someone came in without permission about a year ago, cut them down, and hauled them away for lumber. On the surface of one stump, now marked in paint with a bright pink "X, " I counted 77 rings. These were grandparent trees; and I had the feeling as I rubbed my hand over that dead stump that this was my own personal version of the global rainforest tragedy.

Last January I saw the rainforests in Australia and heard the bulldozers at work. I heard similar stories about the forests of the Pacific Northwest when I was there this spring.

In my own neighborhood in Washington, DC, people are being cleared away as trees are elsewhere. Simple people who first came to the cities of the North in search of jobs early in the century are being economically marginalized and pushed out. Many from my neighborhood are thinking about heading back to their roots in North Carolina.

A month ago when I was in that state, people told me there is no place left there anymore—all the land is being grabbed up for resorts and second homes, for "development" and "big business. " I heard the same story a month before in West Virginia. And I've heard echoes of the same theme from small farmers in Massachusetts and the Midwest to crab fishers in the Chesapeake Bay.

Sitting on my family's little misnamed plot of paradise, I thought about the encroachment of the years and of what has been labeled "progress." And I wondered how long it will be before the rich have bought everything out from under the rest of us. And when they do, where will we go?