I Went For A Walk Through The Past, And Ended Up In The Future

I crossed the creek yesterday and started to walk up the mountain. A friend with a bum elbow went with me. Between the two of us, we could maybe play the piano. Anyway, we started up the road behind his place, and talked about wildflowers and clouds and the meaning of life and stuff like that. We passed by a few old homesites, and decided to check the ground for morel mushrooms. It was the perfect time of year, but a bit too dry, and we found nothing. No matter. We had fun looking. One of the interesting parts of following old logging roads through the forest is stumbling across old homesites. You know you're getting close when you see apple trees. Look about, and you'll usually see rocks laid out in something close to a square - an old house foundation. There may even still be a chimney, or part of one. Kick around in the leaves and under the moss, and you'll find a few old pieces of metal, and maybe a whiskey jug.
We came across one old homestead and then another. Some were perched precariously on the side of the mountain, almost hanging off a cliff, but someone used to live there. Such is one of the ironies of the modern day mountains. The land that used to be considered prime real estate - the bottoms and the fields in the valleys, where you coulkd grow something and earn a living, isn't worth much these days. The mountain tops and the cliffs, where you couldn't grow anything and you needed mules with one set of legs shorter than the other, the places where the poorest people lived, that's in high demand these days.
As evidenced during our walk. We kept walking up the road, past the old home sites, as the road got steeper and steeper. When we got to the top, it wasn't there. Someone had bulldozed it all away, piled all the trees into nice little burn piles, and made a road around the summit. We didn't know what they were up to. and haven't yet found anyone who does, but the clearing was wide and long and smelled like a sub-division.
We weren't quite sure where we were going with this walk, not when we first wet out, but we found out soon enough. We were going to the future of these mountains, and it was covered in hydro-seeded rye. They'd sent the streams through plastic culverts, and circled the mountaintop with a road, and they were ready to build houses.