Swamp or Suburbia

My hometown is a podunk town. As a kid, this drove me batshit. I couldn't ride my bike to a friend's house because my nearest friends were ten miles away, and my Mom feared I'd be mauled by an animal on the way there. I didn't have the option of getting ice cream on a hot summer day unless we had it in the house or my Mom felt like driving us to an ice cream stand. Now I love going home to the bucolic splendor of West Greenwich. I love the trees, the turkeys that use my backyard as a mixer venue, the weird animal tracks that crop up in the snow.

Now the Providence Journal reports that the town is considering taking out an $8 million bond to keep a large parcel of open space from being developed into housing. As a kid, I would have relished the opportunity of a huge housing development. Maybe a Dunkin Donuts would have opened up I could have walked to. More kids in my school to either torment me or be awesome. But, now that I'm an adult, I want my little town to stay as quaint as possible.

It's unrealistic to hope that dirt roads and prancing deer will always be a part of my town. West Greenwich is centrally located, and now is home to two giant corporations. There is plenty to attract the REI-loving yuppies to my town, and they're coming in droves. Which is fine, but the school was approaching capacity when I was there, and that was seven years ago. There's a huge amount of public works projects that would have to happen to support such a huge population boom. Kids are going to be sitting on the football field if they don't add onto the school.

I don't think that the land should be left alone, however. I think a public park would be great in that area. It's quiet, far from the highway, and could be a nice place for people from Providence (or even Boston) to visit. Maybe a sort of Alton Jones type place, but without charging people tons of money to enter. Some hiking trails and public programs would be less costly than building a new school, and would still attract tourists to spend money in our town.

I don't want another subdivision with the verb/noun combination in my town. (Whispering Pines, Fox Run, etc.) I'd like a place where all frazzled city-dwellers could spend a day or two in the splendor of West Greenwich's woods, not just me crashing at my Mom's house.