Publisher's Point
Robert Allan Hooftallen

Summer is passing at a frightening pace. My son's infancy has passed. My daughter is no longer a full-cheeked toddler, she's a growing, classic beauty, despite the gaps in her teeth that announce she is going on seven.

And I am at an age where it is likely that my body has more history than it does future.

Some days I have to take a deep breath and speak the month, day and year out loud just to make sense of my relationship with time. I've realized it owns me and every day I see old things in new ways. In some ways, I am seeing things for the first time.

I hope this awesome phase of my life is being brought on by wisdom that's replacing my youth. Whatever it is, my perspective on what I want out of life is changing radically. Instead of preparing for a day when my family will do this and do that, I am totally passionate about what we are doing now.

What has consumed me lately is the beauty of our home. Not the actual physical beauty of the structure, although it is not an ugly home. Rather, the beauty of its place on this earth, the land on which its situated, all the millions of property details that make it our home and all the work that my family has put into it over the years to make it the kind of place that's great to come home to.

For the past couple years, my wife and I have been planning for the time when we would build a new home, perhaps in a new place. She may have, but I never gave a thought to what that would actually mean when the time came.

The moment arrived about eight weeks ago and it was time to push ahead and make our grand illusions into plans.

For me, it was an uncomfortable step. Building a new house all of the sudden seemed more effort that it was worth, more expensive than it should be and generally just not worth it.

I have found myself making excuses for not doing it, which is totally unnatural for me.

In all the thought I've given to what has taken place in Gardeau and how it must feel to have a piece of land there, it has occurred to me just how valuable our home is to my heart and to my soul. It is more than dirt, vegetation, lumber and mortar.

And out of that, a totally different way of looking at our home has grown. I can't see myself walking away from it just to build something shiny and new. It is too much of my family. It is too much of my parents. My grandmother lived and died there. My babies have grown there. My marriage has grown there. It is an irreplaceable part of the family.

It is the beginning of what I hope will be a place that many Hooftallens after me will adore the way my dad did and the way my mom, my brothers and my little family do today.

If we are lucky enough to make a home of our own, we become inextricably linked to everything about it, but what really defines a family home, one that will stay through generations, is the piece of land on which it lies. Because buildings wear and tear and eventually crumble, but land endures. And despite its permanence, it can be manipulated to alter its uses.

It is an immortal luxury that can't be owned because of its "owners" mortality. It occurred to me how much I love our little piece of land and how fortunate I am to claim it as mine and be able to leave it to my kids when I'm gone.

And the events of the past weeks have made me more passionate about my land than ever.

It has also made me realize that nothing the railroad company has done or will do, will reverse what it has already done.

Time and nature will heal the ecological wounds and in a handful of years, Portage Creek could be completely back in balance with nature.

But what will be left behind are the memories of what took place and the reality of its potential to happen again.

And that doesn't go away unless the railroad itself does.