Covenant Stories: Roberto's Mark

Story #23 in the Covenant series

In the summer of 1999 construction began on our church building. A few days before the foundation was poured, on a whim, I retrieved 15 or 20 small rocks from the ground directly beneath what would be our fireplace. I wanted a building as much as anyone, but I also knew that once we poured the foundation, things would never be the same. Some of the wildness of our land would be gone. A part of it would be tamed. It may sound silly, but I felt like I was rescuing these rocks. I didn’t want them spending the next century or two covered in concrete. I hoped the rocks would help me remember that there was a time when our land was completely wild with nothing on it designed by humans.

It was our idea to be as gentle as possible with our construction, minimizing the impact the building had upon the land. If that is your desire, you should know that you will have to watch the construction workers closely. People in the construction business are often forced to think about saving money and time, so they can be a little insensitive about flora and fauna. One can hardly blame them since their clients complain the most about money and schedules.

My first lesson in this reality was a painful one. We had planned to be careful about the way we built our parking lot. The idea was to preserve every tree and beautiful plant possible, building a parking lot that was curved and irregular, fitting itself into the environment as much as possible. Obviously we had to make room for cars, but we wanted to do this delicately. I went out of town for some kind of denominational meeting. When I returned 3 days later, I found that a man with a bulldozer had razed a perfect rectangle alongside the building site for our parking lot. It was 300 feet long and about 50 feet wide. He destroyed 100 yards of blooming Mountain Laurels that grew along the fence and would have been lovely alongside the parking lot. When I saw what had been done, I was grief-stricken. The guy that did the work meant well. A subcontractor told him to clear the land for a parking lot. He cleared the site in exactly the way that most people want. He just never got the memo that we wanted something different.

At this point I vowed to go to the building site every day until it was finished. And I did. Two weeks later I arrived just in time to see a man with a massive bulldozer heading toward a row of Live Oak trees that ran gracefully along a line about 12 to 15 feet from where the foundation was to be poured. I ran over and jumped onto the moving bulldozer to stop him. It was that close. And yes, that insanely dramatic. If I had arrived 30 minutes later, a row of trees that probably took 50 years to mature would have been gone. The man said that he had been told we needed a full 30 feet of space around the foundation for the concrete trucks. I called our builder who confirmed this.

“Yes, I thought we could do with less space. But the concrete trucks need more room.”

“Bob,” I said. “I see buildings all the time with huge trees near them. There simply HAS to be a way we can pour the foundation without tearing out 25 mature trees around the church.”

Bob thought for a moment. “Well, I suppose we could hire a concrete truck with a boom that can pour the concrete from a distance. But it will cost $700 extra.”

I was stunned. Seven hundred dollars. To save $700 we almost lost 5,000 square feet of natural foliage that included dozens of mature and beautiful trees as well as hundreds of native shrubberies. But that’s the way people build around here most of the time. Land is plentiful. People tend to kill the plants to save money on construction, then spend thousands of dollars on artificial landscaping. I told Bob we would pay the extra $700. The man with the bulldozer shrugged and went home.

At that point I started visiting the site twice a day. Bob told me that the workers had definitely gotten the message. When I came walking up they would whisper, “Here comes the pastor. Don’t anyone step on a flower.”

Then one afternoon Roberto, the teen-age son of the man doing the stone work on the building, got bored and carved a big “R” into the Live Oak closest to the church. He made a deep gash in the shape of an R, then meticulously sliced away all of the bark around it. It was huge. You could see the pale orange flesh of the tree from 40 feet away. Knowing the layout of the building, I realized that people sitting on the front row would look right out the window by the fireplace and see Roberto’s handiwork. I laid my hand in the tree’s wound and wondered if it would survive the next drought. Removing that much bark can put a tree at risk, especially in our part of the world, where there is so little water in the Summer that even healthy plants sometimes die.

I was angry at first. But seeing Roberto’s sorrowful face as his father yelled at him changed something in me. Partly because I liked the man who did our stone work. He was from Mexico, and his sons came every day to work with him. Roberto was just doing what teen-age boys do. He wasn’t thinking much about it. There was something about the ridiculously obvious mark of the letter R that changed the way I thought about our building and our land. I had thought we could slip our building into the wilderness without leaving much of a mark. That was impossible, of course. The building itself was a huge wound to the land, much larger than the mark Roberto left on the tree. The truth is, we humans leave our marks on the world around us. This was our church, so somehow I felt our mark was legitimate, while the marks of the construction men were not. Suddenly I saw the men who worked on our building as a part of our community. They left their marks in the process, just as we did when we cleared the land. In time, nature heals most wounds. Fresh cuts in the ground scab over with weeds quickly, followed by more permanent plants. In a year or two almost everything starts to look “natural.”

And now ten years have passed. Trees and native plants have grown up all around the parking lot. The black asphalt has faded to a light gray that is about the same color as the limestone on the ground. People drive up and say, “What a lovely church. It seems to fit into the land.” No one ever says, “Too bad the about the parking lot.”

The Oak tree healed itself from Roberto’s carving. In time a Mountain Laurel grew up at the base of the tree and covered Roberto’s mark. I don’t think anyone but me even remembers it’s there. Yesterday I pulled back the Laurel leaves and saw the scar. After a decade, bark has grown up over the wound, though you can still see the letter R. I smiled and remembered the day it happened. Now, hiding behind the Mountain Laurel, there is something precious about Roberto’s R. It’s a small human mark on a land where many have come and gone over the years and left marks of their own. Main’s Folly, Gordon’s sign, Janell’s benches, Paul’s Labyrinth, the children’s prayer path, the fort the boys built in the woods, and the rosary I hung on Old Man Cedar. All of these marks have a story behind them. And usually the story ends up being about redemption.

About a year ago, just before we began building the labyrinth, the man who owns the land next door hired someone to put up a new fence. In the process he accidentally cut down a swath of trees and vegetation on our land that blocked the view of all the stuff he keeps at the back of his property. It was a disaster. The clearing where we used to hold Easter services and planned to build a prayer labyrinth had been surrounded by peaceful trees with nothing human in sight. Now you can see his old barn, a pile of trash, and two jet skis.

Sigh.

It was an honest mistake. The guy on the dozer got the wrong instructions. I’ve seen it before, of course. There were some folks in the church who were pretty angry, and I was as well when I first saw it. But I have learned that with buildings and land there is a certain grace in taking the long view. I can promise you, in ten years nature will grow more plants and eventually the great bulldozer disaster of 2007 will be forgotten. It will have left no more mark on the land than the parking lot disaster of 1999 or Roberto’s mark.

And really, why are we out here in this wilderness place doing church if not to learn the kinds of lessons God can teach us with nature? We are learning to see with God’s eyes and think about time in new ways. We have learned that even the most grievous wounds can be healed. We have learned that ugly mistakes can in time become beautiful.

And we have learned that ten years is really a very short amount of time.

Gordon Atkinson

The rocks I took from inside the foundation forms. They are currently in a box in our church attic. (Click for a larger view)

The Mountain Laurel that is covering Roberto's mark.

Roberto's mark. Isn't it amazing how "natural" it looks.

The building just after construction was completed in the fall of 1999.

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• covenant baptist church
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• the covenant stories

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