Every now and then you run into a city that has dealt with some beaver-killing pushback in the past. A bunch of residents circulated a petition or picketed and don’t want beavers killed. The city officials calm down the rabid press saying ‘there there’ as loudly as they can and someone puts in a garden rake and calls it a beaver deceiver and promises get made not to trap the beavers again unless they really really have to.

Last may we took a visit to Cumberland Rhode Island where the exact scene was played out, only instead of a rake they used a giant metal cage which I said looked like it was leftover from shark week. Remember?
Oh you know what they say. We tried being humane and it didn’t work. Now we have NO choice. It’s like your mother picking up the pieces of the broken flintstones glass and saying “I guess we just can’t have NICE THINGS!”

Cue the failed trail.

Monastery trail might have to be abandoned

CUMBERLAND – Walking along the Old Road Trail at the Cumberland Monastery, a path of straw now covers the muddy ground where a wooden footbridge used to stand.

Residents wondering when the bridge, previously located at a spot near the town’s highway garage, will be restored may be out of luck, as town officials told The Breeze that there are no current plans to put the bridge back.

“That trail is going to have to be abandoned,” said Frank Stowik, head of the town’s Highway Department, According to Stowik, the trail is currently wet and unusable, and while the water table is at its lowest right now, after a couple of good rainstorms, it will be under water again.

The town had added the “beaver deceivers,” gravel, and bridge after a family of beavers moved into the area in 2014 and caused the trail to routinely wash out, Stevens explained.

We tried it your way. Now you have lots of beavers, a bigger pod and no bridge. See how that worked out? I guess the Monastery trail is just going to have to be closed. Get a stairmaster. The city can’t do anything about it.

You’ve seen these kind of kabuki dares before. Yesterday for example when Pacific Gas and Electric said, okay if you’re determined to sue us for fires started by our power lines then we’ll turn the power off when there’s fire danger and make you remember how important we are in the first place. Gosh we might have to close the caldecott tunnel. That will be hard on your economy won’t it? Get a stair master.

Because of the time and expense related to the wetlands permitting process, Stevens said that the Rhode Island Land Trust Council is trying to ask the RIDEM for a waiver for beaver-related public trail management, hoping the agency will be more flexible when it comes to these specific scenarios.

To ask for the bridge back, the permitting process will require a survey, engineering drawings, wetlands delineation, and consultants, which takes time, Stevens said.

“Ultimately whether we did it right away or down the line, it was clear it had to be removed,” he said.

Wait, I know this one! There are specific rules and costs for fixing a trail in wetlands that you’ve dragged your heels on for years. And now you’re hoping that maybe you can use the beavers to waive some of those requirements! Just like Martinez did when it pretended the sheetpile along a certain mogul’s property like was a beaver project so they could use restricted funds to pay for it. Gosh there really is NOTHING new under the sun.

That video ends somber because during that work was the first time we ever saw mom’s eye condition and even though I don’t think it had anything to do with why she died 16 months later I am sure the stress of having your home destroyed had something to do with her health. Ancient history. I guess that’s all blood under the bridge now, as Edward Albee once said.

I bet you didn’t even know that the when Ben Goldfarb first sent me his manuscript for review it had a section on the monstrous Martinez sheetpile story and as much as I wanted to shame the city for their fraud and expose it all I ultimately begged him to take it out because I thought it would make too many powerful voices too angry and harm the chances of  whatever beavers we had left.

I figured at the time I got one get one coupon for change and Ben who was basically finished with the book and had his editor’s blessing to everything he had written, would maybe consider the change out of the goodness of his heart. Believe me when I say there were other places I wanted to use that coupon, in the description of my home as full of beaver tchotchkees for example, or to make me sound slightly smarter and less kooky than I did. But I nobly used the coupon  for the beavers. And thankfully, he agreed to change it. So the sheetpile story will remained untold- except by me on this website which we all know perfectly well nobody reads.

Hey maybe that manuscript will be worth something on ebay one day. He’s getting pretty famous. Hmm too bad its not handwritten.