Nothing is Forever

Bev and I are still having a ball re-visiting the lower South Island for the School of Theology and some personal touring around.
We made a brief pilgrimage to Dusky Forest in West Otago where I worked for a year with the Forest Service. In 1954 this was a community of seven or eight family homes, headquarters office building, three-bay fire station/garage, workshop, store, camp cookhouse and a camp of about twenty huts and facilities for single men like myself.
With the Presbyterian Clearwater family from down the road, we ran a little Sunday School there and somewhere there is a photo showing at least fifteen children who turned up. The school bus came right up to the forest. On some Friday nights there was a bus all the way to Gore for shopping and the pictures. Dusky Forest HQ Camp was a whole little village.
Everything is gone. Only the shape of the side road where Johnnie Walker rolled the fire engine (we got the horses Bob and Mac to right it and cleaned up the mess inside and the accident was never reported) and the level space where the garages had been betray a clue to the general location. A road has been built right through the middle of the entire village area but in the drain at one side is a large piece of old concrete that is a physical link to the past: it was the step into the office.
In tramping in various parts of NZ I have seen plenty of places which have been changed by the passage of time and changing fortunes. But nowhere has the transitory nature of life itself been brought home to me as forcibly as the sight of sheep grazing in the perfect pasture that has been created over the site of my hut at Dusky Forest.