Stop the cutting now

I write to you in support of the efforts of the Route One Advocacy Group, friends, citizens and fellow vacationers who strongly oppose the destruction of the beautiful old trees on the pastoral stretch of road in Warren.

I have been traveling to Deer Isle for summer vacations to a family cabin all of my 44 years. Down East is one of the most beautiful places on this planet that sparkles with its small towns, rural routes, coastal bays and abundant nature.

I urge you and the Maine Department of Transportation to stop the cutting immediately. It will forever change the landscape of Maine. There will be no Elephant tree ever again with this plan of destruction. There will only be more tar, more cell phone towers and a loss of the front yards of Coastal Route 1 Maine.

I will be saddened not only when we have to close up the cabin in October, but more so when we take the last drive down the coast through Warren and see bare front yards where there once was magnificent old maples, elms and the once famous Elephant tree in full foliage.

I leave you with E.B. White’s “Stuart Little”: Maine, “… the way it use to be… In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elm trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky, in the loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla” … stop cutting now.

Rex Joffray

Windsor, Conn.