Around Araby Bog, A Suburb Rises From the Ashes
By Lynne Duke
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 21, 2004; Page C01
Patricia Stamper's long thin braids swing across her chest as she hikes through mucky soil. She's heading toward the rare magnolia bog she's spent six years fighting to save.
"In the winter, it's not much to look at," she says apologetically. The sweet bay magnolias aren't in bloom. The three-foot-tall cinnamon ferns have gone dormant for the season, along with the panoply of flora that flourishes in this rare pristine ecosystem in rural Charles County known as Araby Bog.
Stamper, 66, a Navy mathematician, steps gingerly. Her horse, a chestnut named Fancy, kicked her and shattered her right elbow several weeks ago and she is recovering from surgery to repair her arm. She has to be careful not to stumble.
"There's the sphagnum moss," she says suddenly, pointing to a bright green patch growing along the bank of a stream that delivers clean water into Mattawoman Creek and the Potomac River.
And just beyond the stream, up a hill and through the trees deep in these woods near Indian Head, the reasons for this field trip are visible. Stamper wants to show how close to the bog the new houses are being built, and how certain is the bog's ultimate demise.
But far more than the bog is endangered, she believes. With 500 homes set to be built in subdivisions called Hunters Brooke and Falcon Ridge, the new traffic, the new people, the new noise all will conspire to rob this region of its tranquillity, its slow country life. Not to mention lowering the water table, which Stamper fears could affect individual wells like her own. Hunters Brooke is just a couple minutes' drive from the 52 acres where Stamper and her husband, John, live in a small bungalow-style house. She especially bemoans the light pollution that will obscure the stars at night.
"It's heartbreaking, the damage to the community," Stamper says. "A way of life is being destroyed."
Up the hill from the bog, though, the view of this region is different. There, in his brand-new home with its soaring foyer, its 33 windows and its high-end kitchen, Sylvester Kelley putters about, arranging his new life. The Christmas tree is up, the houseplants set in the windows, the family photos arrayed on a shelf.
Kelley's doing what suburbanites do everywhere. When he moved in on Nov. 30, he staked his claim in an area sure to grow and sure to appreciate in value once commercial development catches up with the residential.
Kelley, 56, doesn't know Stamper. In fact he knew virtually nothing about the region or its environmental controversy -- until the fires of Hunters Brooke put this obscure community in the national news and exposed the clash of values between the region's old-timers and its newcomers.
The old-timers' frustrations are understandable, says Kelley, an information technology specialist for a defense contractor.
"They have a cause to fight," he says.
Trouble is, "It's a juggernaut effect," he says with a slow drawl. "You can fight all you want, but you're going to get bowled over. . . . It's a way of life. That's just the way it is. Money has power."
And the bog, he says, isn't something he's given any thought to
