FOES AND WOES

CHAPTER I : A DOCUMENTARY

I was told that morning "It will be the last day of our suffering." The idea was great. At the end of our class, this was proved wrong. I had received tons of homework for my winter holidays. There are lots of bad types of home works such as doing projects and writing multiple chapters but the one I received in Geography was awfully awful. It was a documentary. A documentary on any place you feel is diversely rich in resources and has all forms of landforms - mountains, plains, rivers, glaciers, plateaus, beaches, forests, caves, waterfalls, etc. While in class, I remembered saying this type of a place heaven but I remembered that a heaven doesn't have schools. I had 7 days of holiday.

DAY 0

I reached home that day and instead of going straight to my bed (that's what I usually do on the day before my vacations start), I went and picked up my Atlas. Considering it a privilege to have one, I turned the pages carefully to the country I live in. I searched the whole of my country and found not a single place close to having all the resources and all the landforms.
I later searched the dictionary and realised that for a place to have all the resources, it must have three things - Water, electricity and human resource. I searched my country and realised that a town next to my city about five miles away had these things. The place was called Beverton (I realised how the townsmen modified Beaverton for the name). This place was astonishingly beautiful as described in my Atlas. I will write a short note for you -
Beverton is located beside the bay named after it.

The bay has a small island in the middle of it named Small Paw. North of Beverton is the bay; east of the town is a plateau which slopes further into east and emerges with a forest plain; west of the town is another plateau, larger than the east one and rises higher in the further west to join with some tall mountains (highest peak - 4673 ft.); the south of the town is the intersection of the two plateaus called Atherfall. The intersection of the two plateaus has been cut through from below to pave the way for a road joining the town with the rest of the world. The road passes below the Atherfall. Atherfall is called so as the intersection has a large cave in it. A river originating in the high mountains flows eastwards and enters the large cave in the Atherfall. There, the river takes a sharp left and forms a waterfall falling down the Atherfall. The river flows towards the bay. The road runs beside the river. There is no beach near the bay but cliffs and arcs carved out by the waves. The plateaus bear dense grasslands.

Upon the west plateau is a coal mine which is the source of income of the 250 residential in Beverton. The coal mine has discovered a system of caves running through the whole town. However, only the coal mines are mapped. Beverton is usually cold which stands against the fact it is close to water. The river and the bay are frozen during the winter for a short period of time but other than that, the water is usually icy cold. During summer, one would see a lark or two but owls are prominent. Wild Irish dogs are common and the environment though supposed to be green, is red the most time. During autumn, the grass is not to be seen but it is usually red and brown with the leaves that had gone away with the summer. During monsoon, you would still not see the ground green for the water erodes the rocks and all you see is a brown-barren land of weathered rocks and stones. During winter, you would see the time slow and slowly freeze into the cold waters. The caves are usually dark and not a single soul visits them. The road to the civilised is all snowy during winters. The only way to the west plateau is to pass through the eastern forests and plateau and then over Atherfall to the western side. The grasslands up hide the caves with fields of wheat.

These caves are home to snakes that one would imagine in the dark. The grasslands in the winter are the same as fields filled with needle-like stalks of the crops that had been harvested. The cliffs near the shore are a maze for the crabs and the humans walk over these in the seasons for small strolls they call time-spent-well.
Ruby like gems are the people who visit the village during their vacation-times. Rare are these people for the town as it is not sought after a lot. The town is the same as a bill straight out of a restaurant's payment machine - something which is looked at by a man's thoughtful eyes - he continues to act as if he is ignoring it, yet he thinks a ton on why the cost is so high. Yet it is not about the value of a place but about the people of the place. One might have seen people change places; not places change people - as that is how one survives......