There’s a stretch of road near my office that I go a little bit out of my way to ride through on my way in to the office and on my way home. It’s called Laguna Canyon Road, and it’s a stretch about 3.5 miles long of, well, nothing. Just rolling hills and thickets of trees and a pond and, well, nothing. It’s very pretty, very peaceful, and I go that way because it is pretty and peaceful and it’s a nice way to decompress from the traffic on my way to the office and a nice way to decompress from the office on my way home.

Empty space like this is kind of unusual down in Orange County; in fact where I work in Aliso Viejo they’re flat-topping the hills around the office in every direction in anticipation of building yet more cookie-cutter developments. Empty space down here seems to stir a pathological need to, as Joni Mitchell once put it, “pave paradise and put up a parking lot.” OC is not a wildlife-friendly place, is all I’m saying.

So I was really touched and pleased when I first starting taking Laguna Canyon a year and a half ago because there were several signs along the road saying: “We’re keeping it wild — thank you, Irvine Company!” An Orange County developer specifically setting a beautiful area aside and saying “We will not build here”? Who’d a thunk it? I actually felt a little bit of warmth at them over it. I tasted a drop of the milk of human kindness.

But that untouched area is untouched no more. For several months now it’s been under seige by grader and bulldozer and dump truck and steamshovel and teams of construction workers. They’ve graded all 3.5 miles on either side of the road to make a dirt road for the trucks. They’ve carved huge cutouts into the hills on either side. They’ve laid sewer pipes all down the west side. They’ve created huge dirt berms and piles of boulders they’ve dug out of the ground they graded and bulldozed. The pond is turning brown with runoff from the new dirt road. There’s nothing pretty or peaceful about it any more.

“We’re keeping it wild” is apparently a euphemism for “We’re gonna shred this place.”

Who’d a thunk it?