up on the hill

Jill and I are members of a Sunday School class that operates in a discussion format that encourages group participation. There is a very talkative couple in the class, Britt and Rachel Pitell. They are extoversive guys, willing to talk about all of their child rearing issues. She is an executive in a commercial real estate firm, which was mildly curious to me while his role as a consultant with the global accounting firm, Peat Maverick really got my attention. One of the hundred insecurities that I have is that I have little experience in working as a consultant. I feel like I need a lesson in selling consulting services, accounting for such services and knowing how to transform a transaction-ally oriented relationship with a client into a long term one. The sad irony is that, I always believed that it was consultants - like Peat Maverick that ruined the Wacho Bank but I also saw my former employer rely heavily on them, pay them unimaginable sums to think through strategies that we had people smart enough to imagine and, for the most part, they remained independent. And, as I have felt the unexplainable hand of Providence nudge me in one direction or another, I was open to that possibility again when we got invited to a dinner party at the Pittel's home. It was a snap waiting for my opportunity to talk with Britt and I wasn't even surprised to find that he consulted specifically with banks. I was able to get him to tell me the names of his superiors and enlist his help in representing our process as a solution for them to advocate to their clients. I was even more delighted by the realization that our conversation was being over heard by a woman lawyer from the consulting firm Rat - Glassner, who also consulted with banks, and the federal government. Was this our entree to the FDIC? Before the evening was over I had two important conversation streams to prosecute. Come Monday morning, I placed calls into both resources and had follow up appointments scheduled in a matter of hours.

Still fighting back the anxiety to keep committing time to resource building, instead of calling on prospective clients, I knew that I had one more Land Trust to go see. The Georgia Trust had been prominent in all of the reading that I'd been doing and their Executive Director, Kathleen Eden had a super reputation. She was a Wall Street lawyer from Alabama who eschewed all of that, returned to Auburn University and had gotten a Masters degree in Forestry and now ran the largest land trust in the state. I had called her 90 days ago and never reached her but that morning, while checking e-mails I saw one, to me, from her. She never referenced my earlier attempts to reach her but said that I had been recommended to her. I was flattered and noted the coolness of this being the first time that someone had reached out to me. And this was an important someone. We agreed to meet at her office in Preston, Alabama later that week. (The Georgia Trust and it's sister, the Alabama Trust share offices in Preston, Al because that's Kathleen's family home and she negotiated that when she took her job. The Ga Trust also has offices in Savannah and I had made a contact there a while back and look forward to meeting those guys too, but Kathleen was the undisputed boss.)

To keep it from being an entire week of talking with no one who was going to actually pay us, Matt and I dropped in on our prospective client Richard Dings at the One Georgia Bank. He hadn't seemed especially receptive the first time we met him but he had encouraged us to keep in touch. This time he told us that if we wanted to go look at a tract that they owned, which seemed to fit our model, we could but he made no promises. As Matt needed to do something else, I took the directions to this property in a far, northern suburb of Atlanta and started out. I found the property easily enough and was aghast to see "blue pipes", as far as the eye could see. These pipes, indicative of utilities in the ground with their access stubbing sticking straight up in rows reminiscent of corn has given the them the slur name of blue pipe farms. Clearly, One Georgia Bank was not the only owner of this kind of distressed property as there were at least 4 subdivisions contiguous to this one. As luck would have it, the road was blocked by a chain and massive pad lock, so access was, by car wasn't possible. And I was disappointed anyway because the graded lots, with curb and gutter and asphalt streets hardly looked like a conservation eligible site. But I pulled on my parka, stepped around the end of the barricade and started walking down the deserted street imagining what this hill side must have looked like before the bull dozers and what it might have looked like after 145 houses were built and occupied. The reality, as if in some parallel universe were homeless lots and streets that went to no where. But, at the bottom of the gentle grade, a full half mile for the entrance was a magnificent flowing stream, the Settingdown creek which bordered this and the other derelict developments. The stream, a tributary of the Etowah river that would be completely dead in 5 years following the construction and occupation of the houses yet to be built. Fertilizer, waste of all kinds, storm water run off from the asphalt all would have polluted this stream and harmed a primary drinking water source for the city of Atlanta, or so I was thinking as I trudged back up the hill. Then, as if on cue, my cell phone rang and it was my bankrupt friend from Sunday School who had been a developer and whose father and mother had been lured to Atlanta but the promise of prosperity in the real estate boom. My friend, was just calling to check on me but while we were on the phone he asked me to do something for him. He asked me to get to the top of the hill and to turn my ear into the wind and tell him what I heard. On that frosty cold afternoon, in the slanted light of the remains of the day I told him that I didn't hear anything but the wind. "Exactly," he grimmly proclaimed. 12 months ago, I would have heard carpenter's nail guns and the good natured, rapid fire Spanish chatter of landscapers. I would have heard bulldozers churning and dump trucks rumbling. I would have heard the sounds of people working. Despite the lure of honorable ecological conservation, my friend begged me to recognize the staggering human cost being born by legions of people now unemployed by the depression in the home building industry. There was no more eloquent evidence of the confluence of these two realities than the silence I observed on that hill.