I have faint memories of being in my grandparents’ house in Hollywood, FL from 65 years ago. When you are barely more than a toddler, you don’t have fully formed remembrances but just snippets of memories. Then the night was so quiet that you heard the crunching sound of crab shells when cars drove over them in the dark.

I remember the beehives my grandfather kept and the stings when I stuck my hand in the hive one day. I think I ended up in the emergency room. Broward was then rural except for a small part of downtown Fort Lauderdale. There were plenty of cows and horses, farms, and ranches.

My grandfather was the kind of guy that worked when he had to, fished daily, and hunted when the larder was low. I remember he would have boats on numerous creeks, canals, and rivers buried in the bushes always ready to go. For the most part, he would allow us to fish using a bamboo rod with a line attached.

Photo From Conservation Fund

That Broward is long gone. But this week when I took a tour of the Trailside development, some of that “Olde Time Florida” made a comeback. That was especially true when I drove down the bridal path hugging the Pal-Mar property.  The people that live in Trailside are well-off. If there is anything having to do with ranching being done on their 20-acre ranchettes, it is to qualify for Ag exemptions, but their livelihood isn’t in the cows or the horses.

My grandfather’s roots would be more attuned to the people who have owned property in the Pal-Mar region in the past, and they are very different from those that are buying quarter acre lots there now. Granddad didn’t indiscriminately shoot off semiautomatic guns to be a man. He only killed what he needed and that was usually with a single shot rifle.

I have a photo of my grandfather, his father, and his father-in-law (another of my great-grandfathers) hunting in the Florida woods somewhere. It could even be in Pal-Mar. They looked like serious men doing the serious business of providing for their families. The photo was taken in the early 1930s. They are not a bunch of Yahoos shooting indiscriminately at anything that moves.

The Trailside residents tell me things are getting worse. I have heard that the wetlands are being destroyed and animals are being killed out of season and without a permit. That is bad enough, but do we wait for loss of human life to occur before law enforcement becomes serious?

The residents of Trailside just want to be able to ride their horses without being shot. They don’t want to face bullets whizzing by their heads. What is law enforcement going to do? Right now, it looks like nothing.