Growing up in and around the Loess Hills of Pottawattamie County with their thick canopy of trees was as close to magic as I think anyone gets to these days.

In the heat of the summer, they were a dark, cool place to go exploring, mushroom hunting and camping. In the winter, they were an endless supply of the most amazing and dangerous sledding slopes ever created by God.

I could go camping with my old high school buddies, and even though we may have only been less than a mile from a road or a house, deep inside a gully between two 600-foot hills, we might as well have been in the unexplored wilds of Alaska.

Any Jack London fan could appreciate the almost vital necessity of finding a place in the world where a young man can feel as though the norms, standards and protection of society no longer apply.

Besides the occasional barbed-wire fence, rock road and day camp, one could easily trek for miles without finding substantial evidence of human life.

There is something exciting about walking around in a forest you could get lost in that stimulates the same part of the brain that gets off on reading “The Lord of the Rings” or the occasional Conan novel.

As the sun would set and the shadows grew longer and darker, my imagination would always get the best of me. The same terror that infused “The Blair Witch Project” last summer has always been alive and well in the woods. No matter how rational one might like to think they are, the impenetrable darkness of the woods will always win.

The woods are a place that live in the dark recesses of our collective unconscious. Check your Grimm’s. The forest is where you go only to come out transformed. And the forest always gets the better of us.

That is until we succeed in strip-mining them for such valuable resources as limestone.

The beautiful green hills of my youth are nearly all gone now. As hard as it is to believe, hills and trees that stood virtually untouched for thousands of years except for the occasional cow’s hoof, are evaporating under the indelicate touch of Caterpillar tractors and massive dump trucks.

I hate going home to see how much farther the rock quarry south of my house has dug into them. Entire hills leveled for some rich man’s bottomless greed. I couldn’t save them if I wanted to.

It is a sickening sight, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. The closest most of us come to that feeling is when we see that favorite arcade of our youth has been replaced by a Kum & Go. We get a little wistful and move on.

Our environment is important and affects who we are. This is why I have always found urbanites to be less well-grounded than people from the sticks. Getting used to constant change makes us a little too accepting of needless change.

Now, I know that some people find talk about the Loess Hills gets old. The Des Moines Register routinely does editorials about protecting them and since most people who read the Register do NOT live in Western Iowa, they probably don’t care.

I think that may be in large part due to the fact that they just don’t understand Iowa’s Gentle Giants. I also think that calling them “Iowa’s Gentle Giants” puts off anyone who might otherwise give a damn.

So why should we care? That is a tough one. If you don’t care, you don’t care. Explaining the rarity and beauty of these hills either falls on deaf ears or you’re preaching to the choir.

Does telling you that the Loess Hills were formed thousands of years ago from wind-blown silt make you love them any more? Probably not.

Would knowing that they only exist in our state and China shake you from your apathy and want to save them? Doubtful.

But as is my wont, I like to sneak in under the old radar any time I can. The simple and pragmatic reason we need to save the Loess Hills is because there is damn little to look at in this state. We aren’t overly blessed with lakes, mountains and canyons.

Besides the occasional scenic overlook off the interstate and infrequent state park, there isn’t jack besides cornfields and graveyards to take one’s attention away from the monotony of gently rolling plains covered in corn, soybeans and bone orchards.

Why piss away majestic, rare hills just because some rich dentist wants to stick his house up high where everyone can see it? Why destroy hills just to take the limestone out from under them and put cash in the hands of industrialists?

Besides Okoboji, our state’s lakes pale in comparison to those in Missouri and Minnesota. No offense to Storm, Clear and Big Lakes respectively, but we just don’t rock in the lake department.

The closest we come to a decent canyon is Ledges. That is a state park worthy of many visits in a lifetime, but it is a relatively small park.

Mountains? Forget about it. The nearest we come to that are the Loess Hills, and we tear them down for yuppie housing developments and dump waste in them routinely just because we don’t accept hills as geographically marvelous enough to respect.

What is? People marvel at mountains. I cannot say how many times I have listened to some rock jockey from Colorado go on about how cool it is to live at the foot of the mountains and look upon them every morning over coffee and corn flakes.

Mountains are nice. Not to take anything away from mountains, but they are dead common. You cannot swing a dead cat on planet Earth without hitting a mountain somewhere.

Bragging about how cool your state is with its mountains doesn’t impress me. Did you take a hand in building them? I don’t think so.

If they were made of softer material, most mountains would get the same treatment as our hills do. Man has always been as impressed by his ability to level great beauty as he has been impressed by the object of beauty itself.

So the next time you have an opportunity to voice your concern about the Loess Hills, take the time to sign that petition or tell your senator they are worth saving. This state is flat enough as it is without tearing down the only things that stick out from the plains besides grain storage towers and the occasional retirement home.

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Greg Jerrett is a graduate student in English from Council Bluffs. He is opinion editor of the Daily.