Worms in the Head

Slip Point - for how long?

Oh, you gotta hear this - the latest malarkey at least one of the locals is telling herself to excuse the clearcuts:

"And the loggers are cutting due to the alleged tons of chemicals being sprayed, drying and infecting them, and are in a hurry to raze it, but the gov't agencies who would be in charge, are."

A lot of kelp makes gulls happy.

I THINK I know what that sentence structure is, but, it's a TAD confused. The-Guvment-Is-Spraying-Chemicals gang is like the Sasquatch bunch up here - a few flyerovers by test planes from Boeing or some condensation trailes are blown up into Attack like a couple of run-together big dog prints becoming bigfoot proof.

And I finally realized the biggest worm in their heads. I didn't even make the connection until now. Americans who have never been taught any different in the last hundred years are like Scottish Lairds or German Junkers - they want a landscape to look like this: stags, salmon, grouse - and nothing else, not even songbirds, because they might eat something the grouse eat, like ranchers killing prairie dogs, and complaining about pronghorn being brought back. In their minds, the seals are eating "all the salmon," and the seagulls are eating "all the herring."

I had a woman complain about the seagulls when I had just picked up four nice herring flipped onto the beach in heavy surf and took 'em home to Jim cat. A young man, here - whose family is going to survive because he's a Green, not a Greed - told me his dad had said to always kill the mergansers, because "they ate fish." He said he stopped the day he saw the mergansers eating lampreys. 

That's right - these nitwits were killing the very birds that were controlling one of the worst threats to the fish. I swear, the ignorance about wildlife and actual forest and river systems is massive. They might know how to find the fish - and clean them out to the very last one, while blaming the hell out of each other ("It's the Indians! The Sports Fishermen! Bigfoot!" Everybody but ME, in other words) - but they have NO CLUE how an actual river system works in the lives of fish. NONE.

Oh, I'd better say real quick, that the lampreys feed the mergansers and guarantee a future lamprey-cleaning patrol, or these morons will go out and try to kill all the lampreys. I wouldn't put it past them; I thought I knew how stupid humans could be about the environment, but it's a daily moment of my jaw hitting the ground. Jesus, are we REALLY that stupid as a species? The only way we - and I say that as a White Person, because I'm not going to pretend we really didn't get it going - see any way to solve anything is to destroy what's there. We can only work from a desert.

One old guy, snarling about "this guv'ment and this president" said "It used to be better." Well, if he means the time when he remembers the river so full of fish "You could walk on 'em," he and his were working overtime to make that go away - yeah, he's right about that. Although I suspect there's an awful lot of the Pap Finn whine of "Why don't somebody put this white-shirted free nigger on the block?" (Huh. And Obama DOES strip off the jacket and show the white shirt a lot, don't he?)

But because they have no more clue about how a democracy works, especially one this size, than a serf under King Richard, I suspect what the old guy actually means is that the Indians are quietly saying, "Give us back our fish - or we get your town back."

That's right - it's Bartolomé day, isn't it? Named after a Catholic Priest who spent 50 years fighting what was being done by the Spanish to the Natives. It used to be named after a white guy - but he was basically just another 15th century proof that, at one time, Hitler would have been a perfectly normal guy. Adolf the Antique didn't look that way by the 20th century, but those poor Natives who went out to trade and feed and help when those three ships sailed into the beach - yeah, they were basically facing the Nazis; genocide, slavery and all.

So... if it "Used to be better" or different than that time - good. It can just keep getting worse, then, while the people who caused it start facing what they did. And learn to act like grown-ups on this planet, instead of greedy, stupid children.

By the way, Slip Point has eagle nests. Just sayin', in case they try for it. And if that hill, logged, falls onto houses, I get to do juicy news coverage. And say, "I told you so." 

I used to hate having to say "I told you so," but now it's starting to feel good. Why should the environment - and my heart - be the only thing broken? Pride can be broken, too - and usually is. I guess in the case of a slip hill, "cometh before a fall" is horribly literal.