A Wednesday morning rant about much of nothing...

Okay, so Willy ’n I went for our morning S&P tour of Ol Fair Oaks ’n there is definitely a touch of Autumn in the air…’bout time to put on socks,jeans rather than shorts ’n long-sleeve tee-shirts…almost…

We’ll still have warm days, days in the ‘90s are not uncommon in October, though we’re not apt to see any more triple digit days but they’re not unheard of…

October is usually a dry month here in NorCal so the fires that have stunned California this summer are still a danger…don’t take much, a careless camper, a tossed cigarette, a hot muffler sometimes ’n with a whoom and a whoosh, another acre bites the dust…

If we do get those torrential downpours that the weather people are predicting, it’s gonna change the topography of California again, what with mudslides, etcetera…back in the Gold Rush Days, those rugged miners used gigantic water cannons to blast the hillsides and turn them into raging rapids of water, mud ’n stone…California is a beautiful state ’n I especially love the mountains but I often wonder what it must have been like before the ’49ers went bonkers…on a side note, I grew up in a Kentucky that was in the process of recovering from the depredations of the coal companies that, while they didn’t use water cannons, would carve the tops off the mountains in search of that glistening black coal that powered so much of 19th ’n 20th century America…changed the topography of Kentucky then,poisoned the streams and fields, killed off the animals…I was told as a boy that Kentucky had just simply been over-hunted but that wasn’t the truth…the coal companies raped the land then and are still at it in point of fact, slicing the tops off mountains in West Virginia and carving out huge slabs of Montana…There is a promise to recover, of course. If you watch television, I’m sure you’ve seen actors representing the ‘big energy’ companies telling you how much better the land will be once they get all that messy coal out of it and are able to recover and re-plant and make it all like a brand-new Garden of Eden…in my youth, one of my favorite radio (anyone remember) shows was Fibber McGee ’n Molly and a recurring line was spoken by Molly at least once in every show…”T’ain’t so, McGee!”

I don’t live in Kentucky anymore but I hear that the hills are making a comeback on their own, (God’s help, not human)…the forests are thick again, fish in the streams again and bears and lions are back…I recall my grandfather telling me that the last lion kill that he remembered was back in the early ‘20s and he only heard about it, didn’t witness it…

Mother Nature has a way of reclaiming her own, cleaning up after humans make a mess of things…Mount St Helen’s is a good example…expert humans predicted that it would centuries before that forest regenerated itself but old Ma Nature doesn’t work on a  human time-table…

We humans have a lot to be ashamed of in our treatment of this planet we call home, we rape and pillage the land that sustains us without a thought for the generations that are supposed to follow us…in the settlement of America, there was a practice called ‘slash ’n burn’ which consisted of cutting out the timber to open the land, burning it because we couldn’t think of any use for it, then plowing up the grasses that held the soil so that normal rain wouldn’t wash it away. The crops that we planted were short-term that depleted the soil they grew in…when the soil wouldn’t hold them anymore, the people simply moved to another location and did it all over again.  

It ain’t a practice that was unique to early  Americans…people all over the world did much the same, including those wanna-be ‘guardians of Mother Earth’ so-called Native Americans…the only reason they didn’t wreck so much of the land is that there were not enough of them but the ones that were here did a pretty good job of it…they just don’t like to remember it that way.

Today, oh boy, today, we are much more enlightened…why, we can destroy and deplete millions of acres with a single match…more than that, we can drop a bomb that will stop Mother Nature in her tracks for centuries…or, at least, we think we can…I don’t think we’re nearly as omnipotent as we like to think we are…there’s a lot of talk about how humans are disrupting the climate, responsible for possibly destroying the earth completely…I don’t believe it but many people do…none of these people want to do anything about it personally, y’understand…Nah! They just want to force other people to act in their stead...