[Pangloss62]

It's certainly not a cut and dry situation (is that a animal-skinning metaphor?).

Most unprosperous people here in the ATL are obese, but there aren't always a lot of McDs in the rural areas, so I can see huntin and freezin the meat.

This reminds me of an e-mail my friend in Oregon sent me last winter. It's a good read (she's a greenie/crunchy in a Red/Rual area):

Eastern Oregon, circa early winter 2006:
Last night I attended a town meeting sponsored by the ailing timber/agriculture industries. I was the only person there who hadn't lived here at least 5 years. I also had the only car in the parking lot with a ski rack (instead of a trailer hitch, for my snowmobiles) and 4 cylinders instead of 8. (Oh, yeah -- there are no compact parking spaces anywhere in John Day.)

Anyway .... most folks showed up because it's also the annual Road Kill Chili Feed -- and they weren't kidding. There was one chili dubbed "Mile marker 149." But the one that stopped me cold was ... Bobcat Chili. And they may not have been kidding. The elderly lady across the table from me said she'd eaten cougar before and didn't like it so she wasn't touching the bobcat.

My boss goes bobcat hunting on weekends. He calls it "out looking for kitty cats." He said the "interesting" thing about bobcats is that when they get caught in a leghold trap, "they just lay down, they don't try to get away." Oregon has outlawed hunting for mountain lions with dogs because it was deemed unsportsmanlike, but you can still set traps for bobcats.

My coworker (there are only 3 of us in winter) announced he had twins the other day and he meant baby cows. On his weekends, for fun, he does team roping. Next month is when the big ranches will run their herds through town -- I'm not sure where to (their imminent deaths?) but it should be another valued cultural experience. Bring your cameras and pull up a stump in front of Otis' Barber Shop.

Anyway, at last night's meeting, Bill Clinton got lots of laughs, and the buzzwords were "manage" and "treat." These translate to "cut" and "kill," depending on whether they were talking about forests or wolves. As in "How many acres did we treat in 1993?" or "Idaho gets to manage wolves; why can't Oregon?"

At one point, a guy held up the 1907 USFS handbook and said "Why can't we go back to this?" (Ah, maybe because there are no big trees left, and that's what that book was all about?)

I saw a man wearing a shirt with an elk head embroidered above his heart. Women wore sweatshirts with chipmunks and bird feeders and white picket fences imprinted.

One audience member said, "We need to load all the environmentalists on a bomber and drop them on Iraq."

They blamed Portland and Eugene (but not Corvallis, home of the timber-industry-sponsored OSU School of Forestry) for all the economic problems east of the Cascades. "How do we get urban America to care about rural America?" one guy said, then added that it was "a silly prescription" to be told not to cut within 300 feet of a stream. (Ah, let's see -- maybe urban America will care about rural America when rural America cares about rural America?) Oh, yeah, and this guy is the chief forester for the USFS here. For the past 22 years.

As for my job, it's going great, truly, as long as no one asks me on a weekend hunting or logging excursion. Work has provided some terrific out-of-town trips to meet with other staff in the region, which is absolutely gorgeous to drive through this time of year. It's like motoring through a national park -- and, well, part of it is, the John Day Fossil Beds Nat'l Monument. The rest of it is giant ranch holdings or private timberlands, with some USFS and BLM lands tossed in here and there, so you don't see many settlements and even fewer people (but lots of cows). It was wonderful last week because the snow is so deep it's concealed all the fences, so I could imagine taking off from the road and cross-country skiing. My biggest challenge here is how to ski with fences.

On one of our work trips we took the scenic route so my boss could look for elk, which he is able to track by their hoofprints in snow by the roadside, which he was doing while he drove us through a snowstorm at 50 mph -- and he was not using the 4WD in our pickup -- to attend a .... driving safety class. Taught by a guy from England. A guy who drives on the left is teaching all Oregon state employees how to be safe drivers.

At the class, the instructor asked for examples of distractions while in a car. "A good-looking guy," one woman said. "A pretty woman," a guy said. "A big ol' elk up on a hillside," said another.

Fred, meanwhile, is holed up in Eugene, where he's mopping up after a major flood through our garage. Well, someone has to stay in Eugene and defend our right to eat tofu and commute by bike.

I leave tomorrow for my first of two weeks training at the police academy, where I will be issued a citation book and a fat leather-bound notebook that, my boss says, I'll be told not to tear any pages out of because that looks bad if I'm asked for details while on the witness stand. I can't wait for the chance to testify against all these hostile museum-goers.

Marti