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In the East Texas woods, something good from a bad drought and an 8-year-old international tragedy

It is a sign of the here-too-long drought that has been plaguing folks from “Texarkana to El Paso, Oklahoma down to Old Mexico and there’s Houston, Austin, Dallas and San Antone,” as Charlie Daniels sang, back in the day when he was a rocking long-haired country boy and not a shill for the nut wing. Texas might “sure make you feel at home” but no doubt its rivers and lakes are gettin’ low.

I couldn’t see rivers and creeks for the dirt while I was traversing Interstate 10 last week while on my way to San Antonio from Beaumont and back. Now the disgusting drought that has expanded through this blazing hot Texas Summer and a new relic of the past has risen to the top because of that same drought. I speak of a large, spherical piece of the doomed Space Shuttle Columbia.

It isn’t so surprising that a piece of the Shuttle has surfaced, even a relatively large one, on the edge of Lake Nacogdoches which is in the heart of a sizeable chunk of East Texas over which the spacecraft broke apart while returning from space eight years ago. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know people would be finding the Space Shuttle Columbia for years. I lived in Waco at the time and drove, while on assignment as a reporter, to where another large unrecognizable part of Columbia lay on a grassy highway median just outside Palestine, Texas. That is about 110 miles from where most of the remains of the astronauts were discovered.

Interstate 45, between Dallas and Houston, in a rough geographic sense divides the prairies and savannahs of east Central Texas, and the Pineywoods of East Texas. East Texas holds the forest lands of the Lone Star State. This is the area that those who know nothing of Texas cannot comprehend due to a lack of rock-filled mountains and mesas. But this is the area where I was born and raised, and spent most of my life here. I knew those sometime thick forests would hold for years and years what was left of that ill-fated flying machine and its amazing crew of American and Israeli spacemen and women.

While the Columbia will forever remain another of the tragedies of space travel it also helps those who dream of the future of our Universe and beyond our lonely planet. How many people — that we know of — have flown in space? Not many at all when you stack them up against the number that hasn’t crossed into that magic land where fat guys like me could even feel light as a feather.

The more that is found of Columbia will help put together the tragic but very useful puzzle of what happened to that day in March 2003 over the cusp of that wooded southeastern area of the United States. I may have mentioned I once wasn’t at all into flying in a plane. Once I learned what happened in many of the airline mishaps over time and the safety innovations that came about because of those investigations made me a much comfortable and, to some extent enlightened, air passenger.

At least the whole drought isn’t a bad thing. But I think it’s now done its good deeds and I sure wish the heck that it would cease and desist.

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In a funk? Got a clean colon? Then don’t read this.

This whole debt crisis thing has gotten me down into the funkosphere where everything is, well, you know, funky.

Funk, funky, Funkadelic, Grand Funk Railroad, the last of which I saw rocking Lake Charles, La., back during the mid-70s, they all are funny words and funky as well. Of course, many old timers may remember “Funk and Wagnalls,” who were not all that rockin’ but they were sure funky with their dictionaries. I wonder how I.K. Funk would have defined: “Funky?” The company stopped publishing in 1997.

But yes, we need to lighten up, children, we need to lighten and brighten and anything else favorable that might rhyme with lighten and brighten lest we become frightening. Why do I talk as if I had watched a “WKRP in Cincinatti” marathon? Well, this is surely not the reason:

Colon Cleansing May Be Risky, Study Finds

So reads the headline from WebMD, adding: “Hazards May Include Nausea, Vomiting, Kidney Failure; Advocates Cite Energy Boost, Other Health Benefits”

What are they saying? Is it good? Is it bad? Nausea, vomiting, kidney failure? I don’t see that much of a boost, much less a boost in energy. Well, you can read the article for yourself but I find the whole colon cleansing topic somewhat disgusting. I mean, it’s your COLON for Pete’s sake. Do you even know what a colon is? Ever have one of those tubes run like a sewer snake up your butt?  Traveling as if it is looking for the next big break in the pipes which would cause a massive flood of New York New York New York sewage in Midtown Manhattan. Oh my!

By the way, do you know the difference between the words “sewage” and “sewerage?” Do you care? Well, I spent many a long day and long nights listening to local elected officials having a long discourse over the two. You see, sewage is s**t and sewerage is Shinola. Not really, Shinola is, or was at least, a brand of wax shoe polish. Yes, people used it to shine their shoes. Yes people used to shine their shoes. Sewerage is the actual physical facilities used to handle sewage. Aren’t you much better off knowing that?

Back to why I am running my very own “That 70s Show” is because one of the great mysteries of the Universe could be solved in just a jiffy. Yes, I’m talking about the mystery of D.B. Cooper.

My sources tell me — My sources being newspapers via the Internets, radio and TV — that the FBI is close to solving the 40-year-old mystery of the man who hijacked a Northwest Orient Airlines flight over (where else, the Northwest) and who parachuted from the Boeing 727 plane with bundles of cash that he extorted out of the Feds. This is a story more compelling than Bigfoot, almost. Who was D.B. Cooper? What did he plan to do with the money? Did he survive the jump? Did he have a clean colon?

Well maybe we will find out soon. If we do, I might not be in such a funk then, but who knows? It all comes out in the wash. It don’t mean nothin’ my brothers and sisters. Right on and get down and right on some more! The end of a funky tale might just be near. Our great national nightmare might be close to over. Or not.

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Fair and balanced?

Someone on a cable news show or perhaps an article I read in the last few days — I don’t remember who — said that one needs a libretto to follow the goings on with Congress and the debt ceiling crisis. For those of you who don’t know what a libretto is, yes some folks are operatically deprived, it is the text of an opera or other type of musical theater. That is a highfalutin’ way of expressing the more common saying: “You can’t tell the players without a program,” which also applies to opera. Opera shopura. Any way one wants to look at matters what is happening in Congress now is mostly a clusterf**k.

Why matters are so screwed up that it even has Fox News doing more than paying lip service to their “fair and balanced” motto by pointing out some really astute analysis of why proposing a Balanced Budget Amendment into the mix with the debt ceiling legislation is not the best of moves. Personally, I’m against such an amendment even though I am for a balanced budget. I just happen to believe that changes to the U.S. Constitution should be for matters that we likely couldn’t attain for ourselves if the federal government did not intervene, matters such as ending slavery or giving women the right to vote. You mean women can vote?

Once again federal beneficiaries and employees face the possibility of not being paid if Congress fails to meet a deadline, and quite frankly, I am kind of fed up with such possibilities.

Congress, at large, needs to get their ducks in the water. That includes all parties. President Obama needs to shape up as well. He is becoming a big disappointment.

I am tired from my drive back from San Antonio this afternoon so I will just leave matters alone here and hope some improvement comes along just as did the rain to our drought-stricken land.

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Not carefree but nonetheless Riverwalkin’

It’s a hunka hunka burning Earth here in San Antonio. I am on the Riverwalk this week for training. It’s a cool place. I haven’t been here in years, but it is so freaking hot out. Right now it is 99 F. That’s not bad. I’m looking at the local weather and in Pleasanton, just south of San Antone, it is 103 F. The training has been very useful. That seems kind of a strange statement sometimes. Nonetheless, it is true.

The Riverwalk is a very tourista-type happening if you have never been there. It’s cool though. It is sort of reminiscent of the French Quarter. You see a young freak-type girl dressed up like a Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader except for the tats and piercings here there and everywhere. Then one can see young-middle age couples wearing similar shirts except they don’t say something like “I’m with Stupid –> I am Stupid.” There are a lot of teachers in town right now. Of course, there is a lot of Air Force, as there has long been.

I remarked to a colleague last night when we went out for a couple of drinks that the young E-2, E-3, enlisted remind me of what such carefree times it was for me when I was in the Navy, just barely past boot camp. My colleague, a retired Marine, or Marine  (I think once a Marine is always a Marine is what they say), agreed. The young airmen got the world by the tail. Three squares and a rack. Most out on their own for the first time. Although the economic situation makes that somewhat different. Some enlist when they find the job situation is in the can in the civilian world. Then it gets tougher to get in the service, at least in some of the services and some jobs. There is also the possibility of getting sent to Iraq, Afghanistan or some vaca spot such as that.

Oh well. It’s about time to see if a colleague wants to go to dinner. Hopefully somewhere cool.

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Dry but not too dry for the ‘skeeters in the SE Texas wetlands

The “mosquito plane” came flying over fast and low just as I was readying this morning for work. The “neeEEEEYOWWWWWWwwwwww” of the prop plane reminded me that I haven’t heard it buzzing over lately. That is most likely because of the drought. However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t mosquitoes around, especially when you consider I live close to a navigable river, a number of bayous and some back bays and quite a few marshes.

All of that came back as I took to the field for work today. I went to a very nice house right on one of the marshes in Orange County, just a couple of “gator’s” tails away from the Neches River. As I got out to talk to a very nice gentlemen who was worried about my bald head getting burned — I left my straw Panama-fedora in the car — I had to bat away a few ‘skeeters. A couple of the pesky critters then decided they’d try to steal away with me inside my car as I was departing, but I dispatched them in pretty quick order.

Not that I am an expert on mosquitoes but I recognized the pesky ones assaulting me as salt marsh mosquitoes which are bothersome but not carriers of West Nile. Just which type of salt marsh species they were is beyond me for we have almost as many types of skeeters down here as we have boudain and etouffee recipes. There are about 50 different species of mosquitoes in my general vicinity, according to the Jefferson County Mosquito Control Division. People in these parts usually encounter about 12 of those species.

The mosquitoes of the salt marsh, rice field and Asian Tiger species are all known to be aggressive little biters. But most of the disease-carrying ones such as those flying around with West Nile Virus come from the Culex family.

Our county’s mosquito control folks cheerfully point out that folks move to the country seeking the “good life” away from the urban areas but sometimes forget that that the “good life includes snakes, alligators, rats, mosquitoes, and mosquito control aircraft coming over at 100 feet early in the morning or in late evening.”

Among the helpful hints that our JCMCD suggests for curbing mosquito populations at home include this note about bug zappers:

“Bug zappers are best placed in your neighbor’s yard so that the mosquitoes will go next door! Turn them off if the mosquitoes are heavy. If you do have one, don’t hang it right over the patio table – move it back from where you will be located.”

Our JCMCD has kind of a wicked sense of humor but they probably need it because where we live, mosquito control is a war that never ends. Yeah, we have a drought but that doesn’t mean your cabinets should be DEET-free zones, especially if you live in Southeast Texas.