It seems like I am always doing something with my computer. Well, today I received a replacement computer from Dell. We shall see what happens. Perhaps in a day or so everything will be up and running more better.
Speaking of, I saw my brother in ICU yesterday. He certainly seems to look well considering he had his chest cut open and ribs spread apart while much of the sac around his heart was stripped away. He’s back in a regular hospital bed this afternoon. That’s great and it’s also amazing.
I don’t know if anyone who has had any kind of major surgery can not think of how remarkable the human body can be. People fooling around with your heart and you’re up eating chicken two days later. And let’s see, just when was penicillin invented? Cheezeswhiz!
I hope my replacement computer is half as resilient as the human body. Chow mein.
We don’t want to engage in generalizations about a certain Western state.
But one cannot deny it can get pretty hot out in a lot of the dry, desert areas of Arizona. Some may say don’t judge a book by its cover. Or, as Jimmy Buffett once said, “Don’t try to describe a KISS concert if you’ve never seen one.” Thus, I will attest that I spent the night in Tucson once on a day in which the high had been 115 degrees. Okay, I have also seen 115 degree temperatures in Western Australia and even 112 in Waco, Texas, during one unbearable summer. So what am I getting at?
Well, maybe it is the scorching heat and exposure to the heat over long periods of time that has caused some of Arizona’s lawmakers to perhaps bake their brains.
I speak of the law passed in Arizona that would require police to ask of anyone they stop the proof of their immigration status. Those who do not have proof of citizenship would be charged with a crime and could be detained if suspected of being in the country illegally. Republican Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed the bill just a short while ago, according to CNN.
Well, what is wrong with this if it will help slow down illegal immigration, which is acknowledged as a huge problem in this border state? It is kind of hard to find a starting point as to why this is a really bad idea.
First off, this will be challenged if it becomes law. It should be found unconstitutional on grounds of illegal search and seizure, among other reasons. But one never knows what will happen with the crazy side of the Supreme Court and whomever turns out to be the swing vote. Actually, one never knows what the whole bunch will do in the first place.
Such a law is not only ripe for racial profiling, it practically requires such actions. Maybe you think it is okay to stop — willy-nilly — brown-skinned people if it helps weed out illegal aliens. I don’t think that is neither fair nor a good idea. But what if it leads to stopping, detaining and arresting for lack of proof of citizenship if that person with dark skin is an American? Let’s say an American hero. A veteran. A firefighter. What if it’s your grandma, su abuela? What if it’s your daughter? What if it’s my daughter, who is of Hispanic descent, and whose experience in Mexico has amounted to maybe Cancun during spring break?
Or, what if the police stop you? Yes you, white bread? Hey, cops here along the border know that all “Mexicans” aren’t brown. Some are white with blond hair and blue eyes. While they are at it, why don’t they just go ahead and arrest me? I am white, fair-skinned, but I could be some kind of Eurotrash, Irish terrorist or some old bald-headed American ex-Hippie who decided to become a friend of Mohammed. It goes to show you never can tell.
The Arizona immigration law is so knee-jerk that if you were standing on the side of some tall mountain in Arizona, chances are you would be holding on to each leg as they extend outward while you go flying toward a Roadrunner-like ending. The only difference would be the Roadrunner living to fight another day, while you …. well, not so much.
At one time, the type of folks who were elected to our state legislators were folks who were into “boosterism.” They were the ones who belonged to the local chamber of commerce, the Kiwanis Club, the Lions Club. These folks who got sent to do the people’s works wanted folks to come visit their communities and their states. They wanted people to spend money once they got there on lodging, food, tourist attractions, stores, hunting and fishing. Today, either lawmakers don’t care if anyone visits their state or cities or if they do, they are too stupid to realize that passing laws such as this anti-immigrant bill has so many opportunities for scaring away visitors that it is ridiculous.
Do Arizona lawmakers care about their state or local folks? They may think so by being hard-assed on the immigration issue, but they are going about it just as wrong as it can be done. Maybe when only militia-types or other wing-nuts wearing their bandoleers and all their guns show up, and the real tourists do not, will Arizona state fathers realize, oops, we may have misjudged things just a bit.
It would be hypocritical of me to slam the oil and gas industry right now as I finally unloaded one oil and gas property last week for more than just pocket change — not much more than that to be sure.
But I don’t control the petroleum markets, obviously, or I wouldn’t be sitting here writing on a blog that only a couple of friends, a few of my brothers and I read. I’m joking, of course. I have had readers from 21 different countries on the last 500 page hits. However long a period that might be. And it might interest you to know that behind the U.S. and Japan (my friend Paul), 1.6 percent of my page visits have been from the Ukraine while 11 countries including China, India, Germany and Iran tie for 0.2 percent of my readers, visits, whatever. Filler. That’s what that was.
The point I was going to make was that gasoline remains higher than it was a year ago, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. On average it is anywhere from $0.70 to $.0.95 per gallon throughout the U.S. It seems, as well, that it might just take another jump because of the explosion and sinking of Transocean’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico.
The Coast Guard Cutter Zephyr from Pascagoula, Miss., searches Wednesday for survivors from the Deepwater Horizon explosion about 50 miles southeast of Venice, La. USCG photo
No one is saying that right now, except people like myself who know absolutely nothing about the workings of the oil and gas industry. However, doesn’t it seem logical? Even though the Deepwater Horizon had yet to produce any oil it would seem a rig which would cost about $600 million to replace, not to mention scores of lawsuits that one might bet are already on the horizon, sorry for the pun, would set off a chain reaction. And it seems that at the bottom it all ends with the consumer paying more at the pump. S**t rolls down hill, we used to say in the Navy. I don’t know why, it doesn’t seem much like a nautical saying to me.
Transocean Ltd. operated the rig for BP, the artist oil company formerly known as Prince British Petroleum. That company is relatively fresh from having millions upon more millions of dollars extracted from it in fines and from a settlement engineered by local (Beaumont, Texas) lawyer Brent Coon over the BP Texas City, Texas refinery explosion five years ago. That blast killed 15 workers.
With the oil rig’s sinking, the Texas City saga somewhat fresh and the fact that both Transocean and BP each lost more than 50 cents in stock trading today on the New York Stock Exchange, it would certainly seem that a chain reaction is not unexpected. That, of course, could set off more s**t running down hill and ultimately cause motorists to have lighter pocketbooks or at least fewer digits to the left of the decimal point in their bank accounts.
It goes unsaid that as time goes on from when the explosion happened that the fate of the missing workers becomes more and more ominous. That has nothing to do with the price of gasoline in Beaumont, Texas, for now at least, nor does it affect the price of eggs in China.
People have real issues over which to worry such as whether their loved ones are alive or dead in the sometimes unforgiving waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Whether we pay more for gasoline because of this is really irrelevant when looked through the lens of life. Nevertheless, some will pay with their lives so we can pay at the pump.
Inarticulate perhaps as it is to say, it sucks. However, it’s just another day’s work.
Driving home this afternoon from Nacogdoches I decided abruptly to take a drive through the Angelina National Forest. I turned off U.S. 69 near the Neches River on the road that leads to the Upland Island Wilderness Area and the Bouton Lake campground.
It has been years since I drove the whole enchilada from the other side of where the road leads. I didn’t know how far it was to Bouton Lake this way. I didn’t want to spend all afternoon driving so I decided I would drive five miles and then turn around if all I saw was road.
As I drove about five miles I had noticed some guys in a little four-wheel buggy of sorts — something like John Deere’s Gator — but I don’t think that’s what it was in which they were actually motoring. The guys waved. In fact, everyone I encountered driving down this road waved. Friendly bunch.
Just up the road it began to get smoky and I could then see some fire crawling along the edge of where the timberline begins just off the road.
As the woods start to get a little smoky I realize I am without marshmellows.
I kept driving a little ways and noticed that the fire went off into the woods for a little ways. My first instinct was to call for a fire department or the forest service. Conditions have been a bit dry lately in East Texas and certain areas have been beset, for a number of reasons, by woods arsonists. But I thought, well, those guys had just been driving away from where the fire began.
The more I thought about the fire the more I began to wonder if this was a so-called “controlled burn,” or a fire intentionally and legally set for one reason or the other. In the older days, fire from natural sources such as lightning used to create their own sort of controlled burn. Those fires would destroy the underbrush and allow in certain areas a park-like ground cover in the woods. Growth and Smokey the Bear put the brakes on uncontrolled woods fires in more recent years. Of course the Smokey campaign was well-intentioned but perhaps sort-sighted in selling to the public that all wildland fires were bad. They’re not.
I came to my five-mile limit and turned around. A little ways down the road I saw the two men in the little four-wheel utility vehicle. They were parked in front a big pickup truck which had attached an empty trailer, I suppose for the little cart they were using. I stopped to ask about the fire and almost felt stupid asking because I noticed some type of tank in the bank of the truck of the type used for various types of fuel. Fuel like that used for setting controlled woods fires.
" I'll gas up my hot rod stoker we'll get hotter than a poker/ You'll be broke but I'll be broker tonight we're settin' the woods on fire." Hank Williams
One of the men told me he could understand why I would ask and seemed almost grateful that I did. He called his fire a “very controlled burn” and said that the fire was just creeping along the edge of the woods. I didn’t ask them why they had set it. I figured if they wanted me to know, they’d have told me. I just wanted to satisfy my mind that it wasn’t a wildfire, which I did.
My little fire pictures, thankfully, are nothing compared to the fire pictures I have seen like the ones coming from the offshore oil rig Deepwater Horizon.
Fire boats deluge the oil rig Deepwater Horizon about 50 miles off the tip of the Louisiana coast. USCG photo
I’m happy my encounter with fire worked out okay. Let us all hope those missing from the explosion and fire on the Gulf of Mexico are found safe and sound.
By the way, old Hank’s wonderful songs depicted a lot of the backwoods, cracker life of the South of his time. That makes me wonder if all the words in “Settin’ the Woods on Fire” were strictly figurative?
It’s hard to believe that I haven’t lived in the country for 25 years. When I say “the country” I mean in the sticks, rural free delivery, the outback. It does not mean I haven’t lived in the U.S. of A., but sometimes I wonder if it is the same country that I have been living in all these years.
For two years and then another year after a year in the city, I lived nine miles outside of Nacogdoches, Texas, on about 200 or so acres of mostly pasture land. Since I was in college most of the time I lived there the place was just right for parties, big parties, big normal college parties where you would do things like empty your guns into a couch and then build bonfires out of the couch, then walk on a log thrown on top of the burning couch, or sit on the roof or in my late friend Waldo’s case, fall off the roof. No the fall from the roof did not kill him. He died of cancer about 14 years later.
I went on a photo safari today during my drive in the country to my old haunts and to downtown Nacogdoches where I once worked as a fireman. Unfortunately, my old digital camera seems to be giving up the ghost. I’d say that is quite appropriate since I’m visiting my old haunts. I took a bunch of pictures, including those of where I used to live. Wouldn’t you know that those I took of “the farm” were absent.
Little pines grow to be big pines for 30 years or so until they are "harvested."
It is impossible to convey how much I miss country life. True, I haven’t lived in any humongous cities since I left college. Well, I did spend some time, equaling maybe a year and a half in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. But mostly I have lived in cities the size of the one I am living now. A city of about 115,000 with a metro population of about 250-300 thousand people. Still that doesn’t even compare because when I lived in the country it was outside a city of about 30,000 people. Whether all of this is relative, I can’t tell you.
All I know is the country out toward Woden and Kingtown seemed on a beautiful semi-cloudy spring day as even more beautiful than I remembered it. I drove down what used to be called “CCC Road.” Whether it was trailblazed by the Civilian Conservation Corps I couldn’t tell. I can tell you a couple tales about that road.
First, after I graduated from college I came back to Nacogdoches and had intended to stay with a friend for the weekend but that friend wasn’t around and I couldn’t get in touch with some of my other friends for some reason. This was, of course, before everyone had cell phones. So I ended up out toward where I lived and then pulled onto a little trail off CCC Road into the woods a little ways. I stopped there and spent the night. I think my car seat completely reclined all the way back. The next morning I woke up and saw this huge dog, something like a St. Bernard, staring at me through my window. It wasn’t hostile or anything. Just kind of matter of fact.
Another time, leaving out all the gory details, Waldo and I were traveling into town from the farm. He lived there for about a year before moving to the Dallas area and then I moved in. We were in his little Tercel hatchback. Ironic, sense he had complained that the little Ranger pickup he had before could carry a payload of maybe … “crackers.”
The entire area near the other end of CCC Road had been clearcut for timber. Since they cut down or “harvest” pine trees after25-30 years, it was no coincidence that the same area was clearcut today.
On with my story, for whatever reason, I suppose it makes trees grow better or something, I don’t remember. But the people who owned that land that had been cut over planted just about the whole thing in watermelons. I mean, it was a major watermelon farm. Big trucks pulling what Waldo described as “rattle trailers” (’cause they rattled) would be going down all the roads around Watermelon World at all hours of the night. Also, for some reason, the dirt on CCC Road near all the melons had turned to what I believe — from my two semesters of Geology — as being some of the area’s Sparta sand. It was very difficult to negotiate even on the best days driving through those sands. And the night we attempted to go to town we got stuck in what I had dubbed “The Moon.”
We went back to Waldo’s, later my place, and called a wrecker. The wrecker guy said he’d be out. Asked what it cost, he said: “That’ll be a $50 bill, Bubba.”
On through CCC I traveled this afternoon and then shortly after turning onto Lacyville Road, I then turned on another partially dirt, partially gravel, partially clay road called Saint’s Rest Road, so named for the missionary Baptist church about a mile from Lacyville Road. I don’t know if I had ever actually gotten out and looked around the church before but I did today.
The wooden building is a simple, but fine little structure. The kind of building most folks who would like a little church in the country, would want. It reminds me of that old hymn, or I guess that’s what you would call it,“The Church in the Wildwood,” altlhough the little brown church or the song wasn’t brown at Saint’s Rest. It was white.
Trees out in front of the church sport moss, at least a few do. They say moss gathers on trees on the side pointed toward a river. In this case it is true because the Angelina River isn’t too far away.
I got back almost to pavement after driving onto Pine Flat Road, to what eventually becomes a Texas farm-to-market road. As I rounded the curve right near where the dirt turns into pavement, a big old county dump truck was parked with a load of asphalt. Two county prisoners in their black-striped uniforms where shoveling asphalt. I wanted badly to, at least try, to take their picture but decided against it.
One thing I recall from riding down these country roads this afternoon — aside from all the good memories — was how serene I felt. It was if I didn’t have a care in the world. That was even the case when my co-worker called me and told me she was going to have to change schedules with me next week and I would be out for evaluations with my boss for two days on Monday and Tuesday instead of Wednesday and Thursday. Who cares? I didn’t have any red lights at every intersection or cars that were rolling boom boxes or the constant hum of noise coming from the interstate.
It has been so long I don’t know how I’d adjust living in the country again. I remember after moving back after being gone just that one year and it freaked me out for awhile listening to all the crickets outside at night. But if there was anyway to make it happen, to still make a living or to make a better living, I might have to try one more tour in the country before I get too old and have to once again live near folks.
The drive today just told me what I already knew. I really miss the country.
