Trout Goes Local

With a day off in front of me I thought "what could be more exasperating than a public meeting with our County Commisioners over zoning regulations? Why.. ,nothing!" so off I trotted to "get my fair share of abuse" ,as Kieth and Mick put it. Interestingly ,I found myself sympathizing with the wacky south valley residents who exemplify those "victims of modernity" I write about occasionally. Historically, they were the simple folks who proudly worked their knuckles to the bone for such Conglomerates as Champion Int. and Plum Creek Timber. They had decent jobs and an IDENTITY,they were in fact the very embodiment of the rugged individualist Western mythos until their corporate masters got greedy? greedier?followed the logic of capitalism and tried to cut every last tree.



Fast forward to the eighties and some new science which showed the rapacious logging responsible for all kinds of degradation, fisheries, water quality and quantity, species loss, and on and on. Lawsuits get filed and it is the "damn environmentalists"and government regulators that are out to destroy their way of life. The Giant corporations take the money and run, shut the mills, sell the butchered land they own as real estate and leave the Public Lands for the next generation to clean up. We get armed uprisings and militias and sieges and a simmering, seething mistrust of all things new, new rules , new residents, new lingo like "consensus building" and "public processes". From 1979 to 1984 I worked as a choker setter and skidder operator and rode in the 4 am dark packed into "crummys"(company crew cab pickups) drinking coffee and finished my days in logger bars drinking stronger potions so I know directly of what I speak.

Back at the meeting, these refugees from a simpler time stood as a group in the back of the room with their beards and ball caps and checkered shirts and felt alive again as they took on the powers that be. They said they "just want to be left alone!"Little matter that their arguments and reasoning and facts were totally skewed and incomprehensible, that they had no concept of the forces at work or what exactly it was they were resisting. They want what was. They are terrified of the huge question mark which stretches in front of them, the real possibility of further impoverishment, exploitation and powerlessness. What they asked for is the right to secede, to opt out of the county-wide process, to live on their little island and not have to deal with the complexities and uncertainties of a fast growing and changing society. I say let them have their refuge, their illusion, for as long as they can maintain it. It can be like Jamestown or Frontierland at Disneyworld. Like the Taliban or the Mennonites, maybe they can find refuge in a time bubble. More likely it will become a Mecca for Libertarian nut jobs the country over and they will unwittingly bring on a flood. So it goes.