Hey,
Alright, now I am pissed. I have waited patiently for years now. Waiting to
be back home here in Sitka and to be old enough to play in the 35 and older
city league basketball league. They changed the damn rules. You now have to
be 40 years old to play with them. I will see 40 soon enough but I will also
be far too heavy to...well...to do anything except bowl. Insurance company called
and asked me to take a physical. According to their data from my profile I would
be my ideal weight only if I was 7 foot 3 inches tall. Bastards. Well if I were
7'3" I would not have to be worrying about playing basketball with the
ancients. I could be playing with the non-geriatric athletes. Well...I could
be on their roster anyways. Not going to take that physical. I hear rumblings
of an added dimension and procedure that physicals take on as you near 40. Boycott
State Farm you all!!
Things just are not working out like they said. Nobody listens anymore. I recall
that my mom told me when I was a youngster (and well within the insurance industry's
height-weight guidelines) that there were five critical principles that would
see me through life's many challenges. The first one was.... Well the one that
I remember anyways had something to do with listening and paying attention or
the sort. Never knew what she meant. Still don't. Forgot what I was going to
say. Oh yeah, Alzheimer's Disease is a bad thing. All four grandparents had
it. I even have a step-grandmother who has it. Prevalent yes, but apparently
sexually transmitted in my family as well. A wonderfully rich family tree with
the root structure of a tomato plant in a milk carton.
Trees! Considering joining the NRA. That would complete my swing to the political
right. That and getting my beta copy of Ben-Hur autographed. Came up here in
the winter of 1984 wide-eyed and wanting to absorb the culture. Now I do not
think it is a terrible thing to have to absorb spilled crude oil off the rocks
in Valdez. Too many greenies. Just last week Mother Nature was fined $20,000
for causing a five acre landslide. Turns out she did not have a personal use
wood permit, had not commissioned an environmental impact survey, did not have
mineral rights or the knowledge that the said landslide occurred within 37 miles
of a stream that a hundred years ago had a pink salmon in it. The board feet
quota will increase ten fold this month in the Tongas National Forest. Three
hundred brave outlaws will embark on cutting their Christmas trees.
That is another thing that has my attention as of late. When Kerty and I were
dating, about this time each year, her father would take me out in the skiff
and we would cruise the quite bays looking for that perfect Christmas tree.
The first couple of years we found the beauty stretching for the crisp gray
sky just above the high tide line. Last year the man was able to spot THE TREE
back in the brush 30 rods amongst the devil's club and bear scat. This year,
the damn thing is clinging precariously to the side of a 120 foot cliff in a
windblown snag that you can't even beach a boat within a quarter mile of.
This man is one of my best friends in the world but I am beginning to wonder.
Last summer he cut down two 50 foot alders near our house. We would have to
have someone climb them and attach a line so we could pull them away from the
house as they fell. Well guess what, it was his chainsaw. Know what that meant.
I pulled my sagging butt up the first tree. Made it up to where the dwindling
and straining branches were creaking to hold the mass of a sweating Norwegian.
"A little higher...You see that twig above you another 10 feet up?"
By the time I dragged my butt up there, the top of the 50 foot tree and me were
sagging to the point where we were both only eight feet off the ground. Sagging
worse than Ken Brown's ass after a two hour stint in a whirlpool. He yelled,
"Hold it right there, I'm going to cut it! It's going to splinter to beat
hell but it will be less work for you and far less painful for me if I don't
have to watch you climb back down." Bribed my brother-in-law with a case
of beer to climb the other one and we did it proper. My last stint as a tree
hugger as I recall.
I have a short Christmas list this year. Membership in a 37 and older basketball
league. A renewed life insurance policy. The ability to maintain my fragmented
genetically doomed memory. Someone to reiterate and translate the five things
my mom said would help me through life. Good legal council for Mother Nature
in her trial against the Forest Circus, I mean Forest Service. Ben-Hur in DVD.
A chainsaw. And a scraggly pine or cedar in a location where I do not need to
repel or belay to get to it.
Thank you for your time and attention,
bruce