What a hail storm the Midwest just had! “ I ain’t never seen nothin’ like it”, I heard one old timer say. I have said the exact same thing several times the last few years. You have to start getting some age on you to say that effectively. I never, ever said that when I was 25 or 30 years old. When I was that age, about everything that happened was a fairly new experience anyway. But now that I am older I have seen Ozark rivers at their highest ever and in a year or so the same rivers at the lowest they have ever been. Something about that isn’t quite right.
I live on a remote timbered country ridge-top not prone to flooding, but subject to high winds and bad winters. I am scared to death of a tornado with this ridge in its path. A horrible ice-storm hit pretty hard here, about ten or twelve years ago. I ain’t never seen nothing like that! Limbs everwhere! But today it seems like it never happened.
Still, my heart goes out for those in the path of the storms, those who have lost so much because it seems that nature has become our enemy. It is something many of us may have felt was coming, sooner or later… those of us who feel we live a little closer to nature than those who mass together in a world of concrete and and pavement and glass and computers. No, I am not one of those global warming nuts…I have no scientific evidence to call upon to help me predict the future course nature might take, and I don’t know for sure what is happening or what is coming. But I know this, SOMETHING STRANGE is happening, and I am fairly sure that worse is coming. It is the consequence of huge, ever-increasing numbers of people, and the idea that whatever man does to the earth will have no lasting effect. Chemicals don’t hurt anything, right? It is the problem of man not realizing that the earth is, after all, the boss…and man is not. Will we ever run out of clean air and water, timber, or food. In order to feed twice as many, what will we have to sacrifice.
I think someday there will be a lot of folks who have been hell-bent for growth and progress and greater technology and more money surprised to see there is a down side to it all in some future day. People like my grandfathers no longer exist and never will again. In fact if we could see the humans of the future it might make us glad we ain’t amongst ‘em. People aren’t suppose to live like this, turmoil is not happiness or peace! But one thing for sure, there is no turning around; there is no changing the course. We are going wherever we are going, and good or bad, global warming, global cooling, or global chaos, ….it is coming eventually, and we will be the victims of that AYE_EYE stuff rather than the benefactors. Men will junk the T.V. and try to remember how to make a garden or wonder where they can catch a fish or how to cook starlings.
I would hate to be living in a huge city, where all of a sudden, there might be no course to take but trying to get out of it, to someplace where there aren’t so many millions of crazy people to compete with and run from. Some things a man can’t do a thing about. When a massive black cloud forms on the horizon, you just can’t change the course or the power of the impending storm. Not even with a computer.
The impending storm might be huge cities with millions of people living without electricity in July and August. Think of no refrigeration, no gas pumps, no lights and in little time, no food. Couldn’t ever happen, right?
There is one thing that gives me a good feeling. I know a place or two where the woods are deep and the big trees still exist and there are no people. There are squirrels there to fry and fish in the river below. And blackberries grow in the summer across the river just like they did when grandpa was a boy. There’s a cave there to protect someone from rain and wind and ice alike and the spring water in it is still clean. If times get too hard, I intend to take my window fan and a microwave oven and a good sleeping bag and some matches, and move down there. In the meantime, I am going fishing this week… a whole lot and close to home.
If you are still old enough to read on occasion, visit my website, larrydablemont.com or larrydablemontoutdoors.com Good reading on both.
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