As I mentioned earlier my lovely wife wanted to go visit a specific furniture/antique store today for Valentines. I agreed of course because making her happy is always top on my list.
The trouble is the store she wanted to visit is in the charming metropolis of Columbia, Missouri which is West of us a little ways. I know Columbia is hardly a metropolis but it is the largest (and only) outpost of Federal tyranny locally. All that taxpayer money flowing into the University pretty much makes Columbia the only place that can say it is growing within miles of us. Even our poor State Capital is showing signs of this decline but Columbia keeps right on bulldozing and clear cutting adding in more and more retail space, restaurants and parking lots.
Although I did notice a fair bit of closed businesses and empty store fronts this trip so maybe reality is beginning to creep in.
Columbia also has that liberal disease of placing small traffic circles everywhere they can and somehow managing to make roads that conform to no natural rules of flow or common sense what-so-ever. You never know which way to actually turn there.
Yet the part of traveling to Columbia that irritates me the most is driving through a large section of the Mark Twain National Forest. The winding little road we drive on is actually kinda fun but if I look on the sides at the waste and stupidity strewn all along it my blood pressure starts to rise.
The forest service goes through there and cuts down some of the most beautiful and largest trees any man with a wood furnace or stove would kill for.
AND THEY LEAVE EM LAY TO ROT.
Yes you read that right they just leave em where they fall. Sometimes they cut the tops off but the trunks are left all in the name of ecology or something.
Now I can certainly understand not allowing just anyone to go in there and gather up wood just willy nilly. A permit and rules should be required, maybe a lottery or something but to just leave all that fine timber lay is to me a sin. Or it should be.
Some of those trunks have been laying there for at least five or six years. Majestic old White Oaks and tall strong Hickory cut down so the second story trees can thrive I guess. In one area it looks like they are trying to create a mini-prairie section or something which will never happen unless they go in and remove all the new seedlings that have been coming up.
I really don't understand it to be honest but the environmentalist have spoken and ya know burning wood is so bad for the environment and all so those trees must lay there and rot like mother nature intended.
Except I have never seen mother nature out wielding a Stihl chainsaw before especially while sporting a beard.
Keep Prepping Everyone!!!
I hope all the fast food places stay in business so the university graduates will have jobs this summer so that they can pay their obummer care bills.
ReplyDeleteYour road sounds like the Blue Ridge Parkway, they first confiscated the land from generation owned mountain farms and then won't let the citizens back on it to cut wood or even hike without a special permit.At least you kept the wife happy.
Back in the mid-seventies when I lived in Washington State the forest service, high lords of Olympic National Forest, allowed us peasants to purchase 'stumpage' within the forest. I purchased this permit based on acreage which permitted me to cut and sale standing or fallen cedar for the shake trade. In between cedars I'd take care and look around and make sure I didn't have witnesses and fall a nice select fir for firewood. I figured since I paid so darn much for the permit I'd might as well get my monies worth. Cedar paid well but why waste my profit on commercially cut firewood. Even then I hated government and especially asking permission to cut wood my taxes protected from the public. I loathe bowing to big brother.
ReplyDeleteJohn S. Wilson's Tribes is the closest to your neck of the wood post-apoc novel I have read in a while. It's actually a little north of Platte City.
ReplyDeleteBut to be honest, he doesn't tend to add a whole lot of local flare to his novels. I like his writing well enough, but local flavor is not his strong point.
I agree whole heartedly! I have always been a tree hugger. I want to fall to my knees and weep when I see someone cut a beautiful old tree that took 50 years to reach the size it obtained and build a house in that spot, only to come back and plant a couple of Bradford pears in the yard to replace it. ARRRR!!! Makes my head want to explode!
ReplyDelete+1 to Stephen!
ReplyDelete