Monday, May 25, 2015

War is Declared

AP/UPI Newswire
Special to the Fort Yacavone Daily Gazette
May 21, 2015

MOLES ATTACK GARDEN
YACAVONE NATION AT WAR

In a daring early morning surprise raid that caught officials napping, one or more moles have attacked the Yacavone garden. High-placed government authorities of  the United States of Yacavone say there have been daily follow up attacks. The extent of damage is yet unknown, and officials fear the attacks will continue.
Master Gardener Jim “Mr. Greenjeans” Yacavone discovered the damage. “I walked out to the garden with my cup of coffee early one morning to look for Colorado Potato Bugs, and there were several mole tunnels running down the rows. It was horrible,” he said.
“They came in under the radar. In fact the little burrowing buggers came in underground. We were completely surprised and unprepared to prevent them,” said Yacavone. “We can’t be sure if it’s the work of a lone wolf mole or whether multiple moles are responsible for the attacks.”
The United States of Yacavone immediately declared war on the mole nation. Speaking before a joint session of the U.S. of Y. Congress in the capital city of Fort Yacavone, President James “Bully Pulpit” Yacavone said, “Today is a day of infamy. The mole nation has attacked our garden without warning or provocation. A state of war now exists between the United States of Yacavone and the mole empire.”
Yacavone told reporters after his speech, “I am not afraid to call the moles responsible for these assaults what they are—radicalized Ismolic terrorists.”
In a stirring address before Parliament (yes, it is curious that the U.S. of Y., which is an absolute dictatorship under James “Oberfuerermeister” Yacavone, has both a congress and a parliament) Prime Minister Jim “Winston” Yacavone said, “We will fight Mr. Mole in the turnips. We will fight him in the beans. We will fight him in the rows and pathways, and we will never surrender so that one day people will say this was our finest hour.”
Six-star General James “Unconditional Surrender” Yacavone, commander of all U.S. of Y. military forces, spoke from the U.S. of Y. war room (which is located in the workshop near the small refrigerator which holds the cold beer): “Even as we speak our troops are mustering and preparing to go on the offensive in Operation Mr. Mole Must Go. Our soldiers are well trained and motivated. They know they are fighting for the survival of everything that is near and dear to them, especially the tomatoes and potatoes.”
Sources say that U.S. of Y. forces have been authorized to use all weapons in the arsenal including deadly traps and poisoned baits and lures to rid the garden of pests. When asked about this, General Yacavone said, “Now is not the time to get warm and fuzzy about the little furry creatures. They started this war, and we will use every means at our disposal to end it. The Geneva Convention does not apply to moles, and I will not tie our troops’ hands with restrictive rules of engagement. War is hell.”
The Director of the Y.B.I. (Yacavone Bureau of Investigation), James “J. Edgar” Yacavone, said, “Our preliminary investigation suggests that the mole or moles responsible for these attacks are radicalized domestic moles who have gone underground in a secret sleeper cell. I have directed our field agents to keep their noses to the ground to locate and destroy these moles.”
Cabinet Officer Jim “Pork Barrel” Yacavone, who heads the U.S. of Y. Department of Homeland Security and Tractor Repair, announced that all moles within the U.S. of Y. have been declared critters non grata and must leave the country’s boundaries within 24 hours or face immediate death and destruction. “I vow that our borders will be secure, and that any moles found within this country will be deported. There will be no amnesty for illegal moles within our sovereign territory,” he said. Leading Democrats and liberals did not protest the new policy because, well, there are no Democrats or liberals within the U.S. of Y.
Attorney General James “Judge Roy Bean” Yacavone has authorized U.S. of Y. law enforcement personnel to use profiling to help detect mole infiltrators. “Any small furry animal with large flappy front paws and poor vision should be stopped and questioned,” he said. Police Chief Jim “Law and Order” Yacavone welcomed the attorney general’s announcement saying, “This will help us distinguish unlawful moles from squirrels, chipmunks, weasels and other small law abiding animals.”
James “John Birch” Yacavone, founder of Citizens Against Mole Predation (CAMP), issued a statement: “This proves what we have been saying all along. Our garden is being infiltrated at the highest or I mean the lowest levels by these burrowing animals. You cannot trust them. Today it’s moles. Tomorrow it will be gophers, groundhogs and vols. We need to stop this menace to our garden once and for all.”
The war has broad support among the citizens of the U.S. of Y. “We are united as one people to stamp out this underground threat to our crops,” Senator Jim “Filibuster” Yacavone told reporters. Reverend James “Billy” Yacavone said, “God is on our side.”
In related news, Jim “Dewey Decimal” Yacavone, head of the Fort Yacavone Public Library, said that the book “The Wind in the Willows” is being removed from library shelves. “This book paints an all too sympathetic picture of Mr. Mole’s escapades. We can’t have our children exposed to these sentiments in this trying time for our garden’s vegetables,” he said.
(The Fort Yacavone Daily Gazette will publish a special supplement about the Mole War with reports from our correspondents in the field this Sunday.)

Monday, May 18, 2015

A Busy Time

I can’t speak for other rural places but after the relative inactivity of winter, spring has proven to be a busy time in this neck of the woods. At least it has been for Meredith and me.

Our oldest son, Jake, has a two month break before entering graduate school, and he is spending most of that time here with us. That’s a good thing. When he’s here, he works on his projects. Being the doting father that I am, I have to lend a hand and that keeps me busy. So far he has finished restoring a dune buggy, and he now working on restoring a 1989 Ford F-150 pickup truck. He has it completely disassembled, and its various parts are scattered throughout the workshop and the pole barn. I vaguely remember being that energetic once, but I’m certainly not now. Just being around him makes me tired and in need of a nap.

Our youngest son, Mike, graduates from Marine boot camp on June 5, and we will be driving to Paris Island to see the ceremony. It will be an emotional experience, and I know his platoon mates will be wondering as they march by the reviewing stand who the big sobbing pussy is in the back row of the bleachers. Uh, that would be me.

Mike gets to stay with us for 10 days before he goes to his next training. Jake will be here also. You know that will be a busy time.

It seems like every club and organization that I belong to has gotten very active this spring. In the last month I have participated in the Master Gardener plant sale, helped the Master Gardeners spruce up the Blue Ridge Arts Center, assisted the Fannin County Extension Agent with the annual rabies clinic, worked with the Feed Fannin volunteers to get the Feed Fannin garden planted, started helping the Food Pantry pick up food donations from Walmart twice a week, served as a volunteer at the Blue Ridge Wine and Jazz Fest and spent seven hours in an emergency room to name just a few outside diversions.

And then there is the garden. The garden has been a more hectic task this year than last mainly due to the weather. Last year we had a mild, slow progressing spring. It gradually got warmer, and I was able to take my time getting the garden ready and putting in my plants. Not this year. This year we had three continuous weeks of rainy weather, and the soil was too wet to till and prepare. Then it got unusually warm overnight, and the soil dried out. Like every other gardener in Fannin County, I could not resist the compulsion to get my garden planted. When you have a garden as big as mine that’s no small task.

I’m pretty certain that I’ve gone overboard on the garden this year. It has doubled in size to about 4,000 square feet. To make sure I have enough paste tomatoes to make and can tomato sauce I planted over 35 Roma tomato plants. Then someone told me how productive Roma tomato plants are. If they all grow and produce I’ll have so many paste tomatoes that I won’t know what to do with them. Next winter it could be spaghetti night every night.

I also planted 60 feet of pole beans, 120 feet of potatoes, 100 feet of peppers, 80 feet of winter squash, 80 feet of cabbage, 80 feet of onions, 10 hills of pumpkins, not to mention assorted amounts of okra, collards, Swiss chard, kale, lettuce, spaghetti squash, and corn. I still have to plant two rows of leeks and two long rows of sweet potatoes.

If the secret of happiness in retirement is getting involved and staying busy, then I should be the happiest son of a bitch you ever saw. But the truth is that I’m beginning to feel a little too involved and a little too busy, and it’s beginning to get stressful. I may have to take a time out from my retirement to rest up.

On a totally unrelated and some would say paranoiac note, Meredith has set up two hummingbird feeders very close to our porch, and it’s rare to step out on the porch and not see or hear one or more hummingbirds buzzing around. I mostly hear them. To me they sound like miniature A-10 Warthogs on a strafing run, and I’m beginning to wonder how safe it is to be around them.

First of all, they have two speeds—hovering and Mach 2. They move so fast it’s like they disappear through space and time as they go from one feeder to the other. They may be cute little creatures but they are also high speed projectiles. And then there is the way they are built. Have you ever really looked at a hummingbird? They’re pool darts with wings. Finally, given the size of their heads, their brains have to be on the small size. You have to wonder whether they have enough neurons in their brains for a fully functioning collision avoidance system.


I searched the internet, and I could not find a single documented instance of someone being injured by a misguided hummingbird but I’m still not convinced that it cannot happen. As if I didn’t have enough to worry about. I tell you it’s a jungle out here on the frontier.

Monday, May 11, 2015

Stupid Is As Stupid Does

A View From The Emergency Room
There is no clever way to tell this story that does not result in the conclusion that I’m an idiot so I’m just going to fess up. The Friday before last I stuck my hand into a running lawnmower and injured the middle finger of my right hand. When people ask me about the large bandage on my finger, no matter how I try to spin the incident the inevitable response is “Boy, that was a stupid thing to do.” Even when people do not utter those precise words you can see that they are thinking it. I’m just waiting for someone to say, “Jim, life is a box of chocolates…”

I can’t blame people for thinking it was a stupid thing to do. That’s what I concluded about four nanoseconds after it happened.

After I injured the finger I walked up to the house and tried to sound casual as I asked Meredith if she would mind fetching me a couple of towels and driving me to the hospital. It’s hard to sound casual when the pain alarms are going off in your head and your brain is screaming, “Holy shit, this hurts. Go to full emergency mode. Battle stations, battle stations. Dive, dive.” If Meredith had replied, “I’m a little busy now, dear,” my next request would not have been casual.

I don’t have a lot of experience going to emergency rooms so I don’t know if my trip to the ER was typical or not. I thought there were some stupid questions. I was wearing work boots, dirty farming overalls and a shirt with its sleeves cut off, and I had a red bandanna on my head. Do I look like someone who visited Africa in the last 30 days? Maybe the red bandanna made the admitting lady think I was related to Aunt Jemima.

Fortunately for me there was a hand surgeon doing surgery at the hospital that day, and he was able to see me following his surgery. That was a good thing because I’m pretty sure the ER physician wanted nothing to do with the finger. The telltale was when he looked at the finger, screwed up his face and walked away. Unfortunately, it took the hand surgeon quite a while to finish his surgery so I was in the ER for several hours before he came in to see me.

ER examining rooms are not the most interesting places to pass the time. This one didn’t even have a stack of three year old magazines to read. The only reading material in the room was a flow chart on how to handle a patient with suspected Ebola so I’ve pretty much got that memorized now. I didn’t really understand all the medical terms, but what I got out of it is that the way to handle a patient with suspected Ebola is to move to another state.

Things got better after I got a shot of Demerol, but time started to drag. After I went through all the cabinets looking at the medical supplies I finally laid down on the table to take a drug induced nap. Just as I was dozing off, the hand surgeon walked in.

I got to watch the surgeon reassemble the tip of my finger. It was genuinely interesting to watch him work. As he was picking debris out of the wound he was telling me if it was bone, dirt or grass. When he was stitching me up I just had to ask him whether he had any hobbies like tying flies or quilting.

The injury is not near as bad as it could have been. My finger is an eighth of an inch shorter than it was, and my fingerprint is now off to the side a little bit. The large bulbous bandage at the end of my finger combined with the need to keep the hand elevated makes it look like I’m flipping people off.

If there’s any consolation for my injured pride it’s knowing that I’m not the first person to show up at the ER in Fannin County with a hand injury due to moving machinery. That’s not a very consoling thought. All it means is that there are a lot of people standing in the stupid line with me. 

Well, that’s it from my neck of the woods. The weather has turned nice, and everyone is rushing to put in their gardens, me included. The time in the garden will give me time to work on my Forrest Gump impression. That's all I have to say about that.

Monday, May 4, 2015

Paradise is not Perfect

There have been quite a few controversies in Fannin County lately involving county and city government. The three county weekly newspapers have made for entertaining reading recently. That’s not usually the case unless you find stories about the 4-H club, high school sports and the level of the water in Lake Blue Ridge fascinating. The truth is that the news in Fannin County is usually boring which is okay by me—that’s one of the many reasons I moved here.

When something interesting happens around here, it’s like an elaborate game of Clue to find out what really happened. Each of the papers has its own spin and perspective so you have to read all three to if you want to come close to the full story. Even then you’re probably going to feel like you’re missing something most of the time.

The controversy that has attracted my attention the most lately involves the use of the N-word in open court by a superior court judge and an assistant district attorney.

The facts of exactly what occurred are in dispute. The News Observer has one slant, and the Fannin Focus has another. The Fannin Sentinel lies somewhere in between. Based on what has been reported in the papers and the transcript from the court reporter, there was a bond revocation hearing at the courthouse in Blue Ridge, and an African-American witness by the name of Alan Duray “Ray” Green was sitting in the hall waiting to be called by defense attorney George Weaver. Inside the courtroom Assistant District Attorney B. Morris Martin was addressing Superior Court Judge Roger Bradley. The rest of the story I will take from a very entertaining letter to the editor in The News Observer:
Assistant D.A.Martin, incredibly, was shaky on the names of the two witnesses who had been subpoenaed. One of them, he speculated was called “N----- Jim” but qualified his words by saying the name was “somewhat of a derogatory nickname.” Somewhat? Really? (And he didn’t even get the given name correct. So much for attention to detail. Jim? It was Ray.)
Then after a couple of Fannin County Sheriff’s investigators weighed in on names, batted around a few, adding to the name game, Assistant District Attorney Martin declares that the name is “Ray” and says, “All right, he’s known as N----- Ray.”
The confused Judge Bradley then chimes in wondering if this N----- Ray is kin to N----- Bob who lived right in back of the courthouse in 1974 and wondered aloud if this N----- Ray could be in the same family as N----- Bob.
Does Judge Bradley somehow think that some black families share the surname or given name of N-----? I don’t think they do, actually.
Perhaps attempting to bring sanity to the proceedings, defense attorney Weaver informs the judge that the man in question was sitting right out in the hall and that he had subpoenaed him and that his name was Ray Green.
At this point, maybe someone should have simply walked out in the hall and asked Mr. Green for his name—he probably could have shown them his license.
As you might expect, this story has had some legs. The court reporter was told to transcribe the proceedings, and the transcript was released to the public. Witnesses who were in the courtroom that day say the transcript does not accurately reflect what happened. The court reporter has retained an attorney to represent her. Despite several public record requests, the audio of the conversation has not been released, apparently in violation of the state’s public record law. Green has also retained an attorney and says he intends to sue but at this point I’m not sure who he intends to sue. The state Judicial Qualifications Commission is investigating the incident.

I’m looking forward to receiving the papers this week to see if there have been any further developments.

Am I surprised that the N-word is used in Fannin County? No. The truth is that I’ve heard it here more often and more openly than in Florida or at least in the parts of Florida where I lived and worked. What does surprise me is that the word would be used in open court by a judge and a district attorney in the presence of a court reporter. That shows an amazing lack of sophistication on the part of supposedly educated men. It’s particularly galling to me that the incident involved people in the legal profession. Sometimes you get the feel that large segments of the local population are still living in the early 1960s.

The core question that I’ve been wrestling with is whether this indicates that Fannin County as a whole is any more prejudiced than any other place in the country? After mulling it over for the last two weeks, I confess that I simply do not know the answer. It may well be that the percentage of prejudiced people here is pretty much the same as anywhere else with the only difference being that people around here are too ignorant or unsophisticated or naïve to know to disguise it. I suppose some would argue that makes this area worse than others though I tend to believe that concealed prejudice is a worse evil than open prejudice.

Regardless, I’m disappointed in Fannin County. I feel like I’ve encountered an imperfection in my little slice of country paradise.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not pretending to be perfect. Like anyone else, I have my innate prejudices though I like to think mine are more logical than most. I’m prejudiced against liberals, Ohio State fans, synchronized swimming in the Olympics and reality TV shows. All of these prejudices, I feel, can be defended.

As a trial attorney, I learned not to have high expectations for the human race regardless of race, color or ethnicity. I suppose I should be thankful that people are not perfect. I made a good living for 37 years based on that fact that people were careless, stupid and prejudiced. In a perfect world you would not need lawyers. So I guess the moral of this post is that even here in the blissful, quiet and placid mountains of North Georgia humanity remains true to form.