Watching the Olympics

Like many of you I’ve spent the last two weeks watching the Olympic. In fact, I watched more of the Olympics than I have in a long, long time. You can do that when you’re retired.

They were not as exciting as in the good old Cold War days when the USSR, East Germany and Cuba—those commie bastards—were our hated rivals, but these Olympics were pretty good compared to the last couple. Maybe I feel that way because I had time to watch more of the coverage this time around.

I’m not sure we appreciate how talented the athletes are, particularly the winners. I saw a Facebook post the other day that suggested that each Olympic event should include a contestant who is just an average schmoe to give us a frame of reference.

It’s actually a good idea when you think of it. It has the added advantage of injecting a little humor into the Olympics. I’d like to see the average American male attempt the pole vault or shot putt. Better yet, I’d like to see some celebrities compete in some of the events, particularly those loud mouthed celebrities that I dislike immensely. I’d pay good money to watch Rosie O’Donnell on the uneven bars or the balance beam. I’d love to see Michael Moore try to cram his fat ass into a kayak for the men’s single slalom event. It would be my dream see Debbie Wasserman “If My lips Are Moving I’m Lying” Schultz compete in women’s boxing.

This got me to thinking that what we really need are some Olympic events taken from reality. It would make the Olympics more relevant for average schmucks like you and me and bring a little more excitement to the games. Let’s face it, events like team diving, synchronized swimming, the 10 meter air rifle contest, team equestrian jumping, archery and rhythmic gymnastics are not going to bring you screaming to your feet.

I propose that the host country for the Olympics be allowed to create a limited number of events that are representative of the location where the games are being held. For instance, in Rio they could have had the 100 meter dysentery dash where the contestants have to run to a porta-potty after drinking the water. Another event could have been the timed wallet heist. The winner is the person who gets his or her wallet or purse stolen on the streets of Rio in the shortest time.

If the Olympics were held in North Georgia there are several contests that could be featured. I’d like to see the 10 pound chitlin toss where contestants compete to see how far they can throw a 10 pound box of frozen chitlins. A 4 x 100 meter relay with a live chicken would be exciting. One problem is that we may have difficulty finding anyone around here who has a 100 meter tape measure. This is still a feet and inches place.

How about the stationary boiled goober jump? The object of the contest is to see how far a person can jump from a sitting position when a bag of hot boiled peanuts is spilled on his or her lap. Another good event would be the yellow jacket triple jump contest where contestants compete to see how far they can hop, skip and jump backwards after stepping on a yellow jacket nest.

If the Olympics were held here I’d like to see a Toccoa tubing slalom contest. In this event blindfolded contestants have to tube down the frigid Toccoa River in an undersized inner tube. The first person to arrive at the finish line after navigating the rocks, shallows and backwaters and enduring having their ass immersed in 50 degree water for three hours is the winner.

What if the Olympics were held in an American city where there has been rioting? You could have the 50 meter large screen television snatch and grab where the contestants have to run 50 meters, leap through a broken storefront window, grab a 50 inch large screen TV and return to the finish line.

Another relevant event would be the 100 meter police barricade hurdles. It’s like the 110 meter high hurdles but with police barricades and tear gas.

Then there’s the K9 steeple chase where the contestants have to run through back yards, around clothes lines and garbage cans and over fences with an angry police dog at their heels. The contestants would certainly be motivated to do their best.

Of coure, any sort of contest where tasers are involved would be highly entertaining. I’d certainly stay up past my bedtime to see the finals. Unfortunately I can’t think of any way to work tasers into a sporting event.

If the Olympics were held in Chicago you could have the 40 yard dead man’s carry where Democrats compete to see who can carry the most dead voters to the polls to vote for Hillary Clinton.

Imagine if the Olympics were held in an ISIS controlled area. You wouldn’t want to miss the 50 meter suicide vest walk where last year’s winner will not be returning to defend his title.

I’m sure you can think of other events that would be suited to where you live. The possibilities are endless, and the events certainly would be a lot more entertaining than some of the existing Olympic events.

Turning to an entirely different subject, I have done my best this year not to bore you with news from my garden, but I think a brief update is in order. So far the garden has been relatively pest free. I’ve suffered no deer, mole, rabbit or groundhog damage and just minimal insect damage. I’m not saying that I’ve won the war on garden terrorism. In fact, I believe that nature is just biding its time and gathering its forces for an all-out assault next year. Nature’s sneaky and persistent like that. I’ve learned that eternal vigilance is the price of good produce. And in case you’re wondering, I profile. If it’s furry or has six legs I’m taking it out with extreme prejudice.

It’s been a challenging gardening year here in North Georgia. There has not been a lot of rain this summer, and they tell us we are in a severe draught. Still, I have managed to harvest about 200 pounds of string beans and enough pickle cucumbers for Meredith to tell me to stop bringing them into the house. That’s how I know that I’ve grown enough.

My peppers like the heat and are producing enough for Meredith to freeze and pickle many jars. The tomatoes are doing okay, and Meredith has canned quite a bit of sauce. Earlier in the summer I had some really big cabbages, and I hope to have a large fall crop. I’ve got a large crop of potatoes and butternut squash. My corn was are a little stunted from lack of rain but I grew enough so that we had fresh corn for a couple of weeks and Meredith was able to freeze some for later eating. My leeks did great, and my okra is producing dependably. I won’t know how my sweet potatoes fared until the plants die in the fall and I dig up the tubers.

So there you have it—the garden crop report for Fort Yacavone in North Georgia. For more details watch the agricultural report on RFD TV. While you’re there check out the Mollie B Polka Party (shades of John Candy in “Plains, Trains and Automobiles”) and reruns of Hee-Haw and the Porter Wagoner Show featuring a young and full-figured Dolly Parton. Which reminds me. I may grow melons next year.

Tubing the Toccoa River, or Boy My Balls are Cold

The Toccoa River runs through the heart of Fannin County dividing the county in two. Fed by mountain streams, it flows north towards Tennessee exiting the county at McCaysville on the Tennessee line.

The Toccoa is dammed by the Blue Ridge Dam. The dam, which was built by the TVA back when Franklin Roosevelt was President, is smack in the middle of Fannin County and forms Lake Blue Ridge. Lake Blue Ridge has two claims to fame: it is the highest in elevation of all the lakes in the TVA dam system, and it is also the southernmost home of a fish called the Walleye.

The name “Toccoa” is from the Cherokee term for “where the Catawbas lived.” The Catawbas are a Native American tribe. North Georgia was the home of the Cherokees before they were kicked out by white men in 1840. Given the meaning of Toccoa, it would appear that some Catawbas lived in the middle of the Cherokee land at one time.

Curiously, the Catawbas are Siouan-speaking tribe but the Cherokees speak an Iroquoian language. The two languages are as different as Portuguese and Romanian. This makes me wonder. If telephones had been invented back then would you have had to press one for Cherokee and two for Catawba? On weekends did Cherokee couples go out for some Catawba food? Did unattached Cherokee braves want to hang out along the Toccoa because they heard the Catawba chicks were loose?

Back to the Toccoa River. It has two names. At the Tennessee border it becomes the Ocoee River. Same river, different name. I have yet to find an explanation for why that is.

One of the attractions around here is tubing the Toccoa. There are several small companies in the area that make money renting tubes to people and transporting them up river to float down the Toccoa. So it was that a couple of Saturdays ago I found myself accompanying Meredith, her brother and his wife and daughter for a tubing trip on the Toccoa.

I had reservations about going. I’m just not good at extended family outings. I have a tendency to become curmudgeonly. I suspect that’s due to all the conviviality and good cheer that usually accompanies such affairs. It grates on me. Maybe it’s the Italian in me. A large family dinner in an Italian family is considered a bore unless a shouting match breaks out.

Despite my misgivings, I decided to go along on the tubing trip. The drill should be familiar to you if you ever went tubing. You go to the end point, select a tube, then the tubing company drops you off upstream so you can drift back to the end point. It’s a pretty simple business model. They probably don’t study it at Harvard Business School.

The first thing we had to do was select our tubes. There were two choices: tubes with a bottom and tubes without a bottom. That’s when the guy in charge of handing out the tubes casually remarked that the water temperature that day was 51 degrees.

51 degrees! That’s a setting on a refrigerator. It is not a proper temperature for a river that I am about to go tubing in. I spent 37 years living on the Gulf of Mexico. I refuses to go swimming in the Gulf unless the water temperature was at least 85 degrees. According to the hypothermia tables, it takes 10 to 15 minutes to lose dexterity in 50 to 60 degree water if you have no protective clothing. Exhaustion or unconsciousness occurs in 1 to 2 hours, and death occurs in 1 to 6 hours. While I thought it unlikely I would lose consciousness or die, I was concerned about the possible loss of dexterity. I had visions of coming out of the water with claw fingers and never being able to type or play the bass guitar again.

We selected the tubes with bottoms. I don’t know about the others but I was thinking that the thin fragment of vinyl across the bottom of the tube might provide some insulation and keep my butt dry. Nope.

The other feature about these tubes is that they had a small inflated hump at one side to provide a back or head rest. As events would prove, the purpose of the hump is more of an aspiration than a reality.

After selecting our tubes we piled into a van and were driven to the drop off point where we entered the water and started the adventure. It was at this point I discovered that the tubes were designed to carry emaciated runway models, small children, dwarfs and anorexics. They were not intended to float a six foot one, 200-plus pound man comfortably down the stream. Imagine a limp strip of bacon hanging over the mouth of a coffee cup. That’s pretty much what I looked like once I sat in the tube. My legs hung off one side, my upper body projected over the other side, and my ass drooped in the middle. Because of my weight my tube sat lower in the water and my butt sat deeper in the river.

Any thoughts of a dry ride were quickly dispelled. It took less than 30 seconds for 51 degree water to slop over the side of my tube where it was trapped in the middle by the vinyl bottom of the tube. If you want to replicate the experience try dropping ice cubes down the front of your shorts. Major shrinkage will occur. Harry and the twins were not happy. And if Harry and the twins are not happy you can bet your ass that I’m not happy.

Because my legs hung over the side of the tube into the water they acted as a sea anchor, slowing my progress and causing me to face upstream. I spent ninety percent of the time traveling backwards down the river. This got old pretty quickly. There’s a reason sight-seeing busses have forward facing seats. It’s much more interesting to watch the sights approach you than it is to see them disappear behind you.

Not that it mattered much from a sightseeing perspective. The inflated protrusion on the tube that was supposed to be a back rest or a head rest was neither. In my case it was simply a large inflated lump somewhere in the middle of my back. When I lay back in the tube I discovered that I was facing the sky. In order to actually look where I was going (or in my case where I had been because I was always facing backwards) I had to crane my head up. It didn’t take much time for that to cause major neck fatigue. I spent most of the trip staring at the sky.

The Toccoa is a shallow river with a mild current. There are large rocks in it. Some of them project above the surface; others are just below it. Because I was floating backwards and facing the sky I couldn’t see the rocks to avoid them so I kept running into them and getting hung up. The fact that my butt was riding deeper in the water only increased the number of rocks that I could run into. This was, literally and figuratively, a pain in the ass.

Every time I ran aground on a rock I had to attempt to shove my way clear. This usually resulted in another splash of frigid water on my privates. The constant struggle to get free of rocks slowed me down considerably. It didn’t take long for my tubing party to get well ahead of me. This meant that I had to spend an inordinate amount of energy awkwardly using my arms as paddles to catch up with them. It was a really hot day, and all this exercise made me start to sweat. It’s a curious sensation to have your ass in a deep freeze while the rest of your body is sweating.

All rivers have eddies and backwaters. The eddies and backwaters are sections of the river where the water slows or even flows backwards. For some reason I kept drifting into these eddies and backwaters. When that happened I would have to do more arm paddling to get back in the current flow. I started to wonder whether the trip was an allegory of my life.

There were the large, low hanging branches over many stretches of the river. Because I couldn’t see where I was going I kept drifting underneath them. I didn’t mind that. At least they were something to look at other than the sky. And then someone warned me to watch out for snakes dropping out of the branches. Oh great. That’s all I needed to make the trip truly memorable. On the positive side, there was no way a kamikaze snake could surprise me since I was always looking upwards.

I was very happy when we finally arrived at the end of the trip and I could get out of the river. I don’t want to scare anyone away from enjoying a tubing trip down the Toccoa if you’re ever up this way. The rest of my party had a great time I’m told. But I’ll be honest with you. If I ever get another invitation to tube the Toccoa I’ll pass. I’d rather try to pass a kidney stone than go through that experience again.