Don's Tuesday Column

 

        THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson    Red Bluff Daily News   9/15/2020

    Ethereal, ephemeral beauty, horror

Natural beauty invites getting out of the “flatlands” to mountains, lakes, waterways and vistas. Horrible scenes of destruction are an aberration, overwhelming our world and news, given the limited areas impacted and the finite portion of a mostly pleasant calendar year.

We found a confluence of both beauty and horror at a Cascade mountain lake, tucked next to the Willamette Pass, that has been our “touchstone” of recreation, renewal and recharging for three decades. Spectacular sunsets result from the time that the sun’s rays take—hovering over the Willamette Valley and coastal mountains, turning clouds many shades—before the Pacific Ocean’s nighttime ritual.

Smoke can fill the air from fires in the western Cascades. In summer of 2000 it forced us to take a trip up the Cascade Lakes Highway that ends in Bend, Oregon in search of breathable air for the day. The parking lot and lodge for Mount Bachelor ski area beckoned; alpine ski runs mapped in a brochure inspired us to plan some ski trips, buy yearly ski passes and, eventually, a home for our after-ski enjoyment.

This summer—rather than RV camping in other states, rubbing elbows in grocery stores, etc. with those whose health we knew nothing about—a “stay-cation” at our Bend home seemed the ideal way to limit our (senior, weakened lungs) exposure in a minor Wu-flu area. Our 2-week reservation at the lake meant loading the RV, not knowing what awaited us.

Some “normalcy” is what we found, the outdoors allowed us to keep our distance and shed the masks for a week now. America will get past this—the trends of declining cases and deaths says so. Many readers share our sentiments. A couple of left-leaning campers from Eugene (hey, they’re from Eugene, Oregon’s Berkeley), said they like to go to outdoor concerts; I guessed they’d be as irritated as we are that top-down mandates deprive us of normal outdoor group activities. Soon—freedom, if science rules.

What transpired was unprecedented in our decades of camping: Smoke rose in the west and inexorably moved over the lake, looking like a white curtain, obscuring the forested mountains down to 50 feet above the entire lake. With some anxiety, we watched it slowly lower to the water level, creating an off-white wall.

Boaters and fishermen moved less often; their motors eerily emanated from the haze; occasionally, distant tree-tops gave a hint of outline. For days, it’s been like an oriental painting: ethereal edges around nearer objects. The weird thing is that there have been only minor smoke smells; we finally concluded that the moisture rising from the lake attaches to the fine smoke particles creating, for lack of another word, “smoke/fog,” or “smog.”

After Labor Day, most campers left vacant campsites, leaving a sense of isolation that some folks find unnerving—not us. The activity of cars and campers so declined that we were almost startled to hear children’s voices echo from the trees with no warning; someone camping far away sent them on a walk, their chattering preceding them through the woods. The fog goes through ephemeral changes of hue.

Limited internet allows glimpses into the horrors of (many) arsonist-started conflagrations, ravaging people’s lives, homes, possessions and livelihoods. Do not succumb to the blathering about “climate change” causing fires when your own eyes and mind can tell you that anti-logging, anti-thinning, anti-clearing of dead trees—are the true conditions that turn routine forest fires, part of California’s climate for centuries, into raging monsters.

We have driven along some Central Oregon highways and seen, on one side, a forest cleared of undergrowth with spaced trees—and on the other side a thicket of bushes and trees providing a continuous layer of flammable material up to the tree crowns—it’s obvious what is to blame: naïve, bad forest practices, not so-called “climate change.” Climate alarmists predictions have failed—they’ve no credibility.

Chapter 188 of the weekly “dump on Trump” scandal/outrage du jure brought us the “shocking” revelation that President Trump chose to “downplay” the COVID-19 seriousness so as to not cause panic. 1) Do Trump’s deranged critics really forget the “great toilet paper hoarding of 2020”? Or the anxiety over face mask shortages? Ventilator stockpiling? Dr. Fauci actually admitted that they all downplayed the need for masks to prevent shortages for medical needs.

2) Hypocrisy alone explains knee-jerk Trump-hatred twisting their logic into “just oppose anything Trump does or says.” HCQ has, for decades, been a harmless easily-acquired anti-malarial drug with evidence of effectiveness in early-stage Wu-flu treatment. Dems: “You’re gonna die!” Tell that to Uganda’s 46 million people routinely taking it—only 55 deaths from COVID.

3) Trump’s travel restrictions worked—to limit infections from abroad, and to elicit unthinking charges of “xenophobia,” “racism” from partisan, hack Democrats. Given New York city’s massive infections and deaths, Trump should have quarantined their travel elsewhere—imagine the howls.

Headlines from 6 months ago: “List: 74 actions taken by Trump to fight virus and bolster economy”; “The Real Coronavirus Chronology Shows Trump Was On Top Of It While Biden Was Mocking The Danger—No media or Nancy Pelosi false narratives or phony Joe Biden campaign ads can change the truth about the real chronology of the coronavirus”; “US was more prepared for pandemic than any other country, Johns Hopkins study found”; “Trump’s Coronavirus Advice Was Inconsistent, But So Were the Experts.”

Current headlines: “People trust the media less than Trump on COVID. Here’s why,” (Stephen L. Miller, 9/12); “The real reason no one is buying the media’s latest deranged lies about Donald Trump” (C. Barron, 9/10); “Democrats’ Opposition to a COVID-19 vaccine could cost lives” (Thefederalist.com, 9/11)

Perhaps Trump’s resounding reelection will deflate Democrat derangement.