Keystone Pipeline Beer

North to Polar Bears, South to Old Mexico

It's about time.  A gallon of gas in Montana can be had for a buck 98 now.  That's a helluva deal.  Diana just got home from her annual winter trip to Aruba and filled up the Mercedes for less than a hundred bucks. That's about half of what we were paying for a tank of gas just this past summer.  The price of gas is making everyone feel pretty good.  More money to buy beer.  When you think about it, a six pack of cheap beer, say Keystone for example, is about twice as expensive as a gallon of gas.  That's cool.  I always know there was a correlation between beer and gasoline.  Makes perfect sense doesn't it?  I doubt you're following my train of thought on the subject and you're probably wondering what the hell I'm talking about.  Well, I'm not too sure myself but I'll give it a better go.  Ready?

Alright, so we're getting gasoline at the pump at prices we haven't seen since the last century.  And we are feeling pretty good about that.  We've got a few extra bucks lying around and the economy is picking up even more steam as we slowly but surely emerge from the recent economic slump.  The price of oil has a lot of influence on the overall economic health of not only our economy and well being but as well on the international economic picture.  Let's face it, on those levels, oil is the world's drug of choice.  We get high when there's lots of it and go into withdrawal when it's scarce.  For the time being, however, let's just assume that we're on a good roll that may last a while.  Life is good at the pump.  Keep on pumping.

I know what happens when gas is cheap.  Guess. We consume a hell of a lot more of it than we do when it's above three dollars a gallon. I've gone months without filling up my truck and forking over a hundred and fifty bucks at $3.89 s gallon. That's a chunk of change I don't always have handy.  Now, hell, I won't think twice about filling up and heading down the highway for business or pleasure.  I've got people and places I want to go see now that I can afford to.  (And by the way, I was just pulling your drawers about Diana going to Aruba on holiday.  She went to East Glacier to get the mail).

The problem with that nifty scenario is that when gas is cheap and life is good we do act like a society of junkies.  And you know what Neil Young said about that don't 'ya?  "Every junkie's like a setting sun, (Needle and the Damage Done, 1970)."  I may be acting a bit melodramatic at this point but I can't help but be thinking about Keystone Beer and Keystone Oil.  Shouldn't the oil cost more than the beer?  If we're tallkin' Michelob Ultra, or better yet, Moose Drool, our local favorite,  I'd be drinking oil.  There's the rub. We'll be consuming oil like it's a premier beer unless and until the price of oil goes back up to where it should be.

I know, you're ready to kick my ass.  Why in the hell do I want to see the price of oil to get high and stay high?  Well, it's because many years ago I did one of the greatest hunts of my lifetime in the far northeast corner of Alberta, hard up against the Northwest Territories border and not far from Saskatchewan.  That trip to the bush of Alberta was one of the highlights of my life.  We hunted out of a small cabin on a remote lake, only reachable by float plane.  And we were in the bush, as they say.  There wasn't much in the way of civilization in front of us, in back, or to the side of us for hundreds of miles.  I think Great Slave Lake was somewhere between us and the Arctic Circle.  And when I sauntered off for a morning hunt I was pretty darned careful about checking my back track, not wanting to to be spending the winter holed up in a polar bear den.  I hunted some of the most beautiful, primitive country I'd ever been in up to that point in my life. And to top that off, I killed a big bull moose that to this day hangs on the wall of our ranch house in Montana.  The kicker to that story is that where I hunted that weekend in Alberta more than twenty years ago is where the oil for the Keystone Oil Pipeline is coming from.  I'ts coming from the Alberta Tar Sands.

I've thought on many occasions what that country might look like now and I don't want to imagine too hard.  I'd imagine it doesn't look too much like it did back then.  I've heard stories.  I've not heard good stories about the exploration and extraction of the tar sands from that once pristine region up north.  It breaks my heart.  So how in the hell can I think good things about the most likely forthcoming construction of a pipeline from there to the Gulf Coast of Texas, carrying the oily residue of a scorched earth policy of strip mining the very country I walked on when I was young?  I can't do it.

From this point on in this writing I have a bad feeling that the more I write the more I'll be getting in over my head.  The subject matter gets pretty complex from here on out so I'll keep it simple and have it said.  Hey, I know we need oil, for our cars, trucks, industry, military, the whole enchilada.  I know that.  I also know, and so do you, that we need lots of big tracts of unspoiled country with lots of fresh air and water.  We don't just want it, we need it (Jagger, Richards, 1975).  We're beginning to experience a "going, going, gone kind of mentality that should be suited to a more primitive culture than what I'd like to believe we could be.  I only have to think ahead a decade or two and don't like what I fear we might all see on this abused planet of ours. I don't want to pay three or four dollars a gallon for gas any more than you do.  I also don't want to see that precious country that I hunted when I was young treated like a whore in old Mexico a century ago.

Jobs.  Oh yeah, that's the conundrum.  They say there's thousands of jobs waiting for you, both in northern Alberta, and along the path the Keystone pipeline will traverse.  Maybe and maybe not.  I've heard both sides of that coin and for the record, low gas prices have already, right now and as we speak, slowed things down in the oil patch.  So hold onto to that thought for a bit and in the meantime, if jobs or the lack thereof, are the thorn in the side of the most ardent supporters of Keystone XL Pipeline, why not get a little forward thinking and encourage an onslaught of research and development in massive wind and solar technology. Instead of "drill baby drill, (S. Palin)" we go to "build baby build, (W. Beck, 2021))."  They both employ lots of labor and the money is good.  Neither scenario is perfect and not without it's own respective good and poor points.  But I'll bet you a case of Moose Drool beer that the environmental impact on this good earth of ours will be substantially improved if we can graduate to a more pragmatic way to move forward.

I think the whole deal is a whole lot less complex than any of us want to recognize.  I know, in my case, it doesn't take a whole lot of imagining of the landscape in the tar sands country then, when it was primitive, and in it's prime, and now, chewed up, and spit out, to know which way I want to see us go.  So I've to to take it back to Neil, "I've seen the needle and damage done, a little part of it in everyone, but every junkie's like the setting sun, (N.Young, Needle and the Damage Done, 1970)."

Here's to Keystone Beer, Here's to Keystone Oil, For what it's worth,
" Let's drink to the Salt of the Earth, (Jagger, Richards, 1977)"

The Big Muscanetcong River

"The average American child can recognize 1,000 corporate logos but can't identify 10 plants or animals native to his or her own region." Quite frankly, I can't figure out who is responsible for that quote.  It may have been my facebook friend Oscar Williams 1V.  It have been any man on the street.  It darned sure could have been anybody, period.  I've been struggling with the entire concept of the world of technology slowly but surely (and not very slowly) taking over the lives of our children, and our own lives, to be sure.  More so than ever, it's become more and more obvious that the attachment our younger generation has with technology has begun to wash away the sense and sensibility that it once had.  I didn't have to stare bug eyed at the quote beginning this writing to know that the world of cell phones, i-phones, i-pads, laptops, desktops, kindles, etc. has replaced the natural world of spiders, snakes, tadpoles, salamanders, fish, deer, rhinos, and elephants.  The world that is inside a classroom, an office, an internet cafe, a library, and even your living room, is not the living, breathing world under the blue sky and sun that started it all but appears to be fading into the past like a sunset on a bad day.

My life has changed significantly this past year.  I've begun a two year odyssey of learning at a university in Montana.  It's been forty years since I graduated from college but it seems like four hundred, particularly in the world of internet technology.  I've been operating from behind the eight ball for several months trying to catch up with the new way of doing business.  I did buy a computer in 1987 and got half savvy with it but clearly, didn't take my computer education very far.  Hell, I was busy fishing, hunting, roping, riding good horses, and thoroughly enjoying everything I could under the sun, literally.  Now I'm paying for it.  I watch my classmates barely listen to a lecture while typing their notes on computer generated power points on their Apple laptops with their facebook or hotmail app available with a quick click.  Following a class, those i-phones are out before they are out of their chairs, their fingers working so smoothly on those ridiculously small keys.  They make it look easy.  If I used a laptop in class it would be a disaster.  My fingers would fumble through those keys. I'd be missing keys and opening new programs, shutting down and starting up, cursing through my clenched jaws, and defeating the whole purpose of being in class.

But I'd rather be me than them.  To be sure, I'm surrounded by a whole bunch of good people.  Smart, savvy students who kick my ass every day in class and on exams and papers.  I'm struggling with my lack of electronic savvy.  I spent two worrisome weeks not long ago wondering how I could record an interview without a tape recorder for  a major mid-term project.  The solution was ridiculously easy.  Use a cell phone.  I did.  But I had no clue, until I asked a fellow student and lamely admitted my total ignorance of the whole process.

My whole point regarding the schism between my own lack of IT knowledge and the vast breadth of ability the vast majority of the learned populace does have is the length and depth they have had to go to acquire that knowledge they have, and at what cost.  The learning our world is doing is in fromt of a set of keys, electronically connected to the cyber world and it's particular and peculiar keyboard. I see it every hour of every day on campus.  I d

o see a Montana Sky, big tall trees, squirrels in them, deer hiding behind them.  I see the sun, when it's out, and the stars, when they are.  And I can feel the wind blow in my face on long walks, and I can hear the river flowing under the bridges I cross.  But I also see students staring intently into their cellphones, unaware of me passing by, heads down.  Many of them have earphones plugged in.  They are almost totally lost in cyber space.  Hell, they don't see me, certainly don't hear me, and wouldn't know their ass from a hole in the ground if they were gonna' get their ass kicked by a gut shot grizzly bear that came from around the corner.  They are fucking oblivious.

I was relaying a story to classmates about a particular grizzly bear that I followed one evening in hunting camp many years ago at a distance of just a few yards, as I attempted to blast a full lungful of bear spray at the renegade griz. Most of those listening had expressions of non belief on their faces.  I simply wasn't making any sense to most of them.  The story wasn't registering.  I suspect, however, that if they'd heard the same event on Animal Planet or seen it on Yahoo News it might have rung a few more brain cells.

I know we're a highly educated nation.  I know my grandson is getting a good education at a top notch public school.  He already runs the keyboard on his electronic toys more nimbly than I can only dream of doing.  I'm sixty three and he's four.  But I want Elias to know a white oak tree when he sees one.  I want him to know a gray squirrel when he's on a walk.  Or better yet, the difference between a non venomous black snake and a cottonmouth moccasin..  How about the difference between a white tailed deer and an elk he may very well see this coming summer on his visit to our ranch on the edge of Glacier National Park.

He won't know how to bait a hook, cast it into Bear Creek, and understand where the trout might be lying on that particular piece of fresh water.  Is that a brookie or a cutthroat he just caught?  "What do I do now Grandpa?  Can we eat it?"  I'll help him catch that fish and I'll show him how to clean it and get it ready for the frying pan.  But I'll only do that once.  Then he's on his own.  I'll also try to get Elias to keep his eyes open, not just to be aware of what's around him but also to keep his eyes open to the sun and the sky, to the creek and to the pasture, to the horses and to the herd of elk, to the still air and the gentle summer breezes.  He can't that get that stuff back East.  He won't get it in a classroom.  It won't happen in front of a computer screen, except in virtual reality and that doesn't really count does it?  Elias does have a real advantage however, and I am aware of that.  His Mom and Dad are pretty keen to the outdoors and they'll bring him a long way in that part of  his life  But many kids won't have that chance.  They'll get smart in school.  They may become good lawyers, builders, or teachers.  But they won't know the difference between an oak and a maple, or a black from a grizzly bear.  Or the beauty of a black night in Montana lit up by the northern lights.

I caught my first trout when I was 12 years old on a creek in New Jersey.  That was one of the highlights of my life up to that point.  I was on my own, had found the stretch of creek I wanted to fish, baited my own hook, and caught my first brookie.  I screamed with Joy.  That creek was cold and clear and far enough away from the madding crowd that the whole beautiful experience is one I remember to this day.  God I hope it isn't too late.