DougThompson.Com » Rants

Invasion of the Property Snatchers

Doug Thompson — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 08:34:37 +0000

You see them almost every day, sitting in local resturants, hovered over the tables with real estate brochures in one hand and maps in the other, on a constant qwest for the dream of country living.
After eating, they fan out like locusts, devouring farmlands, hilltops and viewsheds. Yuppies on the prowl, ready to pillage and plunder the countryside.
Local and out-of-town developers, blinded by visions of quick bucks, feed this frenzy, carving up the land into tidy little plots, threatening to turn the countryside into just another vast vista of rooftops.
Yes, growth is coming to Floyd County and the pain that accompanies such growth is just starting. Approval of new subdivision plats have doubled in the last year, ranging from one acre lots for cookie-cutter log homes to a massive, gated monstrosity of 39 25-acre divisions that will fill the hillsides near Twin Falls with overpriced, sprawling architectual nightmares.
Some come here and try to do it right. We have friends from Charlottesville who are building a modest home on some wooded acreage just off Franklin Pike. They’re preserving the trees and natural beauty of the landscape. But too many others clear cut ridgelines so they can plop a large house right on top or end up in a development that threatens to turn the county into just the type of subdivision-riddled nightmare they fled the city to escape.
It can happen here. It will happen here unless the residents demand accountability from local elected officials who have, to date, been only passive observers of the invasion of the property snatchers.

Age

Doug Thompson — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 07:25:43 +0000

At some point, one has to face the harsh realities of age, when the body just can’t muster the strength to meet the challenges of the day.
You fight it as long as you can but, sooner or later, the ravages of time set in. Your doctor ends every sentence with “for your age.” The waitress at the restaurant doesn’t even ask if you want the senior discount. She just gives it to you. The teenage hardbody who would have sent your harmones raging 40 or so years ago looks at you and says “gee, I didn’t know men’s chest hair turned grey too.”
Age, Satchell Paige once said, is simply a case of mind over matter: “If I dont’ mind, it don’t matter.”
Well it does matter. It matters when a walk up a hill or a short flight of stairs leaves your knees in agony and your lungs gasping for air. It matters when covering a high school football game leaves you sitting on the running board of your Jeep, trying to breathe and wincing in agony. It matters when even mowing your yard in a riding lawn tractor leaves you in pain.
And I do mind. I’ve been active all my life. I’ve climbed mountains, jumped out of perfectly good airplanes, raced stock and sports cars, and thrown myself into a hundred or so situations where my body could always pump out enough adrenaline to save my butt.
But nowadays the body fails more often than not, the sore muscles no longer respond to pain medication or hydrotherapy. They just ache — constantly. Knees buckle and legs cramp. I strap on braces and supports and will the body to make it through the day without failing. I come home and collapse on the couch. Exercise might build muscle strength back up but exercise is impossible when mundane tasks wear you out.
Mickey Mantle borrowed an old quote when he said: “If I knew I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.”
Amen Mick. Amen.

When Will It Stop?

Doug Thompson — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 07:51:07 +0000

Gas stations in town started the week at $239.9 a gallon for regular unleaded — down 10 cents from the week before. By Wednesday, the prices had jumped to $285.9 in reaction to the flooding from Hurricane Katrina and damage to oil refineries and pipelines along the Gulf Coast.
Thursday morning brought another shock: $305.9. By afternoon, the signs showed $319.9 and the town’s two independent retailers said they would most likely run out of gas during the long Labor Day weekend because supplies are running short and the big oil company stations get the first allotments.
This news comes just when I have to drive to Rural Retreat tonight to shoot a high school football game. I filled up the Wrangler Wednesday night and it will take a half-tank or so for the drive.
In some parts of the South, gas is already over $5 a gallon and still climbing. My yard needs mowing this weekend and that exercise alone will take $15 in gas.
While we can afford to pay such inflated prices, many people on fixed or reduced incomes cannot. Many who live in our area drive 60-100 miles roundtrip a day for work. How long can they survive with prices so high?
Some say this day was coming and we should have done more to prepare for it. That kind of hindsight will not ease the burden on people who may not be able to afford to drive to work, to the grocery store or who may be unable to buy the propane or fuel oil they need to heat their homes this winter.

Pain

Doug Thompson — Sun, 14 Aug 2005 07:58:32 +0000

The body ages over time. We accept that. Abuse during younger years takes its toll. We accept that as well.
But at what point does pain control our lives? It seems the amount of time it takes to work out the kinks and stiffness increases each passing day and the line between functionality and letting pain take over becomes harder and harder to determine.
I abused my body mercilessly as a younger man. That’s why I hobble around today on two bad knees, a bum hip and an ankle stiffened with a steel pin inside. The calcium buildup on that bad ankle is so bad from a half-dozen or so previous breaks that when I broke it two years ago the doctor couldn’t tell from the x-ray if it was broken again. I can’t raise my left arm above my head because of calcium from two previous breaks and three dislocations.
Helping family move a couch Saturday aggravated an old back injury (compressed vertebrae) and I spent the rest of the day alternating between a hot tub and bed.
Soaked in the hot tub for more than hour this morning before trying my morning walk. Made it about a mile down the road before the pain set in but I pushed on. Pain, a sadistic Master Chief once told me, is only the beginning.
Two miles later, I hobbled back towards the house and started up the long, steep driveway. About halfway up, one knee buckled and I fell. As I lay on the damp gravel, waiting for the pain to subside enough to get up and try again I wondered if it was time to let the doctor operate, again, on the various bones and joints that have declared mutiny. Not really an option. Can’t afford to take the time off.
I managed to get back up the hill and headed straight for the porch and hot tub, letting the soothing, agitated heat of the water ease the pain. With some mobility restored, I stumbled into the shower to complete the start of a new day, ready for an uneasy truce with the pain that becomes part of everyday life.

Well Damn

Doug Thompson — Wed, 10 Aug 2005 02:32:04 +0000

As noted below, Floyd is currently awash in “gourmet” coffee shops along with a number of early am spots for strong, black java. When we lived in Arlington (up in the no-man’s land called “Northern Virginia”) my favorate java spot was Common Grounds, an eclectic hangout where the coffee was srong (and not bitter), the conversation interesting and the wireless Internet free.
Now comes word from Arlington that Common Grounds closed. In its place is something called “Murky Coffee,” a coffee shop that originated in DC and has now spread to the People’s Republic of Arlington.
Not good. Common Grounds had a style all its own and, as anyone who lived in DC for any length of time knows, a coffee shop that called Capitol Hill home is probably too hipper-than-thou. The demise of Common Grounds is yet another reason to be glad we abandoned the urban jungle for the hills of Southwestern Virginia.

Missing the Story

Doug Thompson — Tue, 02 Aug 2005 06:14:56 +0000

So, The Roanoke Times came to Floyd on the pretense of writing about the local music scene as part of their coverage of The Crooked Road. But what did they write about? Roni Stoneman.
Roni who? For those not old enough to know, Roni Stoneman blacked out her teeth, played banjo, and became a hillbilly stereotype on the old Hee Haw television series and, at 67, she’s running around the state trying to capture some of that lost glory. According to her manager, she’s trying to “recapture her lost roots.” Where I come from, one doesn’t need a manager to recapture their roots.
Anyway, Roni was in town the same time as the entourage from The Times (no accident I’m sure) so she became the focus of their article, not the local music, the heritage or the tradition, which is the real story about Floyd. Too bad The Times missed it because they bought into Stoneman’s act. She was the lead of the story, followed by a few words about the Jamboree and the other music venues in Floyd, and then back to Stoneman. This is a story about Floyd? Besides the Country Store and the Friday Night Jamboree, County Sales is part of the Crooked Road but not a mention of that in the Times’ story either (although it was featured elsewhere). Too busy concentrating on an over-the-hill entertainer’s publicity-tour journey to her “roots.”
A few months ago, Don Harrison, a co-worker from my days at the Times in the 1960s, got caught up in the Stoneman hype in an article for Virginia Living, a glossy Richmond publication for the richer-than-thou crowd. Although it was odd to read about the girl from Hee Haw in a mag dedicated to million dollar mansions and Virginia Hunt Country, it shows the power of the Stoneman publicity machine.
Stoneman is from Grayson County. The Times could have waited until they profiled Galax and the Fiddler’s Convention to concentrate on her before allowing her to dominate what was supposed to be a story about Floyd’s rich musical heritage.
That heritage is as rich and colorful as any stop on the so-called Crooked Road. That’s the story. Not Roni Stoneman. Next time (assuming there is one), let’s hope The Times sends a reporter who knows how to cover the real story. Ralph Berrier Jr., the writer they did send, should have known better.
FOLLOW-UP: “Dude, we have done sooooooooooooooo many stories about Floyd and the Friday Night Jamboree,” Ralph says in an email. “In fact, I got a particularly nasty email Wednesday from a chemist in Blacksburg who stated unequivocally that he is sick of stories about Floyd, the jamboree, the store, old-time music in general blah blah blah — that the assignment was to come away with something that wasn’t the same story we’ve done for 15 consecutive years.”
Ralph also points out that at the time I was castigating him for his fascination with Roni Stoneman, I misspelled her first name throughout my tirade. My bad and it has been fixed (shuffle feet, look down, act contrite).

Damn, It's Hot

Doug Thompson — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 05:57:05 +0000

The heat index, the talking heads on the tube claim, is over 100. For once, they may be right. It’s hot. Damn hot. Sweaty, dripping, energy-sapping hot. And, if the talking heads continue their streak of recognizing the obvious, we’ve got at least two more days of unseasonably hot weather before some relief arrives this weekend.
Not supposed to get this hot in the mountains. Not by a long shot. Air conditioners on overtime. Electric meters racking up record readings. Emergency rooms overcrowded with heat stroke victims.
They call weather like this the “dog days of summer,” although the usual dog days don’t hit until August. Not just here. Most of the country gripped in record-setting heat. Hot weather hits the elderly the hardest and deaths are up throughout the nation.
Why is it so hot? Environmentalists blame global warming and destruction of the ozone. Scientists point to global shifts. Doomsdayers say it is just judgment day getting closer.
My granddaddy had the answer.
Hot weather, he said, was just God’s way of reminding us he’s still boss.
Reminds me of an evangalist who came through Floyd back in 1962. On a hot August night in an church without air conditioning, he stood before the sweating congregation and delivered the shortest sermon of his career.
“If you think it’s hot now,” he declared, “just wait!”

Under the Microscope

Doug Thompson — Mon, 25 Jul 2005 03:51:11 +0000

In recent weeks I’ve run across two — yes, two — graduate students spending time in Floyd County to study our lives and ways for use in a thesis.
One is looking at the music culture of Floyd while the other examines homesteading.
Both have degrees in anthropology which, I guess, puts us in the same class with primates as a species worthy of study by academic minds.
I also got a call from a young man inverviewing for a job in the Associated Press’s Roanoke bureau. He wanted information about “life, culture and issues” in Southwestern Virginia hoping such knowledge would give him an edge during the interview. The AP wrote recently about Floyd’s barter system with the headline “Roads less traveled: Bartering is old way to get what you want.”
Jim Minick, a Radford University English instructor, Roanoke Times colummnist and author breezed through town last week to promote his book of essays on ecology, food and forestry. Minick’s book is published by West Virginia University Press, which offers a whole catalog of works on the joys of country life.
Gotta wonder if life in our quaint little part of the world is worthy of all this scholarly and journalistic attention. Browse the magazine rack at the Barnes & Noble in Christiansburg and you can find more than a dozen publications focused on country life and living. A Google search of “country living” brings 56.9 million listings. A search of the news section brings up about 23,900 hits, including one from the Houston Chronicle that says “Country living has its drawbacks.”
Yes, country living has its drawbacks — like trying to deal with all the attention.

Fear

Doug Thompson — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 07:03:35 +0000

Ran into a former high school classmate last night at a meeting of the Floyd Town Council. She and her husband are afraid, very afraid, they will lose her family home to the town’s planned business district revitalization plan.
She is not alone in fearing the town government will run roughshod over private property rights in the name of “progess.” The owners of Floyd’s widely-praised Angels in the Attic also feel threatened by the town’s efforts to secure a state grant to pay for widespread improvements downtown.
“Is nothing safe?” Her question was not rhetorical. After the U.S. Supreme Court’s incredible decision last week allowing the town of New London, CT, to seize homeowner’s property for private commercial developments, those who own property realize that nothing is, in fact, safe from the long arm of the government.
This is an extremely serious issue with serious consequences for the time-honored tradition that a person’s home is their castle. The anquish on my high school friend’s face was neither hysterical nor exaggerated. It was real.
And the threat is real. All of us who own property or hope one day to own a home should be afraid. It has happened before and, thanks, to the highest court in the land, it could all too easily happen again. John Prine’s words from his song Paradise come hauntingly to mind:

Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land
Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken
Then they wrote it all down as the progress of man.
And daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County
Down by the Green River where Paradise lay
Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking
Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away

A tattered, tarnished flag

Doug Thompson — Mon, 04 Jul 2005 03:53:41 +0000

(The following runs as a column today on our political web site, Capitol Hill Blue. It also runs here because, frankly, it was the only thing I felt like writing on this Independence Day.)
The American flag flies in front of our home on this Independence Day, just as it does the other 364 days a year.
Sadly, it does not fly as proudly as it once did because the America it represents does not stand as tall as it should.
Perhaps our flag should be tattered because the America it stands for is but a tattered remnant of a once-great nation, a country that once stood for truth and justice. That was, we were taught, the American way.
But truth is a disposable commodity in today’s America, cast adrift in a sea of political expediency, drowned by a tsunami of double-speak, treachery and deception by our government, our leaders and the definers of our culture.
Truth cannot exist when our elected leaders lie as matter of course, where Americans are expected to fight and die in wars based on misstatements, misdirection and mistakes.
Justice is a natural casualty of war when truth dies in battle. Justice fades into oblivion when the attorney general of the United States calls the Constitution “an outdated document.” Justice cannot survive in a nation where government agencies are given carte blanche to spy on its own citizens or hold them without due process.
Nor can justice exist in a nation that violates its own stated standards on human rights, tortures prisoners or operates gulags under the shadow of an American flag.
On this Fourth of July weekend, the America we once knew, honored and loved is missing in action, driven into exile by a government for sale to the highest bidder, led by zealots who put political agendas above the best interests of the country and who are kept in office by brain-dead lemmings who allow political conformity to displace individual initiative and thought.
America is no longer the home of the brave or the land of the free but a nation of cowards held in check by radical nutcases who use fear as a tool to turn a nation founded on the notion of freedom into a refugee camp of oppressed, distrustful, bitter partisans.
America cannot be great when it is ruled by a corrupt government that answers not to the people but to fatcat special interests with huge political action committees and the money to buy access and influence. It cannot stand as a shining example of what democracy could be when its own democracy is gone, replaced by an increasingly dictatorial form of government where wars are launched without proper review or where key facts are withheld from the people, Congress and our allies.
America cannot expect to earn the respect of the world when its leaders cannot even win the respect of its citizens who tell pollsters that they expect their leaders to lie, they expect their government to be corrupt and they no longer feel their elected officials represent their interests.
Yes, the flag flies in front of our house on this Independence Day 2005.
But it cannot fly proudly because it can no longer represent America.
The America it is supposed to represent no longer exits. On this day when most of us should celebrate many of us will, instead, cry.