Logical Conclusions

Essays on America: 1998-2013: Volume II

James E. Dustin

• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781639037803
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Chapters include the following:

Lawsuits: These are actual lawsuits allowed into our nation's courts. The only way this chapter would be stranger is if it listed lawsuits so absurd they were not allowed into the courts.

Hunting and Fishing: I live in a small drinking town with a hunting and fishing problem.

Weather: This includes a column on the benefits of climate change, a subject that most news reports ignore, and why we in Walden, Colorado, are in favor of global warming.

Politics: The first column is my abortive attempt to run for president of the United States. Another is on what we should learn from the Greeks, and another on state stereotyping. Yes, that happened.

Internet English: This is the Age of the Text. So why do so many of these texters not know basic English? Sadly, examples abound.

Technology: I've suggested a number of new inventions. You'll like the Fleshomatic.

EEKs: Hope you're not one.

Health: You don't realize the value of an eye until you've lost one.

Advertising: Dilbert once observed that if marketing worked, it would be illegal. But it must work on some of us.

Bureaucracies: If learning about what our government workers are actually doing doesn't drop you into a state of depression, you might be heavily medicated.

Human Behavior: None of these columns seemed to fit anywhere else, like what if the passage of an asteroid made us all smarter?

Chapter 21

Human Behavior

This chapter is composed of columns that didn’t fit nicely into any of the previous subjects, but are interesting nonetheless because they look at how we act.

Just residing in a unique area like Jackson County, Colorado, means I got to meet a lot of interesting people for a variety of reasons. I tried to learn something from all of them, so you can read here about people who somehow have the time to travel, ride, walk, meander across the US, vote on marijuana propositions, take roads that are not traveled (for good reasons), buy lottery tickets despite the enormous odds against winning, and so on through my memories of a long life, and one good friend who didn’t live long enough.

We need to remember too we are merely humans living in a massively complex world. We are on this constant search for answers that might not even be out there. Or we may just be traveling in this direction because that’s what our GPS told us to do.

The Jackson County IQ Test

November 29, 2007

This is getting stupid.

In the last two weeks, at least three vehicles have gotten stuck trying to traverse Buffalo Pass. One was a car, one was a car towing a U-Haul trailer, and one was a twenty-four-foot furniture truck.

Because we no longer have a tow service with a four-wheel drive tow truck (one went out of business, and one burned down) it falls to our emergency services to go bail out these people.

And here’s how well that works. Sheriff Rick Rizor went to help one fellow, but his tow strap had been damaged and broke. Rizor kept having to shorten it and finally ended up with a piece about ten feet long, not enough length to snap a vehicle out of the ruts.

So Division of Wildlife officers, who have better trucks, arrived on the scene to help Rizor, who also had become stuck. So during four or five hours, we have three emergency responders up on Buffalo Pass trying to pull someone out of a snowbank and way, way far away from being able to assist anyone else in real trouble.

To compound this nonsense, the county doesn’t charge these people a fee for pulling them out of clearly visible snow and mud. Rizor told the Town Board Monday night that in some circumstance, the county will bill “victims” for rescue operations.

He cited three instances where bills have been sent, but none of the bills was ever paid. All of the victims lived out of state.

This used to be amusing when we had a tow truck. We could laugh at travelers who for some reason thought that a gravel road with scores of switchbacks over the rugged mountains of the Continental Divide was a shortcut to Steamboat Springs.

For those of you who don’t live here, the Buffalo Pass road is not a shortcut even in summer. It winds all the way up the side of a steep ridge that rises from about 8,500 feet to over ten thousand feet. It’s at best a 15 mph road when it’s open.

To momentarily take the side of travelers, they are sometimes surprised that there are still snowdrifts on the road as late as July and as early as October. When snow falls on that side of the mountains, it tends to stay there. And our local governments, federal and county, aren’t helping. There were two signs Tuesday at County Road 24 and Highway 14; one said Buffalo Pass is open, the other said it’s closed. The signs are a hundred feet apart.

However, many of these people try to traverse the pass in vehicles that are only designed for paved roads. And many of these people try to ram through snowdrifts in vehicles with six inches of clearance. But what gave rise to what we call “The Jackson County IQ Test,” some people try to drive over this road in the dead of winter when the snow is so deep you can’t even see the road.

People ignore the signs anyway.

Gee, what is to be done? Close the road in winter.

Sorry to shout, but I brought this up at a meeting when nine or ten Forest Service personnel were in one room, and I got only ums and maybes and I don’t knows. I asked Rick Rizor about this, and he said there was a gate there, but someone hit it last year, and it’s all bent up.

It seems to me that between the US government and the county government, we could come up with a gate. Even a chain and a sheet of plywood would do the trick. Then if someone gets around that barricade, send them a large bill and slap a mechanic’s lien on their vehicle to make sure they pay it.

As my colleagues down here at the paper say, this isn’t rocket surgery. The Forest Service doesn’t need to perform an environmental impact study to put up a gate. They close roads all the time without talking to anyone. The county government has about $6 million in its Road and Bridge Department service fund and probably could cut loose a few dollars to pay for a decent sign that says something like, “Road Impassable Due To Snow.”

Unfortunately, we can’t just leave people up there. If they froze to death, their families would sue, and equally unfortunately, the courts won’t allow “that driver was so stupid, he should have been taken out of the gene pool” as a defense.

And get this: a deputy gave two individuals a ride to town after their vehicle had become stuck and dropped them off at the mini-mart to use the phone. One man’s parting words were, “Thanks for dropping us off in the middle of nowhere.”

Actually, they were picked up about thirty miles northwest of the middle of nowhere.

Whistle While You Don’t Work

June 6, 2002

A couple of hikers got lost last weekend just over the border in Wyoming. A mother and her ten-year-old daughter, although experienced hikers, got disoriented and ended up spending a week in the woods.

They were found last Saturday. They were exhausted and hungry, but otherwise in good shape.

After they were found, I got to thinking, what if that had been me? I don’t mind being exhausted and hungry, but I’d have missed a week of work. When you own your own business, you usually can’t miss a week of work without making careful preparations several years in advance.

I feel like I’m falling hopelessly behind if I take a day off for golf. I go ahead and take the day off, but I feel badly about it.

And most small business owners I know have the same problem. We don’t have full-time staff that can fill in for us when we’re gone for any significant length of time. I don’t mean to brag, but this newspaper wouldn’t be the same without me.

So I get a little irritated when I get a news release from, say, Jamie Fraser.

On May 7 in Williamsburg, Fraser began a trip to ride his bicycle across the United States to raise money for cystic fibrosis. I think the news release meant to say he wants to raise money to find treatments and maybe a cure for the disease.

Now, I don’t have anything against people raising money to fight major diseases, but we get two, three, four, or more of these people every summer. They’re riding, walking, jogging, hiking, flying, walking their dog, whatever, across the US. There was one guy who was pushing a shopping cart across America.

And they take the most scenic routes. Doesn’t that sound like fun? I wouldn’t mind taking a stroll across the United States, stopping at all the resort towns, chatting up the locals, and seeing the sights. I just don’t have the time.

If one measure of the wealth of a nation is how many of its people don’t have to work for a living, the US has got to be no. 1.

What about these people who follow national leaders a...