The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Well, buckaroos, Skeeter’s back. Tanned, rested and ready for the political wars of the internet. Out in the Montana backcountry, we didn’t get much news. We missed the whole Korea Summit and only just learned we won’t have to build our bomb shelter, safe now from nuclear holocaust at the hands of Little Rocket Man. What a president! What a negotiator! Maybe we’ll build a greenhouse instead.

Somehow when you’re traipsing the trails and driving the byways of America’s west, the woes of the world don’t seem so immediate. The forests go on for what seems like forever and the mountains are still peaked with snow even if the glaciers are retreating rapidly. The Missouri Breaks were our turnaround point, about where the steamers had to stop too back in the mid 1800’s from the other direction. We passed through Glacier Park, Great Falls, Ft. Benton, Flathead Lake. Huge sweeping panoramas that humble a mere human. And if you ever felt like America was on the decline, well, maybe so, but my god there’s a wealth of resources and raw beauty out there that we sometimes take for granted or forget completely.

Wide open spaces, big roaring rivers, two mile high peaks, one of the largest fresh water lakes in the world by area, the longest river in America, all superlatives, all super natural. You need a tonic for political cynicism, this is my recommended panacea. Go see America. It will make you want to step up to its grandeur. It will make you want to be Better.

Course, there are folks who can’t see a forest for the trees that need clearcutting. And those who only see land as real estate to be parceled and sold. The Flatheads sold theirs on the lakefront and now have acres of sagebrush and scrub pine. I guess maybe we’re the Flatheads now. We came for the gold and the beaver and the timber. We gave the railroads right of way and land. We killed the buffalo and that killed the tribes and if that didn’t, we finished the job by hand.

But the America we exploited is still out there, a continent more than a country. For awhile at least I’m going to live there and not the internet.

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