The Flames.

Boudreaux calls the doctor and shouts, “Doc! Doc! my wife Mathilda she be in labor and da contractions are only two minutes apart!”
The doctor asked, “Is this her first child?”
Boudreaux shouts, “No, you idiot, this is her husband!”

Lage: You've written about the sagebrush rebellion.
Stegner: I wrote a double piece on the sagebrush rebellion, because the
public lands I think are at even greater risk than the national
parks. They're not protected by anything. They're not protected
by a strong bureau. The BLM [Bureau of Land Management] never had
enough money to operate and never had enough time to get itself
established. And also all of those vested interests, particularly
grazing interests, but also mining, that come in on the public land,
put the BLM in a position where it can't enforce rules. It gets a
FLPMA [Federal Land Policy and Management Act, 1976] act; it can't
enforce it at all. It tries to enforce it and gets a Sagebrush
Rebellion. Just [whistles] as automatic as that. I don't know how
long it's going to take to cure the cowboys and the miners, who are
I should say the least enlightened element in the American populace.
Really. With the most arrogant leftover attitudes from the midnineteenth
century. Just like Mr. Reagan's, actually. He thinks
exactly that way. Good old American initiative. Whether it's your
land or not.
##
Stegner: The whole cowboy industry is a federal subsidy. They're not the
independent cowpokes they pretend to be. They're subsidized
dependents.
Lage: And they're the ones that talk most about individual initiative.
Stegner: Oh sure. And as Benny DeVoto points out, they assume somehow that
everybody in the West also has a vested interest in that myth of
independence. All of which is cockeyed. Most of the small ranchers
I know are absolutely not that way. The ones who are that way are
the ones who have been living on government subsidies for so long
that they've come to take them for granted, and who also fly into a
rage at the slightest notion that things might change. That's a big
vested interest to get rid of. Even though i~'s not a big business.
The cattle business is a bad business, but it's so attractive a
living that the barons are going to stay in there as long as they can.
[laughter]

Lage: I'm always interested--in your writings you speak of the characteristic
American relationship with the earth. Could you elaborate on
that?
Stegner: Where did I say that?
Lage: I found it several places.
Stegner: Characteristic? Well, I suppose I must have been thinking of the
characteristic confrontation of somebody from a high energy
civilization with a relatively untouched environment and with no
laws binding anything, no feudalism that tells you that this land
has to be protected because this is in fief from so-and-so and you
have to deliver him seventy bushels of corn every year to payoff
your feudal debt. We weren't bound to the earth in any feudal
sense. It's very different from any part of Europe. In America
free land was the condition--you couldn't hold people in slavery
because they could just vanish into the wilderness, and you
couldn't even hold them to a kind of feudal bondage, though many
were brought here in the early days on that kind of basis. None of
those systems lasted, simply because, as Jefferson said, it was a
country with plenty of land and little labor. When you've got lots
of land and little labor, the land will just swallow up the labor,
and the labor will go free. Where you've got little land and lots
of labor, then land begins to be treated in the Japanese fashion,
say. It's a very different thing. And I think I must have been
thinking in those terms.
The grandiose notion of opulence, of unending plenty that the
whole history of the continent has engendered up to fairly recently,
and which in the West is still pretty plausible because you can go
out in the Black Rock Desert and look thirty miles ·and not see
anything but empty space. All through the public lands in the West,
in the arid parts of the West, that's still true, because there's
nothing much that anybody can do with that arid land, and that space
is preserved by its own limitations .. And also by the fact that it
has been federal land from the beginning. If it had been like Texas,
then it would be like Texas now, all chopped up into little things
and half of them abandoned, you know, but the spaciousness gone
because it would be interrupted by constant little attempts at human
improvement. What I'm thinking of is the notion of unlimited opportunity
on vast open spaces, which produces maybe a kind of largeness
of mind and may also produce real wastefulness, inability to think
beyond the immediate grab.
Lage: And I think your idea of having no tradition of stewardship--
Stegner: That's forming. We've had, what, four--near1y five hundred years
of it now. In 1992 it'll be five hundred years since Columbus, and
in a half mi11enium you ought to be able to develop something. But
it certainly isn't anywhere near the uniform respect for land that
almost anybody from Europe or any European country I know would have.
Everybody ta1ks--Stewart Udall used to talk at length about
stewardship. Being a Mormon, he had some notion of it, because
Mormons did have some notion of it. They were an agricultural people. They've lost some of it now, but his family in Arizona,
I'm sure, had a respect for land because they had to work for it
and with it in order to make it pay. A lot of his stewardship
comes from the mere labor expended on it, as Wendell's does.
Wendell is living on land that his grandfather farmed, and he wants
to bring it back to something like--as if to do penance for his
ancestors, who were slaveholders and land wasters. Wendell's going
to do it with his own two hands before he's through, and have a
model farm.
I think what I had in mind was the wastefulness, the largeness,
the sense of unlimited possibilities for the future. One of the
things that makes the sagebrush rebels most angry is the notion of
limits, because those are the most unlimited people. They live out
in the widest open spaces, which they don't even have to own.
[laughter]

It is incouraging that you posted the marilnmousketeer, nit in always

Hey Guido ! Get out a my brain! His from a screen short with the lucky photoid code
of 484585! Behold mfm, musings on the page used to show the Bridesmaid dresses banner add.

pre arranged appointment, called by VW a "closing" was scheduled, but I put it off to try to decipher the viability of keeping my 09, wagon. The answers have me unsure, I trust your info, but mistrust the people I spoke to, as they gave such a rote answer. . .

There is no cohesion between the entities, no agreement from chart to chart. The the mis-use of legal terms, no ability to get a projected date for any fix,

The game seems to be one of attrition based on the theory of entropy.

an offer in hand, -now- makes any suitably equitable buy-out , tempting.


But it only makes sense if the numbers work.

I do object to being turned from super vigilant of my personal carbon foot print to a laughing stock at the expense of Prius drivers.