…the cars and trucks barrel-ass along Territory Road here in Oysterville? Twenty-five miles per hour the sign says as you turn into town.  I don’t think so.  That hasn’t happened in a long, long time.  It’s more like forty or forty-five and pedestrians beware.  Oh.  And never mind that there are entire patches where we have no verge to  cower on anymore…

And it’s not just the tourists in a hurry to roar through the town with “isn’t it quaint” and “I wonder what there is to do here, anyway:?”  No.  Often, it’s the workmen coming in answer to a call — time is money and all of that.  Sometimes it’s even one of us who lives here, heaven forbid! How important we’ve all become!  How fast we need to get on with it!

Even scarier was the report in the paper about the break-in a few weeks back at our late-neighbor Bud’s.  It took more than an hour for the sheriff to get here but luckily (I guess) the intruders were still in his house.  Armed even.  What possible good would “neighborhood watch” do here, anyway?  “Good Night Nurse!” as my mother used to say!

Meanwhile, we are kept well-distracted (no pun intended) by water quality worries and by tsunami preparations and by rinky-dink rules and regulations that we can’t seem to change no matter how many tons of garbage the fireworks nitwits leave on our beach.  Our elected officials say their hands are tied and, even worse, no one at all wants to run against them in the upcoming election.  Would you?

I, for one, think we’re in a scary place down here at the grass roots.  I probably shouldn’t have gone out of the chicken biz.  You never could tell with chickens but they did seem a bit more grounded than most of the human flock I’m seeing.  Go figure.