“They are coming out of the woodwork, aren’t they?” is what Mattski said when he came over to borrow the Turf Tiger to assault the first cutting of the year on the pastures. You have to stay on top of these things in the country. It has been wet, and the end of the cooler temperatures and the first 80-degree day of the new season, literally everything has exploded in new growth.
“Rancher Bundy out in Nevada had some fatigue-clad fellows standing in a line in front of him at the press conference,” I said, “along with the Clark County Sheriff, who has apparently been under his desk for the whole crisis.”
“I heard some independence-minded cowboys drove the Rancher’s cattle back onto Gold Butte, which the Bureau of Land Management has other plans for,” Mattski said, taking off his broad-brimmed canvas hat and wiping some perspiration off his forehead. I nodded, and shook his hand- in exchange for using the tractor he was going to trim my fields as well. We figure a loose communal arrangement is the best way to maintain the properties.
While he was cutting the pastures next door, I did some Spring Cleaning, running the vacuum around the farmhouse and cleaning out the winter’s magazines and assorted trash. Down in the garage, I found more boxes of 35mm slides, and sighed. It is hard enough to live one life, much less try to archive a whole family’s worth.
I am going to get ‘er done, though. I was feeding some slides through the digitizing machine when WTOP told me how Bubba was doing at the Masters, and then that some KKK loon had gone on a rampage and shot and killed a Doctor and his Eagle Scout grandson in the parking lot of a Kansas City Jewish Community Center. For what it is worth, the two were Methodists. Then he apparently drove to the Village Shalom retirement community where he sprayed gunfire around and killed an unidentified woman.
Like you, I am starting to think this is all sort of nuts. The thing out in Nevada was just weird, and a pal who knows about these things sent me the full-color BLM brochure that might have set the whole thing in motion. There is actually a fascinating land-use study in the episode, which could have been a flash point for something really ugly.
From the document, it looks possible that the rancher’s cattle became the focus of a strange plan to lease a chunk of Nevada desert to the Chinese for a solar project- you can see the priorities of the Bureau of Land Management in their pamphlet issued last month. I will save you from the mind numbing bureaucratic jargon if you want to go to the words on page 30 and the table on page 34. The number one priority on the project was law enforcement:
There is a much larger context to land use in the west, which is left over from the Manifest Destiny expansion into the vast expanse of land that connects Disneyland to the rest of America. A short appreciation is contained in this article. I don’t endorse it, but it does give some context for why Washington DC should be so interested in what seems to be a barren patch of not much, and why the people out there get so emotional about it:
http://mises.org/daily/6723/Ranchers-and-Empire-in-the-American-West
There is plenty to chew on in that article- and I have a little experience in the area, at the Nevada Test Site and Nellis AFB, which is near where the mysterious goings on at the Groom Lake site of Area 51 is just part. But I am not going to blame it on Aliens, though it may be connected to something in outer space.
The other folks- like the deadly KKK shooter- are coming out of the woodwork because of events in the heavens. Prophecy loves signs from the stars, and if you haven’t heard, there is a Blood Moon in the sky tomorrow.
It is the first of a series of rare alignments of the Moon in the Earth’s shadow. At around 0200 Wednesday morning, the normally bright silver hue of Luna will turn a sort of burnt umber color. It is Tax Day, after all.
Three more episodes of the phenomenon will occur over the course of the next year. Some prophets are predicting all sorts of extraordinary events based on the portents, and for them, the hue of a desert sunset are really the color of blood.
You may want to mark your calendar for the installments of the apocalypse: April 15, 2014; October 8, 2014; April 4, 2015, and September 28, 2015.
Lunar eclipses occur in random order, according to the people who follow these things. That includes astronomers as well as lunatics. According to NASA, these linked events are called “tetrads.” Based on the orbital mechanics, this may not happen for centuries at a time.
Propitious? I don’t know, but the eclipse is going to be visible primarily in North and South America. The loons are drawing their own conclusions about that.
Tuesday’s blood moon also comes right on time for Passover, which commemorates the ancient Israelites’ exodus from slavery in Egypt. According to the Bible, God cast 10 plagues upon the Egyptians, the final plague being the death of the firstborn. The Israelites painted lamb’s blood on their doorways so that this plague would pass over their homes.
My plan is to watch from the country, so that if anything spooky happens there is plenty of room for it. I would say that it would be even safer to be out in the desert where there are no trees or buildings to fall over, but I think considering land use policy, I am better off right where I am at Refuge Farm.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303