‘One foot on a hot stove and another on a ice block’ doesn’t average out in Eastern KY

What do you wear, thought Tie Rod, on a February day in Kentucky when you can snow ski in the morning and water ski in the evening? Tie Rod says that if you put one foot on a hot stove and another on a ice block, you won’t necessarily average being comfortable, and having floods every winter and drought and Arizona heat every summer may not average out. He, like ten billion fellow humans, cannot understand how global warming can make it hotter and colder both, but he has noticed that you don’t hear a lot of old folks bragging about how cold or hot it was in the old days.

Tie Rod says that all that talk about environmental disaster is just a bunch of lies from mountain people whose homes got washed away. Tie Rod’s people are by and large holler people. They string themselves out along stretches of habitable ground on narrow valleys which must also have room for a creek, a road and a too close house or trailer. Then when one of those 100-year floods comes every three years, their humble little houses and wobbly box trailers go floating down to Catlettsburg like the steamboat Andy Hatcher, riding on water browned by topsoil on its way to the Mississippi Delta, to be farmed there, as here, by the hands of the poor. It is said that President Garfield attained his reputation for bravery by piloting a commandeered steamboat down the flood-swollen Big Sandy. He actually won his Presidency by being a war hero, defeating Gen. Humphrey Marshall in a Floyd County battle in the previous Civil War in which three or two people got actual scratches and one guy fell off a cliff.

In order to lower his personal carbon footprint, Tie Rod is giving up hair spray, but not his methane producing diet. He will help lower greenhouse gases as much as the next, but he and his fellow coal worshipers all got together for a gigantic “We Told You So” in unison after the snot-encrusted natural gas system froze up in sunny Texas and put all those Big Hat/No Cattle Texans in the wet, cold dark where they deserved to be for closing their coal power plants.

But surely these gas power plant failures will put all the coal miners back to work, something that was supposed to happen the morning after “Che” Trump was sworn in as President and which no doubt would have had not Trump got so busy organizing trying to get people to ignore Covid and to steal an election.

Tie Rod’s category for vaccinations is coming up and he wants to take all three. He wants things to get back to normal.

Larry Webster is a Pikeville attorney who can be reached at websterlawrencer@bellsouth.net.