Outside

In these election times, it's all too easy to wave Old Glory; we see a lot of well-meaning folks standing in front of the flag when delivering a political message, or hiding behind it when things go wrong.
Last week, I received an e-mail from my daughter, Kristin, who manages a medical clinic in North Carolina. Most of what that dear girl sends me is fun and games, but every once in a while she smacks me alongside the head with a dose of reality and something to think about. To whit:
Three startling photographs of the largest re-enlistment ceremony ever held on the 4th of July, 2008 at Al Faw Palace, Baghdad, Iraq, with General David Petraeus officiating. This outstanding event was – as far as I can find out – ash-canned by our main-stream media. Even Jim Lehrer (may have) missed it, and that's a surprise. Makes me wonder why… Is there someone "out there" censoring our news…?
I have two USAF sons who are F-16 drivers, and have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, one of them on the UN "peace-keeping" assignments in Bosnia. At present, my oldest son, a Colonel in the USAF, is serving in Turkey, and his brother is a USAF Reserve Group commander in Florida.

A stranger to Central Oregon, but common to Florida, the American Alligator. You'd think any Oregonian with a grain of sense would wait until
January to fly off to Florida for a week or so but my son, Ross, called
me last March and said, "Pop, for your birthday, I'm going to give you
an all-expense paid week in Florida. Come on down!"
Well, this and
that got in the way for us to make it happen; two things that were
significant. The first being that my wife, Sue, went to work on a
summer-long contract with the National Park Service to do a butterfly
census in Lava Beds National Monument in Northern California. The other
being a new job for Ross, who is a Lt. Col. in this man's USAF Reserve.
Sue
finished her contract on Labor Day, and Ross, who started out his
career with the Air Force as an F-16 Instructor Pilot, and whom, like
many service men and women, has done tours in the Middle East, recently
took command of the 482nd Operations Group at Homestead AFB in Florida.

Golden mantle ground squirrel mooching at Crater Lake.A little while back, I went to the defense of our much-maligned
rodent-eating reptilian friend, the Western Rattlesnake. In that piece,
I asked people to be considerate of where they go and how they act
while in rattlesnake country. The same holds true when among rodents.
No
one in their right mind would invite a rattlesnake into their lap to
munch on a rodent, the same holds true for our friendly – sometimes way
too friendly – peanut-eating, Golden Mantle Ground Squirrel,
Spermophilius lateralis.
Rattlesnakes injure and kill people by
biting and injecting venom; ground squirrels kill people by sharing
their fleas that in turn bite people and inject one of the deadliest
diseases to infect humanity: the Black Death. And, so you get the
point, the fleas that carry the disease can be found on several species
of rodents living throughout Central Oregon.

Where’s Big Bird?They were BIG, very big, stood about 12 feet to the top of their wooly head, about as long as a school bus and weighed around six tons. As long as you didn't bother them, they probably wouldn't bother you, if you got one mad, however, you were in a heap of trouble – but I'll bet they tasted good.
I saw a tooth and part of a tusk of one years back when I took a bunch of budding paleontologists on an OMSI fossil-collecting trip up the Columbia River near Arlington. One of the young men, an up-and-coming geologist (now retired), found it in sand and gravel deposited by the Missoula Floods. That tooth was massive, big as a football! Yes, by Jove, you have it: the Wooly Mammoth.
These magnificent early elephants roamed all over this country as the snow and glaciers of the last Ice Age melted, building up sprawling lakes around Millican, Christmas Valley, Fort Rock and Great Basin. Dire wolves and saber-toothed tigers feed on mammoths and ground sloths while cranes and herons that stood twice as big as present day species scavenged leftovers and man was living in his cave training wolf puppies to help him kill mammoths and sloths.