Little short story:
I used to go down to Mount Baker to ski. It's an active volcano in the same chain as Mt. St. Helens in Washington state. We skiied a part of it called the Shucksan Arm. On a clear day you can see it from the Burrard St. Bridge in Vancouver Canada. And when that one goes, you will be able to see the three hundred foot tsunami run right up the channel. But that day is still in the future, and it was obviously more in the future then than it is now.
There was a crowd of about twelve of us who, year after year, rented some cabins down in Glacier Washington. And we'd get up in the morning and drive 5,000 feet straight up the mountain in the Beemer to go skiing an hour before dawn.
There are many stories, but this is not the time for them.
Now there is only time for the point. We Don't do that any more, though none of us are tired of skiing or spending money in Washington nightclubs. What happened is they started treating us like Mexicans at the border crossing.
RIght, Jack. No more postcards of Smokey the Bear shaking hands with Dudley Doright of the Canadian Mounties across the "world's longest undefended border" (wish I still had one of those archaic postcards--a fortune on e-bay if you have one). The fucker is defended now, all right. They TOOK MY CAR APART and then they wouldn't even lend me the tools to put it back together when they found nothing "actionable".
And that was the start, and folks, it was WAY before what they love to call 9/11. They should including the year, because it's getting old.
So now I ski in Canada. Eh? Better runs, better snow, and they don't take my car apart. Same car. Same people. Same distance from my home. But you know what? There are WAY more 'murrican ski bunnies and top shelf execs I could kill in Banff and Whistler Village than I could have dreamed of killing in a shitty backwater town on a glacier in the Baker mountain chain with the same equipment. On any given Saturday in any given winter.
Except now. All 'merricans are a bit afraid of travelling, except the very rich and the very poor. What has changed?
This has changed:
I went down to Seattle on business not too long ago and once they let me across the border... and the car was working again... and, just for nostalgia, I said to my friend "Hey. Know those cabins I used to rave about? Well they're just only about fifty miles from here, let's drop in and say hello."
Wish I hadn't. Some background here. The old fella (a shock of red hair, two axe handles across at the shoulders) that owned the place won the land in a gambling game, just a whack of trees in Washington. As a young man he slowly logged the place, by himself, until he had a cleared lot and a roadway and built himself a cabin. He then went into town and found himself a wife. He then went on to clear bits of his land. He cut the trees with his own hands. He sold some so they could eat. He sold some to buy equipment. He used some to build more cabins. He started renting the cabins to Canadians so they could ski in the winter and walk around in the forest in summer. He was dead.
"The life went out of him" the widow said, as we stood there like idiots in the pouring West coast rain. She was blind. "The business just died. There used to be some Canadians used to come down here every winter and it paid the bills. But when he couldn't keep cutting the wood, when he got old like, well there was nothing else."
"I heard he was a fine man", I said.
"Yes." she said, "Yes he was."
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10:52:11 AM 
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