is not something I’ve ever personally resisted, I enjoy learning and doing new things, and my gig is always an adventure.

OTOH, I like some things to be the same, if I can get them.

The town in the frozen north where I now sit is the town that the Ogwife grew up in.

But, then again, it isn’t.

She notices it, I notice it, and we both feel a bit strangely about it. Her because her memories are gone; me, because I miss the town this once was. Here there once were the hard and the rugged, men and women who came here and carved life and living out of the granite escarpments, dealt with harsh winters and rough seas and all manner of hardship. When I first came here over twenty years ago, those people were still here, and a lot of them were still living in the same way, hunting and fishing and trapping. The Hudson’s bay company still had an outpost, where you could buy point blankets with beaver pelts. Some roads were summer roads only. And snowmobile wasn’t a means of recreation, it was winter transport.

Now the town is more like Broad Ripple than Ketchikan. The old trading post now rents plastic canoes and kayaks to vacationers, the local stores replaced by walmart and each empty storefront filled with a used bookstore, an art gallery, havens for hippies and buskers playing artifically distressed musical instruments more out of tune than their singing.

I miss the raw smell of it. The knowledge that you might see a moose or a bear in town. Now it smells like patchouli and dope, and the most dangerous thing you see is the daisy-duke shorts and full length blue support hose on Al, the septuagenerian meth addict. He himself is harmless, but his clothing is lethal both in appearance and aroma.

So for my own twisted nostalgia here’s the lyrics to one of my favorite showtunes, by Lerner sans Lowe. If you haven’t heard Lee Marvin sing this in “Paint your wagon” you have missed something special.

God made the mountains
God made the sky
God made the people
God knows why

He fixed up the planet
As best as He could
Then in come the people
And gum it up good

The first thing you know

They civilized the foothills
And everywhere He put hills
The mountains and valley below

They come along and take ’em
And civilize and make ’em
A place where no civilized
Person would go

The first thing you know
The first thing you know

They civilize what’s pretty
By puttin’ up a city
Where nothin’ that’s
Pretty can grow

They muddy up the winter
And civilize it into
A place too uncivilized
Even for snow

The first thing you know

They civilize left
They civilize right
Till nothing is left
Till nothing is right

They civilize freedom
Till no one is free
No one except
By coincidence, me

The first thing you know

The boozer’s in prison
And the criminally isn’t
And only the rascals have dough

When I see a parson
I gotta put my arse in
A wagon that follows the tail of a crow

The first thing you know
I pick up and blow!
The first thing you know

Updated to add: only in this town would you see a smooooking hot broad in yoga pants and a gadsden shirt having a smoke with a gesticulating sunburned scarecrow of a man in flipflops and mismatched socks, and hes the business owner, and shes the street bum.