 Column: Humor DRIPPY NEW YEAR!By DAVE KIFFER
January 09, 2018
Which begs the question, just how straight does a crow fly really? I mean we mostly have ravens around here, which gets me to wondering if they are all that different from crows. They are both black and they seem to just spend all day flocking around. According to GoogleCaw, there are physical differences. Ravens live longer and crows hang around people while ravens do not. Guess the Google folks need to spend a little more time around the McDonald's drive thru or anywhere in Ketchikan there is a trash can. Ketchikan's ravens seem more than a little social when scavenging is involved. But GoogleCaw didn't answer the main question. Do crows/ravens fly in a straight line? Somehow, I doubt it, but why mess with a good cliché. Anyway, when a crow flies between Nanaimo and Cordova (no matter how unlikely that would be to happen), about halfway it will fly over Ketchikan. Then, after stopping to snag stale French fries in the drive thru and pick apart some salmon bones from a trash bag, it will continue on its beeline (another cliché) northward to Cordova. In the meantime, on its journey, it will get very, very wet. That's the point of all this "crow flying." It is very wet between Nanaimo and Cordova. Some of the wettest places on Earth are along this temperate "rainforest" coast. I know because I live in one of those places. Ketchikan is a pretty wet place. I'm not going to say how wet, because even the meteorologists disagree on that point. Maybe southern Baranof Island or the mountains north of Yakutat are wetter. But everywhere the crows (okay, ravens) are flying around here is pretty wet. Speaking of which, can anyone tell why they are called "meteorologists?" Shouldn't a meteorologist be studying "meteors?" I just don't get it. But I digress. We live in a wet place. We are called "Wetnecks." We are the "People of the Mist." By why do we care about Nanaimo and Cordova? Well, we don't really. They have their own issues. Cordova has its own Bridge to Nowhere. Nanaimo is overrun by floating (more or less) bathtubs every year. But meteorologists and climatologists (shouldn't they be studying paths up Mt. Everest?) think that the world weather is changing. That it is getting hot all over place. That all the people on earth will eventually dry up and blow away like so many disregarded studies on global melting. All except for the coastal area of North American between - you guessed it - Nanaimo and Cordova. This of course begs another big question. How sure are these folks about something that could happen 100 years from now? That, natch, forces me to respond and raise my own question. Kiss My Globally Warmed Globes! (RIP, Floyd Turbo, American) But I digress again. Anyway, these are the prognosticators that will tell us that a storm is coming and we should expect anywhere from 1 to 324 inches of rain or maybe snow. And there is a 0 to 100 percent CHANCE of precipitation. These are also the same people who would say there is a 100 percent CHANCE of daylight tomorrow morning. Uh, gee, thanks for the heads up. But putting all that negativity about the precipitatory prognosticators aside, the area between Nanaimo and Cordova is expected to get wetter and windier in the future. And, of course, we are right almost dead center in that bull's eye. (I'm temped here to pause to ask why it's called a bull's eye. The last thing I would want to do is hit a bull's eye. That would just make the bull very angry. Why not a "fly's eye?" It won't matter if it gets angry and it would be more of a challenge to hit anyway. But I will choose not to digress, just this once!) So naturally all these wet crows are flying over us. But that is not my main concern. Do we really want the weather to get more inclement around these here parts? Yes, it will allow us eventually corner the entire continental market on fresh water and become the liquid barons of North American. But do we want that with the cost of having all the water on the continent deluge down on us, day after day after soggy bugger day? I don't know My Mother, God rest her soul, always thought that global warming would be a good thing for Ketchikan. Now it may be not be such a wonderful weather windfall after all. But then Mom didn't think much of ravens or crows, either. And I suspect she had no urge to fly from Nanaimo to Cordova.
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Dave Kiffer is a freelance writer living in Ketchikan, Alaska. Contact Dave at dave@sitnews.us Dave Kiffer ©2017
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