January 2004 Archived Columns
1/16/2004
The weather’s been a little grumpy lately, but this morning (Friday) dawned as a beautiful day. I was out in the yard fairly early, and it was one of those rare, rosy sunrises where you feel you can see the dark side of the moon against the pale blue sky.Well, it was news and bad news for the locally famous New Year's Eve possum drop over in Brasstown, North Carolina. The good news is that the New York Times covered it a few days before the event. Actually, even though the story was datelined “Brasstown, North Carolina,” I doubt their stringer ever showed up there, because the story stated that the gas station was in “downtown Brasstown,” and anyone who has ever been to Brasstown knows it just don’t got no downtown. Also, it never mentioned the folk school. And, I guess you could also grump that it was pretty typical of up north coverage of what they think of “Appalachia,” what with it leaving the definite impression that we’re all still running around barefoot down here in the middle of the winter, driving blown away pickup trucks and doodling our sisters in between gulping moonshine and worshipping possums. But still, the possum claptrap was invented to promote Brasstown, and there’s no doubt that coverage is coverage, right? All publicity’s good. Just spell our names right.
Well, maybe. The bad news was that the story brought the full wrath of the Virginia People for the Ethical Treatment of animals down on the possum drop. They threatened a mighty lawsuit on several grounds, the main one being that lowering a possum twelve feet from the roof of a gas station in a plexiglass box constituted unspeakable cruelty to animals. While they didn’t actually compare the people of Brasstown to Saddam Hussein’s secret police, that was pretty much the general drift. As you know, while they don’t give us much credit for smarts up north, right or wrong, we generally do know when we’re beat. Remember when Earl Long pointed out that the Feds have the bomb? I wouldn’t want to push that analogy too far with MLK day coming, but it was kind of like that over in Brasstown. After a brief period of denial, it was finally recognized that while the people in the Virginia PETA chapter might be insane, they also have lawyers, while the good people of Brasstown generally don’t. The upshot of it all was that the New Year was brought in by lowering a DEAD possum twelve feet from the roof of the gas station. While that presumably has averted the threatened lawsuit – the poor possum was roadkill – it just wasn’t quite the same. Here in the south, we still regret the passing of the old country ways. As the New York Times dutifully reported in its followup story, one old boy observed after it was all over that “It was a hell of a way to bring in the new year, saluting a dead possum.”
I still don’t have a very good read on the real estate market in the first quarter, because the weather has been pretty bad, but stay tuned.
There’s been a lot of owl activity lately, as it’s mating season for the barred and horned owls. For that matter, a buyer of mine and I got good looks at a screech owl over at Goleega the other day. Apparently, it was asleep on a limb when we came up, and it let us get within a few feet and take its picture before deciding that it was well worth the effort to fly away. (They’re the ones with the eerie call that sounds like a horse whinnying or a cat screeching. They tend to call in the very early morning, after they come back to their roost after a night of hunting.)
Despite the colder weather, it’s a real good time to come up. There’s still pretty good elbow room out there, and I hope to see you in town.
