All Entries in the "Lifestyles at Risk" Category

Burglar’s Rash Baffles Authorities

(Montrose) Police today arrested Hector DesPlants and his little brother Howard L. in connection with a spurt of burglaries on Spring Creek Mesa. The crimes, committed over a thee-month period last fall have been blamed for personal losses in the millions of dollars.

At the time of the apprehension  officers noticed a dangerous-looking rash on Howard L.’s arms and the back of his legs which has little to do with the story but makes for an interesting headline, a play on words as it were, especially considering that it leads off what is normally a tediously humdrum police report.

Back to the crimes: In one particularly bold intrusion the thieves allegedly made off with three race horses, a rare Siamese ferret, a talking blue-streak toucan and an undisclosed number of exotic Mexican geese. This heist, which police believe took place during the third quarter of a Broncos-Chargers game, was carried out with extreme prejudice and  sophisticated precision previously unknown in these parts.

The missing animals were soon found in the DesPlants’ double-wide in downtown Whitewater, which pretty much synched up the case against them.

“We have been seeing crooks embracing specialty theft,” said a local deputy. “It’s all cut and dry and carried out by professionals with a crow bar in one hand and a ledger book in the other. The problem is that stealing is far more lucrative than working for minimum wages downtown.”

She went on to say that while specialization is a logical progression in these difficult times, the practice of targeting livestock throws a another switch in the pasture.

“People leave dogs, cows and sheep outdoors without a thought to their immediate security,” she continued. “I remember when nobody locked their doors around here. Now we have to secure our gates and put alarms in the barn. There are just too many people that don’t connect to our mountains residing here these days. They only relocate because they have fouled up everything where they used to live.”

The DesPlants have been arraigned and are scheduled to face a firing squad on Monday.

– Kashmir Horseshoe

Rip-Snortin’ at Animas Forks

The soft autumn sunlight hung on the edge of the porch toasting the cabin in much desired warmth. The nights had turned flat cold since the August rains had quit, leaving Eliot T-Bone wondering what winter would bring.

At 74, he hardly made it over to American Basin anymore, where he had toiled for some 45 years in search of the big bonanza that was always at the end of tomorrow’s pick and shovel. With the Finns he had mucked out enough rock to build a city larger than any in Hinsdale County. When claims played out they had survived working for wages at larger mines and tending to their placer digs on Henson Creek. Hand to mouth and back to work. It was worse over there in Europe according to the Austrians with wars overlapping wars and peasant sons plugged in for cannon fodder on the battlefields while kings grabbed the glory and the gold.

After a lifetime he had accumulated worthless piles of ore, shafts almost to China and tobacco stains on everything. Living on beans, flour biscuits and elk meat had taken a toll on the system but there were few vegetable gardens at 9500 feet. Sure, his claim was secure and they couldn’t run him off, at least today. He still had his mules and the friends who hadn’t died off yet. He had this fallen down cabin at Animas Forks. Living off the land he was, or wasn’t it the other way around. He just didn’t see any reason to travel up over Cinnamon to Lake City anymore.

Silverton was another matter. He still made weekly trips to Howardsville for supplies, and then traveled on for a night on Blair Street with all the desperate Silverton miners and the far more desperate Silverton whores. When the weather was bad he would just stay home by the fire soaking beans, making jerky, firing up his dutch oven. He had been home on one such night last winter when one of the prostitutes went mad killing three miners with a butcher’s knife, accentuated by well placed sticks of dynamite. That was some big excitement and he almost wished he had been in town to see the blood and the fireworks. Yes, things were that boring out in Animas Forks now that everyone had deserted the place and morbid rock faces stared him down every morning and night.

He scratched his ribs under a dirty union suit and stretched. The deer and the whistle pigs didn’t worry or fret about this life. They just lived it happy to survive another afternoon. Why were people so damned difficult? He had become a near recluse but still welcomed several of his old friends to the porch Emil Turlough, the local doctor, long retired came by every Thursday on his way back from Gladstone. Stan Celkirk still ran sheep up toward the pass in the summer. Oral Stishnik and Peter Leary quit guiding hunters up and down these mountains some time ago. Now their sons did the deed while the old men gave advice and smoked their pipes. They still stopped in and he visited them in a town that boasted electric lights and carriages straight from Paris, or so they said.

The rest of them could pretty much go to hell. Pistol wielders, flimflam men and painted women, and let us not forget the righteous out to save souls and make a profit too. The Ute and Chinee were mostly gone. Disappeared in the dust of progress and comfortable living. What about the souls of the dead?

Most of the newcomers in Silverton had no connection to the place. Why were they here? Were things really that bad other places? They had the combined charm of a pan of burnt eggs, the warmth of a basket of rattlesnakes. Flatlander bastards. They didn’t know a thing about life as it once was in the boom days. They wouldn’t have been able to make it back then. They didn’t pay him any attention, much less a sprinkle of respect, when he wandered into town. They only stared at his bad teeth and skinny string of mules with saddles that didn’t fit any of them. They all dressed up like they were going somewhere, but there was nowhere to go. The mindless march of lemmings served well by the presence of so many convenient cliffs and ravines.

Don’t matter anyhow…since most don’t journey far from town except in the summer. They leave us fellows out here alone and we should return the favor. That new preacher from Mancos said he’d pick up whatever I needed from town and haul it out here but I’m afraid there are celestial strings attached. Before you know it this boy will be holding services and singing psalms right here from the porch. Too much. My few neighbors, the lion and the bear wouldn’t have any of that. They get by without all these fairy tales. They don’t even know where they came from or where they’re going. They just live. The marmots in the ground, the hawks in the sky, the quakie stretching up toward the heavens. They just exist without all the trimmings, the dogma.

He remembered when he had come to this country, seeing the glory of the San Juans for the first time. All the enthusiastic unbroken bodies scrambling for their fortunes in gulch camps and tent cities that sprang up after the Great War. Refugees from the madness embracing another kind of insanity far away in these ragged mountains. The snow covers up the mess. It’s clean and fresh for a while.

The years just went by. More elk stew, beans and biscuits and more dreams of striking it rich. He stared at his pile of firewood, then out across the dim light. There had been bighorn sheep crossing over about a mile down toward Silverton. He had seen the tracks in the snow. He wondered if he had the energy to shoot one and pack it back up here. The price of solitude.

Having never married he had no family to care for him in his old age. He remembered courting and heartbreak, custom brides from far away Missouri and escapes from the entanglements of it all. Sure he’d gone shopping for a wife in Durango back some 30 years ago. He even brought one curious prospect up the hill but by late afternoon it was clear she would grow to hate him and the mountains. Better left alone.

It was quiet here and he had no one to make happy but himself. He went to sleep when he pleased and got up when he damn well wanted to. He snored and wore wool socks to bed. He ate elk stew that he couldn’t taste anymore despite the peppers that he bought in Hermosa the summer before. Every day was pretty much the same.

Just then a sudden explosion ripped through the evening causing bull elk to raise their heads, sending fuzzy marmots scurrying into rocky holes. Fish stopped swimming, eagles stopped soaring, sows looked around for their cubs. This was no mere elk bugle. It was an excurrent discharged, an outburst expelled as if from a buffalo stampede, a bonafide T-Bone bugle that surprised even him. A highly audible sonic boom from the vicinity of his drop-drawers. Thunderous repercussions! Burgeoning landslides! Curious windbreaks! Gaseous dynamite in the digestive tract. The flatulence ripping with major magnitude that echoed down the valley.

Inadmissible punctuation quite relevant for the times, or so he thought. He laughed out loud a little surprised, a little proud of himself. The world stopped for a flash.

“Beans and elk stew,” he snapped, “keeps the system responsive.”

Eliot T-Bone stretched, scratched his ribs, yawned and walked into his cabin.

– Melvin Toole

Presidential candidates gain weight in eleventh hour in appeal for obese vote

• Cleveland) Mitt Romney and Barack Obama have put on a little weight these days in an attempt to sway the vote of Ohio’s chubby voters. Hoping to capitalize on the state’s higher than average obesity ranking both candidates plan to put on 10 pounds per day before the November 6 election.

They intend to do this by restructuring their diets and terminating all exercise.

“I intend to be one with the people,” said Romney from his tour bus near Akron. “The middle class is a little round around the middle as I will be, if not today then on the first day of my Presidency.

Obama echoed the same sentiments promising to embrace a full figure agenda despite the reported protests of the First Lady, Michelle Obama, a strong proponent of nutrition and healthy lifestyle.

“It’s finally come to this,” said one Libertarian. “Politicians have been employing smoke and mirrors since the beginning of time and now they have evolved into shape changing.”

Thirty-five percent of adults in the United States are obese according to countless studies conducted by the Center Disease Control and the number is growing. Mississippi is the fattest state and Colorado the leanest. Ohio falls somewhere in the center and the smell of fresh voter blood there has been enough to entice the hungry coyotes in both parties.

Both Romney and Obama supporters acknowledge that their whistle-stoppers will begin to shed the pounds (like election promises?) immediately following the election. Obama plans to jog in Anacostia while Romney has booked a month in a swank resort-spa in Park City.

Please see related piece: South Sudan Diet Big Hit in Palm Springs

GHOST OF ABE LINCOLN THANKS DIXIE FOR SUPPORT OF GOP

(Charleston, SC) The ghost of Honest Abe Lincoln, dba Honest Abe the Rail Splitter, aka (expletive deleted) Emancipator of the Slaves visiting shipyards here across from Fort Sumner to express his gratitude for the support of the American South in this and most elections since 1968.

Before that the Democrats could count on the overwhelming vote of Dixiecrats or the Solid South, in a region that saw the Republican Party as the Yankee Party. Many Blacks did not vote in those days and the democrats featured candidates that would keep it that way.

Lincoln, who appeared and reappeared in a gaseous state, similar to the smoke and fire from Civil War battlefields was attended by lost souls of the more than 700,000 war dead who didn’t thank anyone.

“I don’t care what level-headed people say,” snapped one descendent of the conflict whose ancestors  bombarded the Union fort stranded like of concrete raft in the secessionist harbor. “Lincoln and the Republicans started the war, perpetuated Reconstruction and destroyed the South. How these people can support them today is beyond belief.”

Polls suggest that most people below the Mason-Dixon Line do not connect Lincoln to cotton or Yankees to Republicans.

Ayn Rand Appears

Ayn Rand Appears to Crystal Lake Fishermen

(Ouray) Author of the objectivist philosophy, Ayn Rand appeared to sturgeon fishermen here today stumping for GOP candidates in this traditional union workplace. Rand, thought to have died in 1982, looked drawn and tired according to reports on the scene. Accompanying her was Friedrich von Hayek, the neoclassical Austrian economist.

Her companion, Professor Hayek, whose death was recorded in 1992, told fishermen that government intervention in a free market system can only make things worse. He added that the adoption of an objectivism philosophy, where everyone pursued his own happiness in deference to the plight of his fellow man, was the only real path to economic growth.

“We are not our brother’s keeper,” he said.

A third apparition, who remained in the background during the intercourse, looked suspiciously like former President Ronald Reagan.

Many freewheeling fiscal saviors have cherry picked from Hayek as far back as Herbert Hoover and Milton Friedman. Margaret Thatcher embraced his beliefs of classical liberalism, seeing personal and economic freedom as entwined and essential to a healthy world economy.

Despite persistent rumors, no one walked on the water during the sojourn.

Rand, born in St Petersburg, Russia, urged the local sturgeon industry to throw off the chains of government meddling, while harvesting high altitude caviar “like Atlas in the silver veins of yesterday.”

Fishermen, who have been testing these waters for centuries agreed that the appearances provided a positive distraction in what can be a tedious daily existence. Meanwhile people in town concur that the whole thing was concocted as a publicity stunt by cults living on Red Mountain.

– John Galt

W Mountain Infested with Sage Grouse

Late summer rainbow at the San Juan Horseshoe World Headquarters at Colona, Colorado (photo by DeLinda Austin)

(Gunnison) 8625-foot Tenderfoot Mountain has been invaded by hordes of endangered Gunnison Sage Grouse, a species that has inhabited the region long before the arrival of modern man. Most of the birds, who experts insist are hiding from well-intentioned environmentalists, are clumped together around and under the giant “W” that graces the peak.

The birds have seen their population fall from some 16 million in 1812 to only 200,000 today. Respected as wild things and as a source of food by the Ute, the birds have become victims of human encroachment and now have been recognized as endangered, a status not conferred on the above mentioned tribe.
Unreliable sources contend that no such occupation problems have been reported on nearby Signal Peak, Green Mountain, Flat Top, or on Cooper Mountain. Local residents say the birds will leave in the autumn when the W is lit on fire according to age-old Homecoming tradition at Western.Tenderfoot Mountain and the W, the largest college emblem in the world (or was that the largest collegiate emblem above 8000 feet?)  by virtue of links with higher learning, have been spared the impact of grazing, geo-thermal exploration and subdivisions . Not to be confused with 11,444-foot Tenderfoot Mountain in Summit County, this spot may be seen by grouse as a last stand or at least  safe haven for the present.

“Around here we don’t call 8600-foot no mountain,” said Clyde Colon, who spoke without clearance or encouragement from anyone. “It’s more of a big hill but it’s the 2587th highest peak in the state and we cannot have this bird inundation messing with our cherished landmarks. I say let’s send some of those idle administrators from the college up there to run them out. Maybe they can increase enrollment at the same time.”

To complicate matters the Gunnison Sage Grouse is known for elaborate courtship rituals which can be observed by field biologists in the early morning and early evening when the lek (breeding ground) comes alive in mass proportions. The males of the species strut around for a while then copulate with any willing female and nesting follows. Many potential aves voyeurs have been turned away by Friends of the Sage Grouse, an armed  paramilitary group that has set up daily patrols at the bottom of the peak. Sadly some have slipped through the lines and threaten to distract the birds from the mating business at hand.

“They are up there strutting around, partying all night, every night and in the morning too. They’re having an orgy and the authorities do nothing,” said Colon. “What if children happened by? It’s all out in the open with no discretion whatsoever. If it wasn’t for these fancy rituals nobody with pay them a tinker’s damn.”

The ground foraging Gunnison Sage Grouse (Centrocercus minimus), a smaller, more intelligent grouse, has been recognized as a species distinct from the Greater (than what?) Sage Grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus) which is the largest in North America. Both nest on the ground, and eat copious  amounts of sagebrush as well as a whatever insects might be hanging out. The Gunnison Sage Grouse is considered to be far advanced in matters of winter survival techniques and general thermodynamics.

– Melvin Toole, Science Editor

Millionaire Christians Meet

Aerobics in the Pasture Part Three: “All the Stacked Horses” performing south of Crested Butte. (photo by Jeff Brown The Juneau What)

(Ridgway) The first ever meeting of the Christian Millionaires Club was held here last night attracting an assortment of the righteous who have managed to acquire vast sums of money and now seek to nail down their eternal salvation.

Among the subjects discussed was the purchase of Ridgway Town Park, the termination of local liquors licensing, sending out mass mailings, a whitewashing of the town’s historic church and what to do with people who refuse to embrace their philosophies.

“If these pagan elements would simply open up to the bigger picture I’m sure they’d see the advantages of joining our cult,” said Charla Tinn a spokesman for the club. “We host hay rides, bonfires, book burnings and bring in lots of Christian talent. Let’s face it, we have all the money and will soon be having the only fun.”

Tinn, a former heroin enthusiast from Southern California, says she was saved on the street in Hollywood back in 1994. Thanks to a strong resolve and plenty of inherited family money she kicked heroin and found religion. She moved to Ridgway the next year.

“Our club is open to everyone…not just millionaires. Billionaires too are welcome to our ministry as is anyone with a missionary commitment, just so long as they can pay their dues.”

Tinn went on to say that her membership saw no conflict in supporting the killing in Iraq and adhering to the Christian way of life.

“It’s either us or them,” she waffled. “Didn’t you ever read the Old Testament. I’ve got it here on CD in my Lexus.”

Following the meeting a reporter asked whether the late prophet Jesus Christ, the man whose philosophies the group claims to follow, could afford membership in their elite group.

“He probably could have joined but he kept giving away all his cash. Maybe we could find him a sponsor among our multitudes.”

– Kashmir Horseshoe