THANK YOU FOR reading this. Writing our nation’s only wilderness gossip column is not easy.
It took me years to become an overnight success with a publishing empire stretching from Shine Slough to Dead Dog Flats. And for that I am very thankful.
That’s what Thanksgiving means to me.
It’s so much more than images of black-robed Pilgrims with white starched collars, sitting down to dinner with their Indian friends to give thanks at harvest time.
Colonizing the New World was hard work that could give you quite an appetite. You had to plant something. It had to grow.
By the end of their first year in the New World, the Pilgrims were starving.
The Indians had plenty of food.
They taught the Pilgrims how to harvest maple syrup, plant corn and smoke meat.
As a way of thanking the Indians, the Pilgrims wiped them off the face of the Earth.
After settling the Eastern Seaboard, the Pilgrims headed west to make Thanksgiving a symbol of the America that we celebrate today.
It’s the story of the American Manifest Destiny, the belief that God gave us this land. The Pilgrims knew what to do with it.
They chopped down the forest and had the slaves plant corn, tobacco and cotton amid the stumps until the soil wore out, then loaded up the wagons and headed west looking for new land.
The inexorable tide of westward expansion bluffed the English, French, Spanish and Russians while massacring the Native Americans from sea to shining sea. Giving us a much different Thanksgiving than the Pilgrims could ever have imagined.
With the miracle of modern science, corn isn’t just for food anymore. We use it for fuel in our vehicles. With the rising cost of food and fuel, today’s Pilgrims are often faced with a choice of which they can afford.
Which leads to the basic question of how we will spend Thanksgiving, at home or on the road.
A Thanksgiving on the road is a travel adventure through America’s crumbling infrastructure.
Our roads, freeways and bridges have been ignored for so long they’ve become a rutted mess of chuck holes, even where they are not being torn up to remove barriers to imaginary salmon migrations.
I’ll be spending Thanksgiving at home in my palatial estate, giving thanks to the many government agencies that rule our lives and make this column possible.
Who could have imagined in a million years that U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists plan to exterminate 450,000 barred owls to save the spotted owl?
At Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Every year they provide us with a constant source of mirth with 150 pages of cutting-edge humor disguised as the fishing laws that protect the invasive green crab.
These rules can become irrelevant at any time with an emergency closure that can end the fishing season, causing thousands of salmon to return to the hatcheries to be sold as cat food.
These are the same people who insist we buy our fishing licenses on April Fools’ Day, then print our licenses, punch cards and tags with disappearing ink.
That’s hilarious!
That’s nothing compared to the comedians running the salmon restoration industry who are spending a million dollars a day removing salmon barriers in streams with no water.
What could be funnier than that?
There is no way in a million years I could make this stuff up on my own.
For that, I wish to thank the countless government agencies that make this column possible.
That’s what Thanksgiving means to me.
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Pat Neal is a Hoh River fishing and rafting guide and “wilderness gossip columnist” whose column appears here every Wednesday.
He can be reached at 360-683-9867 or by email via patnealproductions@gmail.com.
