You can't do that!

“You can’t do that!” was the phrase, in some context, my now former neighbor up on big Boulder Creek told me as we finished packing the 26 foot Penske truck for the move to Reardan early Wednesday afternoon.

When I was searching for some title for this brief update, the term that seemed most appropriate was — “You can’t do that!”

The move itself, with the truck leaving north Spokane after 9 AM Wednesday and completed in less than 12 hours, was a reality trip proving you can’t do that is many times wrong.

The senior citizen on this move was my late 60s aged Bannon cousin Jim, with a knee replacement, which he says is his good knee.

For me, a few years his junior, I have my porcine aortic valve and a piece of Dacron that ties it to the rest of my blood distribution system. As I was carrying one of the boxes into the house in Reardan, I got to thinking this is exactly not how my doctor told me to carry heavy objects with my left shoulder torn rotator cup.

A year younger than me, was another part of the moving crew, cousin Stan from the Miller side of the family. He had a slight stroke a few years ago after which they found an enlarged aorta also, which they are closely monitoring.

Then the youngster on the team, in his late 50s, was my neighbor Rick Sphuler, who once I moved to the big BC (Boulder Creek) determined we were in the University of Washington Medical Center Hospital at the same time; me for a heart valve and an artificial section of aorta, Rick for a bone marrow transplant. Rick and his wife Sandy, on Wednesday celebrated their thirty-eighth wedding anniversary, hence he only helped with the loading in Kettle Falls.

If you think that a bunch of old duffers can’t do that, you really can’t believe in a series of miracles, which will form the renewal basis to what the world’s scoffers attribute to the decline of historic American opportunities.

Uncle Sam maybe getting old, but he is far from dead, and as a virtual reality figure, is not subject to the natural decay of we mere mortals, who like to export our limitations on everything we cannot control within our limited spheres of personal understanding.

While we got the move accomplished in less that 12 hours, the new behemoth on the local communications front, Century Link, was supposed to have me set up with my new high-speed DSL internet link last Tuesday and hemmed and hawed until yesterday; they now say that it will happen this coming Wednesday.

Therein is the contrast that will change the way the United States and the world operates in the remainder of this century. The corporate dinosaurs, behemoths and leviathans will not be able to move rapidly enough to keep from becoming extinct in an economic world that more closely models natural law than the artificial environment we created during the Industrial Age and the Debt Supercycle.

As far as the new digs in Reardan, this century old house, needed a few new electrical outlets in the master bedroom, which required a new sub electrical panel and a significant rewiring of about a third of the house in total. This will require sheet rock and finishing of one bedroom wall before the move will really be moved in.

As a graduate school alumnus of Washington State University, about the only news I have kept up on in the last week is Wazzu has hired a new football coach, one-time national coach of the year Mike Leach, formerly of Texas Tech. I bring this up because the WSU athletic director Bill Moos, is from Edwall and played his high school football on a field a few blocks to the south of my new home, at Reardan High School. This historically rapid and expensive move in WSU athletics has been reported in the local press as akin to “You can’t do that!”

Now that I am situated in the Eastern Washington wheat belt, one of the conversations I had the other day brought up the potential reality that under the current practices and incentives in American agriculture, it maybe impossible to provide our citizens a truly healthful diet. If you couple that with the totally unsustainable nature of our current nationalized scheme of agribusiness incentives, we will need to refocus our whole concepts of “doings in the dirt;” the title of next week’s full column.

A whole future concept of how a nation goes about “doings in the dirt” will also give many people the economic opportunity to show the fallacy of “You can’t do that!”

Tags: Reardan, WSU, agriculture