Tuesday, November 30, 2021

Turn That Right Around!!!!!!

 


                               Back and badass!  Slammin' doors and slappin' whor...well, yeah.

 

And on the heels of that despairing little post comes the fantastic news: WE FOUND A FANTASTIC APARTMENT!

Right near the Biker's job, way within our price range, lots of room, brand spankin' new, and the landlord and onside handyman are great.  We'll also be four doors down from one of the Biker's friends!

Man, I cannot believe our fortune!

Monday, November 29, 2021

Dead Raccoons and Crackheads

                    "Hello I'd like to look at the apartment you had listOH HOLY FUCKBALLS NO." 
 

 Looking for apartments.  

Found one, it was the size of a closet.  Lovely neighborhood, brand spankin' new, lovely neighbors, and tighter than a nuns' ass.  I have never seen such a tiny  little place, and I've lived in studio apartments, kids.  What the actual fuck.

Looked at another apartment. -nay, a duplex!  Just about perfect!  Beautiful rural setting, a view of the mountains, on high ground, all the space we'd need plus a yard to turn into a magnificent garden...aaaaaand the manager is a huge douchebag.  Big man here. Got important shit to do.  Not time to chat! Yeah yeah yeah yeah my wife handles that shit I AM DOING IMPORTANT THINGS PEASANT!

Whew!  OK then!

On to Crack Country.  Average apartment, average building, rent controlled, but crackheads.

Then to the Wood Hood!  Yes, once a former coal mine, now a large flat place riddled with underground tunnels, where all the streets are named after trees and all the people are sketch as fuck.  But it is a nice building, and hell, it's in a neighborhood...near all the stores and services...

And in the middle of all this, I travelled nine miles and then waited two hours to speak to a Red Cross representative only to have our case get lost in the system.  Waited some more, sitting in the shelter, smelling the distinct aroma of human feces, amid the Covid cases and a lot of really pissed off people, only to get a phone interview - that could have been conducted anywhere - and  end up re-start a new case with a new case number...only to have the system lock up and be told that 'You'll be hearing from us.'  At least I got a can of tomato juice out of the venture.

I also met a couple of grizzled old rips like me there who lost everything in the Sumas flood.  It was kind of nice to meet old neighbors and be able to commiserate with people who 'get it'. 

 Both women had to be rescued by fishing boat AND by tractor bucket.  One almost drowned when the shelter she was staying in flooded and a floor caved in, and the other has been moved three times already to different shelters.  So there's the 'it could have been worse' factor too. 

As I was out and about I nearly drove in to Sumas to take a look at the old place, but I just couldn't. It's odd.  I just never want to see it again.  

I'll have to of course.  There's things to clean and pack, and roses to dig up and distribute.

The thing that gets to me is all the people out there living in their little houses, just like mine, happy about Christmas on the way, warm and dry, probably worried about their mortgages and car payments.  I desperately want one of those little houses.  It doesn't matter where.  I'll make it a home.  I'll stand on the roof and fend off the crackheads.  It doesn't matter.  I just want a little house again. My own, all paid for, simple and cozy.

Yeah, the loss is starting to hit home.

Friday, November 26, 2021

Happy Post Thanksgiving!!


 Here's hoping you had a boneriffic Turkey Day, and that your turkey had a boner, and everyone had boners, and there were boners laying out in the yard, and like driving cars around, and one in your mailbox too which is absolutely a double entendre. 

For the first time in absolute centuries we spent Thanksgiving as the guests of another couple, instead of being the T-Day destination for stray people.  IT WAS AWESOME.  

Our host and hostess are fantastic cooks, and no holiday horrors were perpetrated on our palates - you know, like that gross sweet potato casserole with maple syrup, Karo syrup, brown sugar, onions, raisins, miniature marshmallows and canned sweet potatoes that's always kind of burned on top?  Or the nasty green bean dish made with Campbells mushroom soup and overboiled beans and mystery chunks?  No!  Begone! Not present!  WE had fresh asparagus spears and a green salad with pomegranate and feta cheese, and turkey and ham and potatoes and gravy and PIES PIES PIES!

There is a Carmel Apple Pecan Streusel pie making the rounds of supermarket bakeries here that is the most delicious thing ever.  We shared one for dessert last night. OMG I would totally smuggle this pie in my underpants across state lines. It was incredible. We were truly thankful. Traditional food-coma Thanksgiving meal - CHECK!

I hope all of you had a wonderful Thanksgiving.  Even people who live in no-Thanksgiving countries and stuff.  Yesterday should have been wonderful for you and I sincerely hope it was, because all you guys are one of the things that I'm thankful for.  You make my day and lift my spirits.  

                                                          Rock on with your bad selves!


Monday, November 22, 2021

Family Matters

What's cool is when your kids grow up and finally realize you were right all along.  AND TELL YOU THAT.  

What's weird is when they say you were a good example.


                                        I really wasn't a good example.  I swear I wasn't. Really

______________________

Life in the new motel is going well.  Once again the Sikhs came through for us via a co-worker of the Bikers, and got us a week free at this place owned by one of the Temple members. We'll probably  be able to stay here as long as we need to, and it's clean, bright and economical, too. Most importantly of  all, it's on the second floor.

What's strange is being back in a city-suburban surroundings again.  

The last time I lived in Bellingham, it was a nice little town.  Now it is a high-density urban sprawl, and there's homeless encampments in every empty lot and down every creek.  Meth is everywhere.  Our room is in a nice area, too!  Clearly I was entirely too isolated in Sumas, because this is fuckin' extreme shit as far as I'm concerned.  

About five years ago I worked at a place about half a mile away from our room, and it was a nice 3-star Marriot, brand new, in a newly developed area with it's own brand-new business district.  All that's still there, and still fairly upscale, but it's got homeless people, garbage dumps and abandoned cars everywhere they can fit.  The corners of every parking lot, between buildings, in landscape plantings and what few empty lots are left.  It's really messing with me.  Meth heads roam in packs and do home invasions en masse!

Now that being said, we're looking for an apartment in one of the 55 and over developments nearby, since the Biker works three minutes away from where we're staying - he's been walking to work in the mornings, it's so close.  It's simply a matter of finding a vacancy in this particular time and at this time of year.  This genuinely is a nice area, meth heads aside, and the amount of money we're saving on gasoline alone is fucking astounding. EVERYTHING is nearby!  Our friends, public transportation, our doctors offices; you know - civilization!  No livestock! No silage trucks! Supermarkets galore!  Even a sex shop!  All the necessities!

So here's the score.  We've been getting the mess cleaned up and the house dried out up in Sumas; we still own that, and we're planning on selling it.  We'll be moving back to Bellingham and into senior rental digs for the rest of our wrinkly lives because frankly, it makes sense.  It's time to let someone else worry about upkeep; and they all have allotments where you can garden.  Hell, I'll sneak in a rose and some ferns and they'll take it and like it.

  The flood was a wake-up call.  We need to be way closer to services, and we need to downscale.  These past days have been...enjoyable!  Convenient! Positive, even!  And there's no chance in hell that we'd ever, ever get cut off so fast and so completely as happened in Sumas when the flood hit.  We're well above sea level here on a rise, and the drainage is fantastic.

Remember, at 9:30 am the water had reached our backyard.  At 9:52  it began to come into the house. At 10:08 we stepped off our back deck into water that was three feet deep. At 10:10 we were on a raised railbed watching water draining down into our town from a nearby river, and at 10:18 we were speeding down the single open lane of the very last back road out of town, with nothing but rising water in our rear view mirror, covering the road behind us as I watched and the Biker drove like a motherfucker.  That's 48 minutes from a dry house to a house that had two and a half feet of water in it and a town that was COMPLETELY INUNDATED. That's FAST.  Add to that another day and a half trapped on Mt. Baker  because the few roads and bridges were washed out, in a shelter because all the resorts and motels on the mountain were full of skiers and dipshits?  FUCK THAT.

Friday, November 19, 2021

Everything Is Fine

 It's over. No more emergency. We're doing the recovery and assessment thing now and we have plans in place and arrangements made. Shit happened. We prevailed. Next!

_______________________________

We got to relive some good memories unexpectedly while we were up  in Kendall when we ran into a woman from back when we were riding. She had been a bartender at the local Bandido bar, pretty much what you'd expect; a packer like I was, a cheerful hillbilly type lady who took no shit and started a lot, and laughed all the time and partied hard.

In the intervening years, she had gone on to get a Masters' degree in Special Education, and works with mentally challenged kids now! She also held the line and stayed in Kendall, which is a little slice of squalid meth hell in the pinewoods, and is a dedicated community volunteer - and there she was volunteering at the shelter!  

The thing about her that made this reunion so incredible is that she's the woman who stood by our dear friend, business partner and running buddy Albert Souk while he was dying.  

We did a lot of business together over the fifteen years we knew him, oddly all legal (I used to run his stall at the  swap meets and made him a big ol' pile of cash, while he went out doing his social butterfly thing, buying low and selling high.)  He had so much respect that he rode under the name his mother gave him, which believe me, is not something that happens a lot an almost never to people who aren't clubbed up.  We've got a million stories about this guy and all of them are as appalling as they are hysterically funny, but to get down to it, the man loved criminally insane women, and the last one tried to bludgeon him to death. While he had brain cancer.  It put him in hospice.

During all the insanity this woman literally stood guard over him and mustered the clans on his behalf.  She made sure that no part of the sideshow nonsense that was his wifes' family and their intrusions and outrages touched him by filling up the place with large men and women with intense attitudes. This was a high-end facility, and for a solid month the sidewalk out front was constantly lined with Harleys.  Everyone came out and represented and kept the peace in his honor. It looked scary walking up on, all those different clubs flying colors, and not all of them friends. But that happened, and this lady coordinated the whole thing.  And, without going into vivid details, because those details are just way over the top biker as fuck, she saw to it that he went out the way he wanted to go out.  Think of a Viking pre-battle feast, except one that went on for a whole month. That's kind of what it was like.

It took a little while for us to recognize each other because it's been a lot of years, but once we did she just brightened up our day.  She's still all country, all Bandito, and totally awesome.  We knew we were going to be OK while she was around. That vibe just spreads out from her.  It took our minds and got them right, and we got to hang out with someone from back in the day and reminisce about one of the most awesome people we've ever known and laugh.

I'm not going to put her name out there, but she deserves all the good vibes.  She's astounding.


Wednesday, November 17, 2021

Our Old Carpet Looked Vastly Improved With A Nice Brown Coating Of Farm Silt

 The house is, as we expected, a complete loss.  No surprises there.

My front steps are missing.  Absolutely gone.  We actually drove around the block looking for them, for a laugh, and there is a very real possibility that they washed into the nearby creek and are now in Canada.  Not even kidding.  If someone finds three grey wood steps with two silver pigs jammed in between the steps, those are my steps. You can keep them.  Hands across the border.

There are pictures, and someday the Biker will email them to me and I'll get them up.  For now I'll give a brief description of what we found, starting outside.

-Two steel dumpsters! Big welded steel dumpsters! in our front yard.  One had smashed into our garage door, and the other was stopped by my valiant 'Improved Josephs Coat' rose out front from colliding into our front room.

-We have other peoples belongings all over our yard - fence posts, a razor scooter, a girls bicycle helmet, a big Halloween pumpkin in the buddleia, a Betty Boop 'Welcome!' mat in the front  yard, and oh so very much more.

-Our entire barbecue deck floated away and is now in the back northeast corner of my back garden piled high against the fence, with all our lawn chairs, random garbage cans and so very, very much more.

-Our back deck broke away from the house and is covered in a giant tangle of flotsam and jetsam, railroad ties and mystery belongings, including a Buzz Lightyear coloring book.

-The bottom of the garage door blew out. The high water mark was three feet.  Nothing important inside was damaged, thankfully.

-Both sheds also flooded at the three foot mark, and my lawnmowers are deceased.

-My car was lifted and set at a 45 degree angle to the driveway against the retaining wall, and was filled with water up to the drivers wheel. Borked.

-Our truck is salvageable, although waterlogged and in need of a complete oil purge and some jiggering around to break the waterlock. This suits me just fine. I like my truck. I did not like my sedan.  And our SUV is running strong.

-The inside of the house got two feet of water.  All the bottom drawers of everything, including the refrigerator are full of water and every drawer made of wood is swollen shut. The furniture is borked - we may be able to salvage the solid wood pieces, though.

-We lost nothing whatsoever of any real or sentimental value!!!!!  It's all safely in storage now!!!

-Some stuff had floated around in the house.  Not a lot of things, just enough to it kind of amusing.

-All the food will have to be thrown away, of course.

-And finally, weirdly...MY GARDEN IS ALL THERE AND HAPPY AS A CLAM.  Even though there are places where the wicked current had laid things out, everything is alive, still rooted, kinda dirty.  Even have a couple of roses in bloom, and all the calendula is going nuts too.  I  couldn't believe it!  All that fresh, nasty, reeking silt is probably acting like plant crack, is what I think.

The people where the Biker works put together a work party and tomorrow we set out to get the place scraped out and the junk hauled away. Lots of trucks, lots of volunteers. One has a container we can store our salvagables in until we find a place to rent!  With any luck, the next week will see the place squared away enough to be boarded up.

Amazing things that happened:

Sikhs from the nearby Guru Nanak Gursikh temple, the one that I've been supporting for years with food donations, randomly laid two hot meals of curried rice and lentils on us just for...being in Sumas!  They were helping our pharmacist get his store cleaned out and just had a pile of meals they were distributing to people!  I will always support their temple.  They walk their talk.

Our pharmacist gave us our prescriptions for free!

I was offered a job working where the Biker works!  (after I described my scant qualifications, I doubt I'll get anything, but the offer was sincere.)  Truthfully, his job is doing so much right now to assist us that I almost burst into tears.  They might even find us a place to rent.

It looks  like we'll get FEMA money!

The hero in all this is THE BIKER.  Without his fast thinking and his knowledge of  logistical and financial things, along with his amazing memory, his sense to drive back home when he saw shit floating around on the roads and waves in the fields, added to his mad driving skillz?  Without all that my happy ass woulda woke up floating around on my memory foam mattress.  He has brought us through with style and class.

Tuesday, November 16, 2021

Off Mt. Baker! In A Fine Two-Star Motel!

 

                 "If you need anything, I'll, I'll, um, just ask my mother. Me! I mean me. Just ask me."

 The moment that Mt. Baker highway opened up we raced down off the mountain and into Bellingham and straight to...well, ahem.  Affordable accomodations - where we will be staying for at least a week.  It's near the Bikers workplace, and hell, there's no cockroaches or blood on the sheets so I'm happy.  

 It's been a long, stressful day.  They're saying that tomorrow we might be able to get back into our house and check things out.  I really want to see exactly where we stand - then we can make solid plans.

We also have standing offers on the property, and while we'll probably take a kick in the ass on the price, it's still four city lots near a grade school in a good school district. It'll sell next spring, floodplain or not.  The same man who plopped 62 people in a high-density unit two feet off the side wall of my garage will buy our place and plop another 62 person unit on it. Fuck it. Fuck Sumas. Fuck all my furniture and appliances. Fuck the 20, 000 we just spent on updates and repairs. Fuck it all.

I'm going to bed now.

Rancho FirstNations, Flooded As A Motherfucker

 

                          Circle marks the Rancho.  Lookit our house!  French Provincial! 

Well, here it is.   If you want to see the whole video and you are not from America, try Google United States and searching it on there.  Here's the link to that video:

https://www.facebook.com/wcfd14/videos/1078428006261595/

It's on the Whatcom County Fire District home site here:  https://www.facebook.com/wcfd14/

Scroll down and you'll see the link, with a picture, for the flooding today.  Tap on that and watch the kayakers cruising through town.  It's whimsical.

We're Homeless!

 We will be staying at least one more night here in the shelter before we can get down the mountain and find a motel to hole up in, and get ahold of FIMA, our insurance company, and a realtor.

Yeah, a realtor.  We're selling our house and property.  We'll never feel safe there again.

Here's what happened.  

Sumas is four feet below sea level, and back in the 1800s it was a shallow lake, not fields. The area was drained via a system of canals to open up the land for agriculture.

Usually when it's flooded in Sumas, it's just been rain accumulation and the runoff from the couple of creeks that go through town, combined with a really high water table. The whole town turned into a big, shallow mud puddle, and only a couple of times. No big deal.

This time was different.  

We had been having torrential rain storms for the past month almost every night, all falling on land that had been baked solid by last summers dry conditions.  But then, two days ago, we got a hard southerly rainstorm that came through, with high winds and sideways, firehose-type precip, nonstop.

The town just south of us is called Nooksack, because the Nooksack river runs through it, and it's a deep, swift river with tall embankments built all along it's bed through the flatlands.  All the rain that fell emptied into the whole of the Nooksack, from where it starts on Mt. Baker and downward until it abruptly hits the flatlands, where it just overtopped all the levees and spread out over the fields.  The floodwaters crept out over the nine miles between us and Nooksack, and came spilling DOWN into Sumas over the railroad embankments, and I know because at one point we were stranded on one such embankment wondering why the water was higher on the south side than on our side, and trippin' balls watching it come cascading down into town.   That's why the water level rose so rapidly beginning at around 8:35 am.  All that river water had just crested the railroad embankments.

A helpful diagram.  Not to scale and kind of sideways, but you get the picture.
 

Our house is an unrepairable biohazard now.  The floors and the foundations were pretty iffy, and we were going to wait and re-do them this summer.  Now we don't have to.

We are for the present time homeless, and will be until we can get down off this mountain.

Here's the thing I can't get over - how nice this facility is!  It's like the grade school I attended.  Everyone has been so kind and the food is pretty good, too.  We're the only flood refugees here, but the place is also a food bank and a Head Start - community center with multiple resources.  

In fact, we left this very place, Kendall, where we lived less than a mile down the road from where I sit typing this, because it had become a slum in the deep woods, where meth and crime were rampant.  We moved to Sumas to get our daughter into a better school district, so that worked out.  But here we are right back where we started from, getting our butts saved by a facility that didn't exist here ( and really needed to be here) when we moved away.

Our plans for the present are - assess the house, contact our insurance and all the other resources at hand, get an apartment or something in Bellingham to be closer to where the Biker works, get our household situation together and then wait for further developments.  I foresee a huge garage sale in our future.

Monday, November 15, 2021

We Evacuated!!

 At 9:58 this morning the floodwaters started running into out house.  We had everything important packed and ready, and stepped out into 4ft. of warm, icky crick water and slogged to our SUV.

We are in a shelter now.  We are safe, and the facility is set up and ready to accommodate A LOT of people comfortably.  But the flooding is so widespread that we literally cannot leave Mt. Baker - Kendall because all the roads out of the area have been flooded and many of the bridges washed out.  Thank God the Biker thought to come home this morning instead of pushing though to work - the speed with which this came on was unprecedented and it would have been a hell of a lot more difficult to get things situated and he had not been there, my guardian angel, to keep a cool head.

I do not know if our house is a loss or not.  I do know that the entire town of Sumas is inundated.

Take a look at this shit:

https://www.king5.com/article/weather/weather-blog/sumas-flooding-atmospheric-river/281-e5823c49-4269-4145-ad4f-d219b40ba945

A day late and a dollar short is how the flooding caught all of us in Sumas.  I honestly think that we were some of the last people who got out of town today, as the back road we took through the cornfields was just beginning to flood out just as we hit the base of the mountains and started up.

I've got all my crying done, and now I'm sitting here in a really pleasant facility on a cot.  And that's how things are going for me.  We are safe, we are sheltered, and we have insurance AND money in the bank.  All is not lost.

We're Flooding!

 Yup, for the first time, we have completely flooded right up to the foundations. NO I DO NOT HAVE PICTURES. Imagine a whole shitload of water.

Last night at 11pm. an alert came over my phone about flood warnings for Sumas between midnight and 3am., and to go to such and such a church for shelter.

Well, it was raining, and my phone is always blowing up with bleeps and bloops and alerts and shit, and I just thought nothing of it.  I wake up this morning at 8:30 and find  my husband roaming around. WTF? I think.  Come to find out,  Sumas is cut off.  Everywhere. And that's the first time that's ever happened since we've lived here.  (Of course snow is a different issue.  Everybody freaks out and commences to flail and drive their Yugos around and all kinds of nonsense.)

I checked the back yard - always the first thing to flood - when I woke up, and as of twenty minutes ago the water level has risen four inches.

We've got another foot and a half before it's actually to the doorsills.  Meanwhile, the garage and both sheds are flooded about an inch or so deep.  And the rain is torrential, heading sideways at us at high speed directly from the West.  Hoo boy.  All that work we just had done on our house...

We're in the process of moving all our shit up onto higher stuff inside the house.  There is a very real possibility we may have to evacuate.

So, there's that.

Wednesday, November 10, 2021

If I Buy The Yarn, Will Your Mother Knit Me A New Proctologist?

 Sorry I haven't been around.  I picked up a quilting project that I put down about seven years ago and I've been all OCD on it since the last time I done bloggered.  It's a hand-sewn quilt, so it's been just thousands and thousands of stitches, and me mesmerized, and the floor next to me all littered with pins and bits of thread and shit.  Do I have pictures?  No I do not have pictures. QUIT BUGGING ME FOR PICTURES! I DON'T HAVE THEM! PLEASE GOD STOP!  THE PRESSURE! THE PRESSURE!!!!

Looked up 'downtrodden medieval peasant'; found 'lute playing cat with a snatch' and here we go.
 

______________

My primary physician has been bugging me to get my annual butt probe, which, at my age, is considered mandatory, and I've been telling her for two years now that I will once they get Covid figured out.  In return I get that placating attitude from her that folks give old people who are being unreasonable. I was not being unreasonable.  I was being someone who's learned that thoughtlessly granting your trust to people simply because they have a medical degree is naive and dangerous. Those are MY mucous tissues, and I'm guarding them with my life. 

Looked up 'militant medieval peasant' and found 'badass dragon attacking ancient Ninevah' and here we go.


Then I got a letter in the mail last week from my ass specialist, the very man I was supposed to visit, that I have been going to for seven years now, saying that since his rights as an American were being infringed upon by being required, as a medical professional, to receive the Covid vaccine, he was forced on principle to to resign his practice, and hoped his patients understood.  

             Looked up 'medieval asshole', found far too many images of assholes, liked this better, so here we go.
 

You know what I understood? That he should never have received a medical degree in the first place; and that his hurt feelings are clearly more important to him than his patients welfare.  This man actually decided to be a potential disease vector, and thought he was quite the valiant martyr for standing up for his 'rights'. What an asshole!

Haven't felt this bummed about being vindicated in quite awhile. I've been passing around his address to all the raccoons I meet, so let's hope for the best.

 

 



Monday, November 1, 2021

It's Halloween! Time To Scare You!

 OK fine it's the day after Halloween.

You wanna know what's scary?  When you live in a border town and the international line is breached.

A couple of days ago someone tried to blast through customs without stopping, and suddenly there arose, at 11A.M., the background track from every documentary concerning the London Blitz you've ever seen at full, screaming volume. Those loud wailing sirens, whistles, all kinds of holy horseshit. I was expecting to see those ICBM contrails come arcing over. I had no idea what was going on at that moment.

Here's the deal.

I live in the Constitution-free Border Zone. 

 A quote from the ALCU website: "The expansion of government power both at and near the border is part of a trend toward expanding police and national security powers without regard to the effect of such expansion on our most fundamental and treasured Constitutional rights. The federal government's dragnet approach to law enforcement and national security is one that is increasingly turning us all into suspects. If Americans do not continue to challenge the expansion of federal power over the individual, we risk forfeiting the fundamental rights and freedoms that we inherited—including the right to simply go about our business free from government interference, harassment and abuse."

Yes, this is a very real thing. Look up just what that means here. NO, SERIOUSLY. DO IT RIGHT NOW:  

                             https://www.aclu.org/other/constitution-100-mile-border-zone


 

                                         Old broad goes alt-freak with political post! News at 11!

 

When you contact me, our online interactions are being monitored by Homeland Security and who knows what all Agencies and shit with guns and badges.  

Now, me being me, yap first and think later, I have been contacted by some pretty shady entities from all over the world during the course of my online presence, including extremist groups from overseas and Anonymous.  It's all on record somewhere. NO I did not respond, fuck that action! It's one of the many reasons that I'm no longer on Facebook, though.  All of this contact came directly through Facebook. Yup. I did nothing to encourage it. But the wackos out there also have keyword bots, and they use them. In a worst case scenario, just having those cookies on your machine could be construed as highly suspicious by people in positions of authority. Paranoid? With good reason. Homeland Security agents aren't hired to use their abilities of independent thought and judgement, kids. One power-tripping bully can ruin your whole life.


                                                      

When the child internment camp scandal down at the Southern Border exploded, I went to the Homeland Security installation a mile from where I live, in person, to ask about it. Yes, they have a whole back room full of holding cells - I saw them before they closed the door on me - and more shit underground because I remember them building the place during G.W's 'reign', the same time they put up the spy towers (without a public vote or notification of purpose/ expenditure) all along the northern border of the U.S. Of course I was handled by a flak catcher and gentled along and given no real answers, but the place is serious as a heart attack, and those black and gold helicopters and SUV's are omnipresent, just another part of everyday life here.

When I heard those sirens and alarms go off I went right past panic into zombie mode.  I did not know what was going to happen. There's no 'Public Alert' system in place - I had no idea what to expect, and just stood there waiting for something to explode, gunfire, bombs, crashing planes, immanent death, whatever.  Why not?  Clearly there's something going on.  Why would they not want to inform the public?  Gracious, what purpose might that possibly serve; koffkoffintimidationofthecitizenrykoffkoff.

I do know that the border is being breached nearly every day, though, that important arrests are being made and serious shit is being apprehended, and that none of that information ever hits the news. I know it for a fact. I've seen it happen.  If you live around here you've seen it happening too...out in farmers fields, in the woods, on the roads, in stores, you name it.  People talk about it. It's known. But less than one fraction of one percent of that activity ever makes the local news outlets, much less the national news.  Think about that.

No, we don't have a wall (yet) but there is a long-distance detection protocol in place; it's referred to as 'motion sensors' when it's mentioned at all.  I know for a damn fact that it's more than motion sensors, and I get that the Border Patrol doesn't want to reveal their hand and give the bad guys a tutorial in how to breach the system, so we'll go with 'motion sensors' for the remainder of this paragraph.  Now usually it's tagged animals that trip the alarm (like bears and such that carry tracking devices for the forest service on either side of the line.)  It also catches a lot of on-foot drug traffic and groups of people trying to come over and get work during harvest season; and also ordinary hikers, small aircraft, trained dogs with knapsacks full of oxycodone, 4 wheelers, snowmobilers, cross country skiers, logging trucks, road equipment, farm equipment, and even by flying payloads delivered via trebuchet. 

 Seriously.  They load timber-built trebuchets with drugs and a tracking chip all wrapped in duct tape, find a nice empty stretch of forest and fire the bundle over the border. Someone is waiting on our other side with a marker detector and goes tootling back through the woods whistling a merry tune, carrying ten pounds of XTC. 

I can see the clearcut line of the border going right up over the mountains through the timber, laser straight, from my front room window - and the spy towers too.  And those spy towers can see me.

Close enough to what ours look like.  They aren't just in a neat line down the border, though - they're dotted here and there all over within the zone.  What you might think is just a cell tower has about a 50/50 chance of being a spy tower with a different configuration. Hit up Google images for more.
 

Right after they first went up, I used to go walk my dogs near the ones here in town and moon them, I was so angry about not having been informed or given a choice (all while GW was crying poverty and recession and shutting down public services right and left.) It was a HUGE construction operation, very intensive, very sudden, very organized and well funded, whammo, out of nowhere, blocking traffic, ripping up streets and digging up private land.  And those towers are built to look scary, too.  You can clearly see the binocs on top when they level around and tilt until they're aimed right at you. So to answer your question, yes. Homeland Security has pictures of my bare ass on record. Your tax dollars at work.

 A couple of times my dog Opie would catch a scent and run right across the freaking line into Canada and I'd have to go chasing after him because there's a road right on the other side, and the little dipshit didn't have any sense whatsoever once he latched onto a fascinating aroma. He'd run into walls, fences, cars, people on the sidewalk, out into traffic, just mesmerized.


                                          Sub in a short, fat stinky dog and you have the idea.

So there I am again, on record as having crossed the border illegally at least two or three times, trying to keep my Opie dog from rolling in a dead Canadian possum or being creamed by a Buick with B.C plates. I could see those sensors  tracking me as I ran, too, every time. Hi there! I just thought I'd invade Canada with a farting dog!  Lock up your daughters, Huntingdon!

In this day and age I don't know if these measures are necessary, are enough, or too much, or already obsolete.  I do know that this 'Constitution Free Zone' was imposed, not decided upon by the public.  I know that the public has never been given enough information about the border situation to be able to make a decision about it, too.  I live that truth every day since I've moved here.

So there you go. If you have a scarier story than this? Post it. Tell me.