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Restoration
Jul. 22nd, 2011 11:31 pmI keep going back to This website, which the Minnesota DNR put up when the government creaked arduously back to life, burdened with an incredibly stupid, patched-up, very temporary solution to the budget problems Tim Pawlenty created and nourished when he was in office. It's been curiously comforting and invigorating to watch the red circles next to the names of state parks turn yellow or green. There are far more green circles now than when I first began to look.
One then begins to wonder about the red ones. I know what happened to St. Croix State Park. On July first, a storm that Raphael and I left earlyish to get away from at the end of a visit to Duluth worked itself up to 90- or perhaps 100-mile per hour winds and flattened the majority of the trees in the park. One park employee said that it would be a different park, that it would now be a meadow. The trees were not ancient, since the entire area was clearcut about 80 years ago, but there was a diverse forest with a diverse understory, including, incidentally, near one dip in a washboarded dirt road, the only purple fringed orchids I've ever seen. I hardly know what to expect when we finally go back.
So I know about St. Croix. But I wonder what's up with Camden, Old Mill, and Upper Sioux Agency parks. We haven't been to any of them, but I like just looking at the map with all the parks on it, and knowing that they're there. It turns out, if one clicks through, that Upper Sioux Agency and Camden also suffered in the July 1 storm, and that Old Mill was hit by a storm on July 20th. And they couldn't clear things up at once because the Republicans were ranting about stem-cell research and abortion, and playing with their shiny new toy of refusing revenue to government.
I didn't think I could be less impressed with either the local or the national incarnation of the Republican Party than I was during the Bush years, but I was wrong.
Pamela
One then begins to wonder about the red ones. I know what happened to St. Croix State Park. On July first, a storm that Raphael and I left earlyish to get away from at the end of a visit to Duluth worked itself up to 90- or perhaps 100-mile per hour winds and flattened the majority of the trees in the park. One park employee said that it would be a different park, that it would now be a meadow. The trees were not ancient, since the entire area was clearcut about 80 years ago, but there was a diverse forest with a diverse understory, including, incidentally, near one dip in a washboarded dirt road, the only purple fringed orchids I've ever seen. I hardly know what to expect when we finally go back.
So I know about St. Croix. But I wonder what's up with Camden, Old Mill, and Upper Sioux Agency parks. We haven't been to any of them, but I like just looking at the map with all the parks on it, and knowing that they're there. It turns out, if one clicks through, that Upper Sioux Agency and Camden also suffered in the July 1 storm, and that Old Mill was hit by a storm on July 20th. And they couldn't clear things up at once because the Republicans were ranting about stem-cell research and abortion, and playing with their shiny new toy of refusing revenue to government.
I didn't think I could be less impressed with either the local or the national incarnation of the Republican Party than I was during the Bush years, but I was wrong.
Pamela
