This has been a summer like no other summer has been.
Because of where I live, this place is a "magnet" for primitives and primitive-like people seeking a campground in a scenic-but-isolated area, so they can do their alcohol and drugs thing without interference from law-enforcement (alcohol and drugs are prohibited on state property in Nebraska).
In past summers, about every weekend from Memorial Day until Labor Day, one could see a bunch of old hippies camping and cavorting on the riverside about two football-field lengths away from the back porch.
I must point out there's never been a problem, and they do ask permission. They don't ask me (the riverside is
my territory), but they do take the time and trouble to inquire of someone in town, who directs them to the property caretaker who lives in town. Because of my peculiar circumstances (being deaf, and living alone out in the middle of nowhere), he "vets" them, inquiring of their backgrounds, and then gives the okay.
I'm sure he also tells them that franksolich is an axe-murderer or something out on parole, because they assiduously avoid coming to house to bother me.
Or perhaps the cats, which are trained to be watch-dogs, keep them at bay.
The caretaker did however some years ago attach a telescope to the railing of the back porch so I could keep a closer look on them. I check every so often, but not being a nosy person, usually don't.
This summer, four old hippie guys showed up down on the river over the Memorial Day holiday, after which there haven't been any more. Of course, I've been gone; there were a couple of weeks where the business partner and I traveled around Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota, watching the prairies burn, and so someone might've been down there then, but it doesn't look like it.
Also, in early July--ChuckJ knows the story--I came down with something, and was pretty much out of it for another couple of weeks. I'd gone to see a physician because I wasn't feeling well, and he advised me that the lungs were full, crammed to the top, with liquid.
My eyes grew as big as saucers, and I pointed out the window. "It's a hundred and five degrees out there--a hundred and five degrees--and I have
what?????
"It's the hottest and driest summer in the Upper Great Plains since the catastrophe of '56, and I have
pneumonia?????"
Well, I did, and so underwent two weeks of enforced bed-rest (and a regimen of penicillin--the real stuff, not the chemical stuff). I was very well taken care of--the
femme, the neighbor, the business partner, the property caretaker, the neighbor's wife, and many others who happened to drop by.
But the house is very old, and not air-conditioned, excepting a two-year-old small window unit in the bedroom. Otherwise, it has big windows and doors on all four sides (and good screens too), and so there's plenty of big fans located in strategic areas to help the air flow along. But it still gets incredibly hot inside here.
One can sleep and read in a bedroom only so much, and seeks other things to do.
I kept checking, hoping to maybe get a story or something, but no primitives showed up down by the river.
So it's been a boring summer; no unusual occurrences, no middle-of-the-night "guests" catching me off guard.
In the meantime, during this, the Great Barack Drought of '12, the prairies all around have been afire. I've seen some of this, usually when driving to see the business partner 130 miles to the west, but of course from the ground one can't grasp the Magnitude of it all.
These are photographs (not taken by me, obviously) of what it's been like; these fires are just west of here, near my good friend Skul's stomping-grounds when he was growing up in this area, about 250 miles east of where my good friend dutch508 lives (although his area, on the other side of the Sandhills, has been similarly ravaged).
The National Guard (part of the defense budget Barack Milhous wants to cut so as to give more goodies to the special interests) is on its job, as usual, using the Niobrara River as its fire-hydrant.
franksolich remains defiantly confident that it'll soon be all over, the three-digit temperatures, the lack of rain, the damage and destruction.....and by 98 days from today, a new president who offers real Hope and Change.
