The Summer of Discontent...

What a weird summer it's been, and my mood sucks...

Maybe it's the news cycle that's constantly bringing up the office of the president and his perpetual folly.  I've never seen so much horse shit in my life.

Maybe for the first time in my life I've actually thought about nuclear war

Could it be that the Department of the Interior Secretary rode into office proclaiming his love of the Roosevelt legacy, only to institute a review of 27 national monuments, threatening our public land.

Oh, the same guy is making it easier for extractive resource companies to do bidness on public lands and along with the orange guy in charge, has reignited the possibility of the Pebble Mine.

Perhaps its 15 days straight of temps over 90 degrees, mixed with a lung and eye burning smoke that seems to have wrapped my home town and most of the west into a cocoon....

What about the fact we have a state representative in Cathy McMorris Rodgers leading the charge to put our heads back in the sand with her bill HR 3144 thats trying to protect the lower 4 Snake River dams.  Sure, lets put a Columbia River Bi-Op that's been roundly rejected in court time after time. Sure, lets cut springtime spill on the rivers that give smolt a fighting chance to get to the ocean. Sure, lets sidestep the public process that just registered hundreds of thousands of comments in the fall that was court ordered to engage constituents in looking for a new route forward on the Snake and Columbia....

I bet it has something to do with a historically bad summer steelhead return on the Columbia and it's tributaries.  A lot to do with it.  We're talking a year where you you might not make 100,000 fish on the entire system where the 10 year average is approaching 300,000.   This is the time of year I normally get so amped for my favorite chase and now I feel a bit hollow.   Looking at daily run counts is like a punch in the gut.

Call it the summer of discontent.  I cannot wait for the first rains of fall to get rid of this smoke, clear the air and give me a better picture forward.  It's hard for a normally positive person like myself to stare at all this crap and stand by the notion that it's going to work out for the best.  

Because it has to.

My route forward through this shit comes in the fact that I know what I am standing for.  I will buoy my spirits in the fight for wild fish and wild, public lands.   There's no other way around it.

So if you're like me....I encourage you to do the same