Poser Patrol Heats Up By Josh Mahan

MISSOULA -- Floyd left town yesterday. We were sad to see him driving away in that boxy, pink Cadillac. He said he had an important meeting in Birmingham. We told him to watch for black ice. Montana winter has set in again, and Floyd likes the humidity. But, really, I think he was just getting bored of listening to Roselle and I banter, as we clickety-clack on the keyboard all day in a cramped studio above Charlie’s. Roselle accuses me of too much mouse work, and not enough clack on the keyboard. I'm the damn Lowbagger that has to design the site, even if it loads improperly on half of our audience’s computers. But, alas, I say hang-on dear readers, the technology is at our fingertips, and soon we’ll have Lowbagger looking like a High Roller, even in Firefox browsers.

Work goes on, beyond the browser situation. Roselle’s writing regiment is one of such dedication and style that even Hemingway or Kerouac would feel they had missed something. Up with the sun, he terrorizes the staff of local hippie cafes, drinks coffee, pours pools of Tabasco on his over-easy eggs, and holds an assortment of meetings with local enviros. Then it’s back to World Headquarters for hours of clickety-clack. I tend to sleep in a bit, so on any given day I’ll catch up with Roselle at some stage of his routine.

If he gets into trouble, he leaves a message.

“Josh, I’m glad you’re not there, and that I’m leaving this news on your answering machine. But, I am posing in the Break, and not in the Raven, where I had planned to be a Poser. This place is not a good place to be a Poser. And I’m not really doing very well…..Now I have a problem, because I have a computer with me and I haven’t even picked it up because there’s not even anyone worth posing for, so far. And the Doc is at Charlie’s. So, I have to go over there. And if I pull out a computer in the morning over there, well you know where that’s going to lead. But, I’m going to try to deal with this. The main thing is don’t look for me at the Break posing, or at the Raven posing. I’ll probably act like this is my suitcase and just go over to Charlie’s and have coffee. So if you get this message call me back, but it would probably be a waste of time.”

Roselle’s hell-bent on flushing out the Posers these days. Sometimes he questions if he might be a Poser. But decides he's just posing as a Poser. A Paradox like this can never be fully hashed out on the page, but it makes for interesting reading.

When we’re not quashing Posers beneath the soles of our muddy hiking boots, Roselle and I pay quite a bit of attention to the top environmental stories.

Today I’d like to highlight a terrible defeat, a small victory, and an honorable fight that is underway. First, the bad news. The U.S. Senate voted 51-49 to open the Artic National Wildlife Refuge up to drilling. After two decades the Republicans are finally one step closer to getting their mitts on one of the last, few true wildernesses. A small pocket of the earth, untouched by humans, could get wiped out for six-million barrels of oil that we'll have ten years from now. I’ve never understood the conservatives’ liberal use of natural resources.

On a lighter note, the Forest Service announced that they would not grant developing permits to money-hungry, real-estate developer Tom Maclay, who wanted to throw a series of lifts to the top of Lolo Peak, a sentinel of the north boundary of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness. As Missoula slowly enters the twenty-first century, it should remember what makes it unique. An industrial-strength ski area on a wilderness boundary, complete with 2,200 condos, will never be one of those virtues.

Inspiration is afoot in the Biscuit, as every-day people put their lives on hold to try to make the Forest Service follow the nation’s environmental laws. Illegal logging in a recently burned area of southwest Oregon has old women, young professionals, hipped-out teens, and rednecks holding hands in the middle of mountainous logging roads.

The situation with the Biscuit is unique, as a former court injunction halting the logging expired (on Mar. 6)  three weeks before the case will be heard again (March 22). The three week window found loggers dropping old growth, and people blocking roads in protest.

The Forest Service has long been notorious for underhanded dealings. As reported in Lowbagger, and elsewhere, the Forest Service has been busted, in federal court, for breaking the law 44 times during the past two years. That list of 44 convictions, during the 2003 and 2004 fiscal years, is limited to cases where the court found both that the Forest Service violated the law, and that its position could not be “substantially justified.”

It's not easy to get the nickname Freddy. You have to be pretty scary.