BUST CAUSES ALL BUT COWS TO PONDER RURAL AREA'S FUTURE

There is something about cattle grazing, something mystifying, even
edifying. Oblivious to the world, it seems they never look up from
their munching and mooing. Can they look up? Usually, their heads are
down while they pursue their main reason for being: feasting upon the
meal between their two front hooves.

Appetite trumps conversation, which is often reduced to a cow's
enigmatic signal to her calf. Who knows what is being discussed, but
it is the mothers who moo the most.

On a typically beautiful, summer day in Pine Valley, the sounds of
mooing gave way to the unmistakable fluttering of helicopter wings,
that whirling, staccato flapping noise only choppers can make. An
ominous sound intensified as it bounced off the mighty walls
geologists refer to as a laccolithic outcropping - one of the largest
in the world - surrounding and, thereby, giving definition to the
valley floor with its glorious fields of verdant pasture land which,
in part, inspired this column.

I say the sound of the helicopters is ominous in Pine Valley because
in the usual case the crew is ferreting out a fire or scooping water
from the reservoir to put one out. Not this time. This case was far
more exotic. Or should I say, on this occasion with marijuana as their
mission they "cased the joint?" (Sorry about that) They also worked
their tails off, providing the other reason for this
composition.

A not infrequent mantra in these parts is the obligatory grousing
about big government and how incompetent layers upon layers of
bureaucracy prove to be, a la Katrina and FEMA - a waste of our money.
Contrary to that assumption, what I and other Pine Valley residents
witnessed with fascination - and the cattle ignored with indifference
- - was something bordering on the heroic. This tireless and certainly
risky enterprise, especially for the pilots, consumed an entire day
and then another and another. The Drug Enforcement Administration
officials, teamed with local law enforcement and several other
agencies, gave us our tax dollars' worth and then some.

After the dust settled, the hard work was done and the chopper sounds
were swallowed up by the primordial silence Pine Valley is known for,
I was in a mood to ponder. When distant drug cartels send those they
employ scampering up the sacred Pine Valley mountains to grow
marijuana, it gets you thinking. Could we somehow monitor the use of
legalized marijuana in such a way that less harm is done to our
communities and now even our mountains in spite of the Herculean
effort to suppress its growth?

My other thought was prompted by the sight of the pilots dropping
their precious cargo upon the green fields below, right next to our
other incursion from the world beyond and within range of the cattle
still grazing, unimpressed by feverish human activity. Encroaching
upon the bucolic setting of acres upon acres of rich pasture land,
suddenly a new road has appeared with its citified curb, gutter and
asphalt for future houses - another swath of irretrievable grazing
land, gone.

What saddens some of us causes others to celebrate. County officials
and developers lick their chops, with their congratulatory clinking of
glasses sounding like cash registers ringing, incessantly opening and
closing, never to take in enough money. If they have their way, some
day not too distant, a fellow looking for a stray cow searching, in
turn, for her calf (precisely how Pine Valley was discovered by Isaac
Riddle in 1855) will come over the crest and look down upon a valley
filled to the brim with nice, wide, urban streets leading to neat,
Pleasantville-style homes with luscious manicured lawns, but not one
blade of grass reserved for that man's calf and cow.

Charles Kothe is a retired Presbyterian minister. He has owned a cabin
in Pine Valley for 30 years.