KATIE ON RAVENS...

Jimbo:

In response to my friend Lynn Jacobs (Feedback in the Z, Feb/Mar 2003) I have to wonder how ravens got so smart. They know how to play, and they don't go to a resort with 50,000 other ravens to do it. Just two, three, or four at a time sharing the sky, a rock, each other, a piece of drift, an orange peel, a lizard....whatever.

There are millions of stories, essays, books written about their antics. Once they had a home in Glen Canyon--they loved the Glen, so many places to hide and play. Saw three of them playing tag there one day...two would fly erratically over river and canyons until one wing-tapped the other, then the tagged one would go after the third guy and they'd race it out, spiral, eights, lifts and dives, until the wing-tag, then that guy would go back after the first one--that had to be what they were doing. I watched them for an hour, sitting on a rock above the plunge pool in Lost Eden Canyon. When a fourth one came by, he must have smelled bad, 'cause the game broke up.

Don't you wonder why our old friend Ed chose buzzards as his family incarnate, instead of Ravens? Like him, they're a helluva lot smarter, and he was neither a redneck or buzzard-ugly.

Katie Lee

Jerome, Arizona

 WAR? LET GEORGE DO IT...OR THE TWINS

Jim,

"Date with the Lonesome Lady" reminded me of when I was in Germany at the age of eight or nine. Our family was part of the occupation force in post war Germany. We lived in a house owned by an older German couple who lived in the attic apartment. The year was 1953 or 1954; less than ten years after the end of World War II. We lived in Darmstadt, a city that had been targeted for whatever reason during the war. There were still sections of the city that were rubble. Live munitions could be found just about anywhere; leftovers from the bombing and shelling.

I remember an evening that we traveled to a nearby village to have dinner with the son of the couple upstairs. It was a pleasant evening with a good German dinner, and we got to meet the brand new grandson. It would not have been an event that a grade school kid would be too likely to remember except for the fact that the gentlleman we visited had been in the German Luftwaffe. My father had been in the U. S. Army in Germany during the war.

If my father and this German pilot had had occasion to meet each other during the war, their job would have been to kill each other. But there we were, exchanging pleasantries and sharing food only a few years after the war.

If we little folk can get along so well so soon after a war and probably could have before the war, why the heck are we always going to war or at least thinking about it? Could it be that there are people in power who get us to kill each other?

Are there always good reasons to go to war? Maybe. In fact, we are being told that there are good reasons to go to war with Iraq (and anyone else who decides to join in). And there may be good reasons for an Iraq attack. But those who are trying to push this new war on us don't seem to me to have much to lose by going to war.

Will President Bush be carrying an M-16 and assaulting a bunker outside some town in Iraq?

Will Cheney be driving a tank and hoping the next land mine will take out the tank next to his instead of blowing his butt to bloody pieces? Not too likely.

Will Bush and Cheney make any money from our involvement in a war? Possibly.

For years, I said that those who want war should be the first to fight in that war. Bush should carry that M-16 and Cheney should drive a tank. But that wouldn't work too well I finally realized. Those guys are old. At least Bush is in good physical condition, but imagine all those fat congress people who thought it would be a good idea to go to war. We'd lose for sure. We need young meat to send to battle. So it finally became clear to me. Don't send war hungry leaders to do battle. Send their children or grand children. If George Bush really, I mean REALLY, believed that we needed to go to war with Iraq, he would send his daughters. They're young, and I suppose in good health. I'm sure they could be trained to be good fighters. And the image of them wishing they were having cocktails over an M-60 machinegun in a muddy foxhole somehow pleases me.

Bill Foreman

Moab

REMEMBERING JFK & 11/22/63

Dear Jim,

I read your article on JFK with great interest. I was 7 yrs. old and living in Fort Worth at the time. My parents were from New England and Irish Catholic so we were very much a Kennedy household. My Dad was an air traffic controller and through his connections we were able to be part of the group that greeted the President when he landed at Carswell AFB in Fort Worth the day before he was shot. I remember vividly watching him walk down the ramp of Air Force One and getting very excited as he walked by shaking hands with everyone.

Even though I was only seven years old I liked the fact that he was funny and told jokes that I could understand. I went to a Catholic school and the next day in school it was all we were talking about. I was the only one in our school to have actually seen him when he was in Fort Worth and it was a story I repeated many times that day. We were within the alleged bombing range of Cuba so emergency drills were a daily routine and we had just completed one when, over the loudspeaker, it was announced that President Kennedy had been shot. Within minutes the school buses pulled up and we were let out of school early.

I walked in the door of my house to see both my parents weeping in front of the television. I'm not sure what was more powerful that day, the death of the President or seeing my parents crying. It is an image deeply etched in my memory and I knew that I was a part of history that day.

When the opportunity came for my ten year old son to see Bill Clinton while he was President, I jumped on it and we waited in the rain for three hours culminating with the President exchanging sidesways-fives with him while he was on my shoulders. Fortunately, Clinton didn't get shot the next day so his memory of it will be different from my memory of seeing JFK. There, that's my JFK story.

Thank you,

Dave Jette

Castle Valley