I first wondered at the swans of Lithia Park in 1972, sitting on a bench at the lower duck pond with my Mother, who, understandably, thought that my decision to move to a spec of nothing from my former position in L.A. as a buyer of Men's Sportswear for 22 department stores was, well, just short of absolute insanity.
Occasionally, I reach back and lash myself for having dropped so much money in the move, but, more often than not, rejoice in my decision to park elsewhere.
For those of you who are droopy-eyed or otherwise predisposed, the icons for our fair city, two idyllic swans, are no more.
Over the years they proved to be cranky and, well, not versed in the gentle sensibilities of pleasing our visitors. They would honk, flap, lurch and lunge, this until they were either rendered by an unleashed dog or one of our City dump trucks in reverse.
They became a pain and were clearly the blame.
Now that our attempts to keep the Upper and Lower Duck Ponds free from fecund scum have so abundantly failed, we frame our City Icons in the past tense. The trumpet of a swan no longer signals the triumph in the pond.
With an annual budget of more than 90 million dollars, we can't figure out a way to allow two swans, mated for life, the dignity to swim, frolic and waddle in an increasingly artificial aquatic stage. Maybe they need more City underwriting.
If swans could vote your goose would be cooked.
About Me
- Lance
- I don't remember being born very well, but am working on it. Shaking off the conformities of High School I spirited away to UCLA, there to learn about the refined intellectual abstractions such as Frat Parties, motorcycles and how to cram for a final. It was there that I met my wife, Annette, on a blind date. After a stint as buyers for The May Company, we headed toward Canada for a vacation, yet got sidetracked in Ashland, Oregon for 32 years. We bought a Mom and Pop grocery on the Plaza and morphed it into a natural foods restaurant, which we kept open 18 hours a day.. I went on to develop historic commercial properties and working on feature film projects. All the while I wrote for several papers, airline magazines, while publishing The Essential Guide to Ashland, which sold briskly one weekend. I'm currently writing a column which is published 4 times a month, assembling an anthology of my articles and writing a novel. I've got a half-hour television documentary about the Buckaroos of the Great Basin in the can and am in pre-production of another western hour long special.
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1 comments:
"Essentially Ashland" does not have his/her facts straight. The notoriously acerbic terrorist media outlet, Al Jazeera, has published numerous reports of Bin Laden backed groups testing lifetime-mated swans as WMDs.
Intitial testing using sticks of dynamite up the swans' lower intestinal tract proved too difficult, owing to the length of fuse needed, getting passports for the swans, and a host of other inconveniences. But when a Bin Laden lackey slipped on the plethora of swan poop in the testing area and broke his hip, the light when on: Weapons of Mass Distraction!!
Imagine Ashland with two or three pairs of mating swans, all laying down a vast network of slippery, slimey swan poop all over the park. Tourists begin slipping and falling, incurring injuries and suing the City... children slide headlong into the ponds and mess up their clothes... pretty soon nobody wants to come to Ashland, the tourists dollars dry up, real estate prices drop off a cliff, and life as we know it vanishes into the history books.
And then the terrorists will have REALLY won.
As a True American Patriot, I say that blatant terrorist supporters like Essentially Ashland do their research before blogging such horribly anti-American propaganda as brining swans back to Lithia Park.
Has anyone else reported this to Homeland Security yet??
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