But the 34 feet of snow which fell this February fell all at once instead of in little flakes.  Not that little flakes are uncommon in Peg's Bottom at any time of year, but what happened was that due to strange meteorological conditions, the valley was for a long time home to a trapped layer of warm air exactly 250 feet deep. 

Above that, the air has been freezing since last September.  That is where the 34 feet worth of little flakes fell.  Nobody has heard from anybody on top of Pumpkin Ridge since Labor Day, in fact.

Then, last Thursday, the temperature inversion inversed and all that snow up there slid off the tree limbs and landed on this community in one big lump.  It was all of a sudden right up to the second floor of the hardware store.

The snow that was on the ground up there didn't drop on us like the stuff on the trees, but instead slid down the ridge, taking entire farms with it, and leaving behind several deep scars in the land.  One of those scars revealed the long-forgotten headquarters of the Pumpkin Ridge Democrat Party headquarters, all of the members of which had been froze solid since Eugene McCarthy ran for president in the Sixties.

The entire office staff, like Teddy Kennedy but for different reasons, was preserved down to their campaign buttons, and came to life right then.  Archeo-anthropologists from the cow college, Oregon State University, have identified three separate species of Democrat which existed in the area at that time.

There is the industrial socialist, similar to the modern day George Soros, the New England moderate, all of which come out of the Rockefeller tradition (Mark Hatfield, for example) and the dope smoking, greasy hippie in a tied-died T-shirt and bell bottom pants.

It was one of the hippies, with a toke in his hand and sitting behind the wheel of his spray-painted VW microbus, who first revived, and looked to be in good shape until he learned that after he had been frozen Ronald Reagan had become a two term president.  Upon hearing that, he said, "Far out, man," and fainted.

Medical teams tried to revive him by boiling the drugs out of his system with heat lamps, but the result, while animated, was but a shadow of his former self.  It is bald, has big belly zits and keeps protesting the Vietnam War.  Genetic technology will be tried next, but the best the medics will hope for is an independent who prefers Dukakis for president.

For Sale: Pickled Logger found in barrel of salted lutefisk at Snooseville Saloon.  Suitable for garden artifact.

Twisp -- Albert Kamoos specialized in animal husbandry until they caught him at it.  After that, he developed a professional interest in the migration patterns of the Oregon Moose.  These days they are extinct in the wild since they had all run head first into private club houses, right behind the bar, and all had to be chain-sawed off at the shoulders so the exterior siding could be fixed.

Professor Kamoos developed the theory that the Oregon Mooses had not run intentionally into walls, but rather had bad traction in snow and had slid off Pumpking Ridge to their deaths against the structures.

So, using a female Oregon Moose which resides at the Portland Zoo, he replaced the egg nucleus with one from a snowshoe rabbit, and ended up with a moose with flat feet the size of a barndoor.

After the recent winter storm in Oregon, he took his showshoe moose to Pioneer Square in downtown Portland to see how it would fare.  It stepped on six of the remaining Democrat presidential candidates who were having a debate at the time, reducing them all to dwarf size.

A national survey based on press photos indicates that most people can't tell the difference except for Wesley Clark, who now looks taller to most people.

Philbert Pennypacker-Holyoak Weds Clone

On Tuesday last at the Peg's Bottom Church of the Moribund Disciple, Philbert Pennypacker-Holyoak wed the person he loves most in the world -- himself.

If the marriage doesn't work out, the couple has signed a pre-nuptial agreement that following a divorce, each may use the other as a source of spare body parts.

Lodge Meeting Announcement

The Sisters of the Perambulating Orient Lodge of Peg's Bottom will meet next at the gas station, where guest speaker, Hillary Clinton will give a talk on fumes.

2004

January 

2003
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2002
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2001
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This page is dedicated to Dave Bascom.