Some people are utterly unsuited for life in the Great Outdoors, or even for living outdoor adjacent. Take one of my neighbors at a southwest Louisiana riverside RV park.
Last week he was purposefully striding around on the park’s gravel roads, aggressively swinging a small plastic racket. I asked him if he was training for pickleball.
“No,” he said. “This is a zapper racket. I hate bugs!”
I should not have been surprised.
This is the man who, last autumn, decided to “help” the park’s owner by weed eating around all the tree bases, cutting down native perennials the park owner’s wife had carefully nurtured for more than a decade.
“It looks so much neater,” he said, proudly.
After that, he “improved” his (and everyone else’s) view of the river, taking a hedge trimmer and chainsaw to the saplings and bushes that had been anchoring the soil of the steep bank. Of course, spring river rise washed away huge chunks of the bank, and caused two 80-foot tall pines to fall into the river.
“Now, isn’t that a gorgeous view?”
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