Forty-Seven Years Is Nothing: A Note on Patience

This week the federal government cleared the bridge program to begin activities related to construction, and my staff filed it as news. They are young. I have covered this river since before it had a name, and I offer the region some perspective.

Forty-seven years is nothing. I have watched cedar seedlings become the beams of houses that are themselves now gone. I have seen the river swallow a forest and give back sand. I once waited sixty years for a huckleberry thicket to recover from a burn, and it recovered, and it was good, and nobody held a press conference.

You will get your bridge, or you will not. Either way the rain will continue, which has always been my position.

The moss does not attend open houses. Be like the moss.

This publication stands behind nothing, as a matter of policy. But it stands beside you.

— The Editor