TAMING TORNADOES or "Thank God They Cannot Cut Down the Clouds"

When I was young America was great again. Nothing got out of hand because we controlled things. When I was young we didn't need to go to school for twenty years just to learn how to run the place. Six years of learning was plenty. We were smarter then. And we got that way by walking six miles uphill just to get to the schoolhouse. Then we walked six miles uphill to make it back home in time to do the chores. 

When I was young we controlled things. We didn't have such nonsense as climate change, rising sea levels, floods, forest fires, volcanos, air pollution, global extinctions. America was great again. 

When I was young we didn't have much food so I was brought up on a lot of stories about that part of America where I lived, the Golden West. A diet of road-killed horned toads, cactus paddles and half-cooked beans was not quite as nourishing as stories about those grand American heroes that controlled things and made America great again. A landscape of hope, space, clear, blue skies, few people and lotsa wildlife. A landscape of freedom and self-reliance. 

Hell, today we can't control nothing. Least of all ourselves. Back then Paul Bunyan controlled the forestry while Smokey the Bear controlled  the fires. Miz Polly Pele controlled the volcanoes. Mike Fink and the Beaver Boys controlled the floods, John Henry kept technological excesses in check and Johnny Appleseed kept us in fruit. We even controlled the weather. We had tornado controllers. One was a lowly bronc buster and cowhand named Pecos Bill.

Now everyone from the old West knows that Pecos Bill could ride anything. No Bronco, Bison or Grizzly Bear could throw him. As the stories go, I only heard of Bill near getting throwed once in his whole career as a cowboy. Even here it's not clear whether he was throwed or just so liquored up and full of laughter that he fell off.  They say it all began when Pecos was courting the ladies up Oklahoma way when he decided to ride a tornado.

Bill wasn't the kind of man to ride just any tornado. He waited for the biggest damned old tornado you ever saw. It was turning the sky black and green, and roaring so loud it woke up the farmers way over in China. Well, Bill just grabbed that spinning, twisting, roaring tornado, pushed it to the ground and jumped on its back. The tornado whipped and whirled and sidewinded and generally cursed its bad luck all the way down to Texas. Tied the rivers into knots, flattened all the forests, tore up the earth so bad in southern Utah that there was nothing left but red sandstone bedrock. But Bill just rode along like he was born to the wind. He whooped and sang and waved his hat in the air and now and again give that storm an occasional jab with his spurs.

Finally, that tornado decided it wasn't getting this cowboy off its back no-how. So it headed west to California and just rained itself out. Made so much water along the way it washed out the Grand Canyon. That tornado was down to practically nothing when Bill finally fell off. He hit the ground so hard it sank below sea level. Folks call the spot Death Valley. 

That's what I mean when I say that once America was Great. Again.