Chris Holmes Online

This weekend a very important film is opening in select theaters nationwide. It is a film about how procrastination and misinformation could seriously jeapordize our future on this home we call Earth. It’s an important film because the ramifications of its subject matter affect us all. We share the same space; we share the responsibility.

I’m talking about Davis Guggenheim’s film An Inconvenient Truth,
starring Al Gore.

The film is about Global Warming. The truth about Global Warming.

As Roger Ebert says in his review:

Gore says that although there is “100 percent agreement” among scientists, a database search of newspaper and magazine articles shows that 57 percent question the fact of global warming, while 43 percent support it. These figures are the result, he says, of a disinformation campaign started in the 1990s by the energy industries to “reposition global warming as a debate.” It is the same strategy used for years by the defenders of tobacco.

For too long misinformation about Global Warming has been introduced into the mainstream in an effort to discredit the scientific evidence. Evidence that, as Gore reports and Ebert quotes, scientific experts agree with 100%. There is no debate among the scientists that Global Warming is real. The only debate is among those who have an agenda, who are determined to spread false information to an ignorant public.

If you are fortunate enough to live in an area that is showing this film this weekend, you owe it to yourself to go see this movie. You owe it to yourself to become educated on a subject that affects the entire planet; and that means you. You owe it to yourself to drag your own mind out of its current state of ignorance, to dust off the lies and disinformation you’ve been fed, and acquaint yourself with the facts. This is a global problem. It is happening everywhere, to all of us, and it will only get worse, not better, unless we do something about it. Katrina was just the first example in America. Analyze the global evidence and you’ll see that there’s far more damage being done than anyone realizes. There will be more disasters of epic scale like Katrina unless we do something.

But there is hope. Much like the ozone layer, which was also attacked with lies and misinformation as well, this can be fixed. But we have to act now, collectively, as a planetary community. We can only do that if everyone has the facts. That is why you have to see this film.

You should also take a friend. You owe it to them. If you found out tomorrow that a significant ingredient in your diet was going to kill you in 10 years, and you had friends that regularly ingest the same ingredient, you would want them to know. They would want to know. They deserve to know about real, scientifically accurate facts that can jeapordize their lives.

They deserve to know about this.

I love a lot of things about living in the country. I love not having neighbors, because they always seem to come complete with barking, pooping canines that don’t know the difference between my yard and their master’s. I love not having to listen to traffic at night, the sirens of the police or ambulence, and other people’s dreadful music. I love the quiet serenity of life outside the city, being able to bask in the glow of the stars at night, or watching quietly as a herd of deer much on grass in my backyard. My wife loves being able to sun tan without the voyers. And then there’s the hunting; I only have to walk through my back pasture and hop down into the canyon behind my house. And I don’t have to share the land with anyone if I don’t want to.

But these things come at a price. There’s always a trade-off. And one of the dangers of living out here is rattlesnakes.

We’ve not seen a rattlesnake close to the house since we moved in several years ago. It’s always been something in the back of our minds, something the wife warns me about when I go for an evening hunt or take a walk down into the canyon. But it’s never been anything we’ve spent a whole lot of time worrrying about.

Until tonight.

When I came home this evening I found the fella in the picture in our garage. I didn’t see him immediately, as I was busy scurrying about, trying to get meat on the barbecue. Some of our kittens (what’s a farm without cats to catch mice?) were nervously skittering around the garage near their food dish. One of them was mewling something horrible, sounding like he had a very bad stomache ache.

When I approached I heard the rattling, but it was coming from a spot near a bag of cat litter, so at first I thought it was simply one of the kittens crawling around the backside of the bag. The rattle sounded an aweful lot like the sand in that bag shifting around. I walked away to the barbecue and the sound persisted. And then I caught on; the obvious dawned on me and I realized I had a snake in the garage.

I couldn’t see it immediately. We had a small doghouse (for the cats) sitting in the corner, next to the litter bag, and it was all tucked away in an area of the garage that is very dark. I ran into the house to get a flashlight, and when I returned I got a good look at him. He was fair sized (I was hoping for a small one) and that got my blood pumping.

Standing nearby was one of the kittens, a small white Siamese mix. She was so close to the snake I was concerned she was going to get bit, and I was trying to get her to move. I snatched a shovel off the wall, moved some garbage cans out of the path, and starting reigning down blows. Unfortunately, the litter bag made good cover for the snake, and each blow hit it instead. He ducked, weaved, and occasionally launched a small attack in my direction. Then he slid underneath a nearby countertop/sink that doesn’t come all the way down to the floor. With about three inches of clearance he was able to duck away and escape, temporarily, rattling wildly the entire time.

I couldn’t leave him there. Another trip into the house, and this time I emerged with a .22 semi-automatic rifle. I stuffed the muzzle under the cabinet and yanked out a few shots. His rattle fell silent. But like all tough snakes I knew he wasn’t done yet. I managed to pull him out from underneath with the staff from a tall broom, and he was still defiant, occasionally trying to strike. Time for the shovel again, severing most of his head from his neck.

When I was done with the snake I heard the mewling again. I found the grey-and-white kitten underneath a small step stool, trying to walk, but limping and stunned. I knew he’d been bit. It wasn’t long, ten minutes tops, and he was gone. Two nights ago we had come home to see one of the other grey kittens dead at the entrance of the doghouse and we couldn’t figure out what had happened. We thought maybe it had got into some mouse poison, but we had not laid any out in over a year, and there was none of it in the open where the kittens could get at it (most of it was in drawers and cubboards where the mice like to hide). At least now we know what happened to that one. Although it scares the beejeezus out of the wife and I to think that snake was in the garage two nights ago, because Jessica likes to tend to the kittens when she gets home, always running over to the doghouse and petting the little guys. She would have been less than three feet from the snake if her and her mother had got home before me. If he had bit her… We live far enough outside of town that she could have died.

Life in the country certainly has its share of peril. We dodged a bullet.