All Wet

Uncle Ken's canoeing analogy is all wet. I don't necessarily need to run either one of those rapids, I can portage past them or turn around and go back the way I came. If bad guys are chasing me, I can drag my canoe off into the bushes and chuckle to myself as the bad guys go shooting past. A vote for the Libertarians is not even a half vote for Hillary because I wouldn't have voted for either Hillary or Trump regardless. If there was no Libertarian option, I would just not vote or skip the presidential part of the ballot and vote for all the other offices. I don't know why you guys and the media are so obsessed with this election anyway. Everybody knows that Hillary is going to win, but not with my vote.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that my congressional district is the second most sparsely populated one east of the Mississippi. I knew since I was seven years old that I wasn't going to live in Chicago when I grew up. I originally planned to live in Michigan because Chicago and Michigan were the only two places I had seen in those days. By the time I was in high school, the part of Michigan with which I was familiar was filling up fast, so I set my sights on Alaska. I went there right after graduation and stayed for four months. Alaska was certainly better than Chicago, but it wasn't Michigan. I met a guy in the army who was from Cheboygan, and he invited me to come visit him after we both got out. My first visit was in March, and I wasn't crazy about the place. My friend told me to come back in June, which I did, and I have been here ever since.

I don't know how much federal money comes into our district per capita, but I'm pretty sure that it's less per square mile than a lot of other places because we have less people per square mile. It seems that our local officials are always dipping into the pork barrel to fund some boondoggle project, but I suppose it's like that all over. It used to be a joke around here that our biggest export was high school graduates, but I'm not sure that's true anymore. They used to go work in the auto plants in Detroit, but most of them would return when something opened up locally, or when they retired, whichever came first. We experienced a population growth spurt in the 70s, but then it leveled out, and I think we even lost a few in the last census. It's a good place to live, but not a good place to make a living. Nevertheless, I managed to stick it out and provide a comfortable retirement for myself. The best part is that I didn't need to wait till I retired to move here because I was already here.