Happy New Year, everyone! We’re very sorry for our recent silence. As it turns out, syllabuses do not write themselves and the first semester of 2013 has brought with it far too many early tasks. Not to make excuses for neglecting the Line 6B blog, but we can tell you that we’ve been doing a lot more work this first week of the year than have Enbridge’s pipeline construction crews!
We’ve missed you all tremendously and hope that your holidays, however you celebrated them, were full of food, drink, and conviviality. We were certainly refreshed and pleased to spend some time in our hometown with family and friends. But being out of town for the holidays also meant that we didn’t receive our little Enbridge surprise until well after our fellow landowners received theirs. Yet sure enough, we returned home to a big box:
And what was inside that box? Well, lots of chocolate covered-cherries*, along with a card saying, “Thanks for your patience. Happy Holidays from your neighbors at Enbridge.”
Now, our mother taught us our manners too well for us to be un-gracious for this unexpected gift.** And we have to admit that it was a pretty nice touch, especially so since Enbridge had the good sense to pick a Michigan company (and Glen Arbor, the home of Cherry Republic, is in fact one of our favorite places on all of planet earth). So we have to say, sincerely, thank you, Enbridge. This was a nice surprise.
Yet, however nice the surprise, we can’t resist asking a few questions and making a couple of brief remarks:
We’re assuming everyone else on the route received the same gift? Did people who have yet to settle with Enbridge receive anything? And did “Dr. Michael Milan” receive something extra special? A new hunting jacket, perhaps? Maybe a gun rack for his pickup truck?
Also, we do wish that Enbridge would drop the “your neighbor” stuff. Unless this is part of a new year’s resolution and they really are going to start behaving like neighbors, we really think the “good neighbor” rhetorical ship has long since sailed. To keep it up in the absence of genuine neighborliness is just offensive.
And finally, we’re sure they didn’t intend it, but the card that came with the gift is rather unfortunate. We don’t know about yours, but this is what our card looked like:
The tree, of course, is a little troubling, since it really just serves as a cruel reminder of all the trees Enbridge removed from our backyard that we will never ever be able to replace. And it’s all the worse, of course, since implicit in a card like this is some sort of appreciation for the aesthetic value of trees, something we know first hand that means nothing whatsoever to Enbridge.
Equally unfortunate is that flowing body of water at the foot of the tree. It looks to us ominously dark. Surely it’s not… Talmadge Creek?!
Again, happy new year, everybody. We’re glad to be back!
* All these cherries remind us of a strange passage at the very end of Moby-Dick, one that has always baffled us. Just before Ahab goes down with the whale, his second mate Stubb sees the whale bearing down on him and exclaims,
Oh, oh! oh, oh! thou grinning whale, but there’ll be plenty of gulping soon! Why fly ye not, O Ahab! For me, off shoes and jacket to it; let Stubb die in his drawers! A most mouldy and over salted death, though; – cherries! cherries! cherries! Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we die!”
We’ve never fully understood why all of a sudden Stubb starts thinking about cherries. Feel free to discuss this amongst yourselves in the comments section.
** On the subject of manners, see this wonderful bit by our friend Kim Savage.
We got our box of treats, but my mother, who lives next door got nothing. She called her ROW agent last week.
Still waiting.
LOL @ the Dr. Milan comment! very funny stuff, you should write for the sitcoms.
When I saw the card with the pine forest my thoughts were the same. What a cruel joke! Some of the non-settlers did get the goody box, but other neighbors did not. I can’t figure out how Enbridge decides who gets the goodies…are they really thank you for your patience boxes? If so one would think that they would want ALL of their “neighbors” to enjoy them. They are very tasty and I am also glad they were not imported from Canada like everything else they bring us.
Missed you, happy New Year to all!
As for the Moby Dick reference, I can only hope Enbridge didn’t take down a beloved cherry tree. Certainly when I am fighting for my last breath I won’t be thinking of cherries…chocolate maybe, but not cherries.
I haven’t settled and I didn’t receive a goodie box or a card, just a calendar of pictures of things Enbridge will soon be destroying. I also haven’t heard a word from my last appointed ROW agent since I asked for the contract to be sent via email (so I can amend it and/or pass it on to a legal rep to amend) …why they say they “can’t” send a doc this way lacks credibility. They just want to make everything as difficult as possible…then wonder why there’s opposition from their “neighbors”. Maybe I didn’t get the box because I live in Indiana and we don’t grow anything around my area but pollution and feed corn? I think big boxes of chocolate would have made me a little more “friendly” as a “neighbor”; instead I just still feel like Enbridge is a poacher (I wanted to use another word, but I’ll be nice today).
I think the ability to receive electronic transmission of documents relates somehow to the particular ROW agent or the office they work out of. Here in Indiana (Hobart) I did manage to get some of my documents as PDF attachments in an email. Hardly the Microsoft Word format I was hoping for. A PDF doesn’t lend itself to inline editing and reformatting after such edits, so I was still forced to retype existing language and amend it with my changes.
Also, on a related note, be cautious of heart failure when viewing PDF attachments with Outlook 2010’s built in previewer. Apparently, this pesky previewer doesn’t always display a the full content of a PDF file, perhaps (and I’m theorizing here) when Enbridge has modified an underlying PDF boilerplate with a PDF editor. I had one of my documents arrive containing an absolutely blank conditions clause when viewed with the Outlook previewer. The previously specified conditions text only appeared when I saved the attachment as a PDF file and subsequently opened it with an external viewer.
PS… no May Day gift for me, and the time is rapidly running on Cinco de Mayo… tick… tock…