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:

 

 

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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.”

 

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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:

 

Photo on 1-7-13 at 6.03 PM

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.