Got Dem Stump-bustin’ SkidPro Summertime Blues

The forest edge is receding, slowly at first, and then in a panicked rout. The remnants are called “patches,” but they are not patching anything.

I’m not much of a media junkie but I do like my Weather Channel. That is, until they run those nasty ads for the SkidPro, and I have to roll my eyes and mutter, “What were they thinking?”

In case you haven’t seen it — and maybe they only stream this to rural audiences — the SkidPro brush cutter is a mechanical version of the Belgian draft mule. It’s a marriage between a riding mower and a bulldozer. I don’t know if you’re supposed to have one in the garage of your MacMansion or just put down $500 at the RentRight for a day in the cockpit so that you can feel like an imperial Corps of Engineers on the planet Pandora. The Weather Channel ad is supposed to give you enough FOMO to get off the couch and start clearing some forest.

Most mornings I am out at sunrise biking through the rolling hills, passing fields of corn…