Boxed-in Bolshevik ?

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We were cruising pleasantly in the area of Awendaw, SC, in Charleston County when something out of the past caught our eye: a Red Star on a black Hummer. Inside that red star was the infamous Hammer and Sickle, the logo for the "former" Soviet Union. " What the heck is THAT ! ", we wondered. Had the Soviets been secretly buying Hummers and consolidating a power base in the Francis Marion National Forest ? We thought that they went broke years ago. Maybe they already had Hummers back then and just ran out of gas so they migrated to South Carolina for our low fuel prices. They couldn't possibly be buggering around with our protected woodlands, we felt assured.

Well, who would really know? That is, with all those trees in that big forest, who really has any idea what's going on in such thickly wooded areas? We do a lot of snooping, but we're not really rigged for busting through the heavy brush or jumping ditches in the Mustang. We have to admit to certain suspicions, but we never thought that the Russians would be invading our woodlands. We thought that our massive southern woodlands would be forever protected by the likes of Westaco, International Paper and other users of pulpwood who planted, harvested and managed these forests. Unlike Robert Frost, we didn't have to wonder whose woods these were when we entered them. Posted signs proclaimed the ownership and protection of and by the paper companies.

We couldn't wait to see the Berlin Wall fall and with it the entire Soviet Union along with their grip over Soviet Satellite states. How nice that would be to have all those little countries liberated. Unfortunately, few of us anticipated the tribal and regional warfare or the ethnic cleansing which ensued nor were we ready for the resulting rogue states which play hell with world peace more each day. In retrospect, we have come to realize that the Soviet Union had kept most of the nutty states in line, not nicely, but in line nonetheless.

In this brush with the red menace, we began to think of how so much forest land is now being liberated by the paper companies divesting themselves of thousands of acres which they formerly held...and protected. All of a sudden, parcels of land are falling to developers and we already know where that's going. We'll have countless cutely named subdivisions from Awendaw right up to Georgetown's door. These will not be grand homes to be cherished by future generations. We shall see the onset of many little Taraettes, the Scarlet O'Hara line of Double Wide Mobile Homes. There will be bungalows constructed of composite materials which won't last long either. They will all be made out of "ticky-tacky " and they'll all look just alike....except that genius developers will skew their "footprints" just a bit so that nobody quite figures out they're all in a row right away. Give them your money and they'll give you a geometric stunts.

Well, the Hummer was not filled with Communists or even " Fellow Travelers ", but had they been, we'd have called in the FBI. Now, if that big gas hog had contained developers, we'd have just lynched 'em. We don't mind developers hanging around, we just don't want 'em building anything in these parts.