This may have been the worst year for pears in the Rogue Valley in the 33 years an OSU extension agent can remember, but the crabapple crop was the best I've seen. Although I've only been here five years, the weight of the crop broke the neighbor's tree in pieces and most of them fell in our yard. We did have to pile up the branches and now have to dispose of them, but I got a laundry basket and a six gallon bucket full of the best looking crabapples I've seen to date.

I may have mentioned it before, that the American Chemical Society said that there are great value added opportunities with this lowly apple. That's due to the fact that they are loaded with antioxidants and anti-inflammatory compounds. The last being very important. Most of our diseases apparently can be traced to inflammation, either on a overall cellular basis, or in some specific location in our bodies. I'm no doctor, but my wife is a nurse, who says that they can do a test for inflammation. I already think I'm prone to cellular level inflammation as little blood vessels in the back of one eye started to hemorrhage.

One thing my doctor found was that I need to avoid caffeine and wheat like the plague. (There is a gluten-free beer thankfully.) Also, I've been experimenting with mixing crabapple juice, a la Jack LaLane's juicing machine, with apple, grape and now carrot juice, whichever is most handy. This year it sure wasn't my grape crop. A very lousy year for two of my three vines, and I'm not the only one who noticed. Don't know how the big growers did; it will be interesting to see. Anyway, throw in a little stevia to sweeten a glass and you have a great drink, and VERY good for you. (And yes, the FDA now allows stevia to be put in food. They still won't allow it to be marketed as a 'sweetener' alone though. Has any of them every tasted it?)

On another note, we took a four day break from looking after the 'lost boys' as I call Terry and my kids. Mine cycle through here until they get their footing and off they go on some great adventure. My oldest is here with his little five year old, just starting kindergarden at Jewett Elementary. Jesse put in two tours of duty in Iraq and now is hunting as much as he can and trying to get on with the Sheriff's department. I told him the other day I could really see him as the County Sheriff someday. The work suits him. The score so far is one bear in the bag.

Getting back to the interlude at the coast, we rented a vacation house from a nurse friend of Terry's and spent four days just goofing off in Gold Beach and Brookings. The pinnacle of the trip for me was going to a small chunk of virgin forest up the Rogue River. It's named after a woman, who I assume chained herself to one of those big six hundred year old Douglas firs about a hundred years ago. Well, maybe not, but there are a few acres in there that you can get an idea of what it used to be like before all the logging started. Is what struck me most, being a fish guy, was the amount of clear, cold water in the numerous streams running through the old growth.

We crossed two streams in about an acre or more. Compare that to the small streams you see in a clearcut or second growth - hardly any at all. I suppose logging reduced the flooding in the rivers at times due to lack of stored water in the soil, but sure dried up a lot of fish creeks. And I guess, reduced the flows to places like Bear Creek in the Rogue Valley to the point where a salmon would be half out of water in most of the creek. And in many places in the Country, especially California, that creek would be called a river. Well, it will be a long time before the mountains around here start acting anywhere near like the spongy, water-retaining nature of an old growth forest, if ever. Hence a good chunk of the reason for the loss of five thousand miles of salmon habitat in Oregon.

A local politician was recently querying folk as to how to plug the three billion dollar budget gap Oregon has. The question was posed in terms of looking for a pot of gold under some tree or other. The problem is that there just aren't any pots of gold around. In Alaska I introduce to state government the idea of regional development associations to look after, in that case, the regional commercial fisheries. And that took fifteen years for the legislature to get the drift before any enabling legislation was written. Now the resistance by the 'Pygmy monopolists' are at the local level. (I use that term because the cannery owner at Gold Beach long ago got that handle for hanging on to sole use of the salmon runs in the Rogue River. He may have been a short man, I don't know.) The term fits industrialists of all stripes who just want it their way to the ruin of anyone; they don't really care. It's a small-mind-set, hence the term 'pygmy monopolist.'

As much as the grasping are getting more fervent, there are movements springing up all over to engage folk on the local level in local problem solving. I think for too long we have just relied on casting a vote for a President who we insanely believed would solve our problems. What was that definition of insanity I heard? Something about doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results every time? The mistake Alaska government is making, and maybe it's the same all over, is in not supporting a mechanism for local involvement. It's not going to work to just pass on suggestions to a politician. Been there, done that. And it needs to be done industry by industry.

Didn't I hear our Governor here in Oregon say Oregon is ungovernable. Oh, it's governerable all right. It's being governed by lobbyists just like the rest of the country. But since nobody has the guts to stop the practice, there really isn't much protection from the pygmy monopolists. The real question is how are regular folk going to really have a say, and I don't mean someone just giving them lip service.

P.S. This (below) is the saddest thing I've ever seen. You can figure there will be even less of the few scrap fish left available to the other 99.9% of Oregonians, with no hope to turn it around. This is one of your problems, Dennis R.

16:39/10. NMFS PACIFIC COAST GROUNDFISH TRAWL FISHERY SOCIAL STUDY: The U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) Northwest Regional Science Center is launching "The Pacific Coast Groundfish Trawl Fishery Social Study." Several researchers from NMFS' Human Dimensions Program will be traveling along the west coast during the next few months to collect social/cultural information on fishermen and fishing communities in order to establish baseline data on communities that will be affected by the new groundfish trawl IFQ program. It will be repeated later (no timeline specified) to measure changes that have occurred as a result of the program.

Participation is voluntary, and it's important that as many people participate as possible. The study will be targeting anyone working within the trawl fishery, but also others who "feel they are part of the industry and may be affected by fishery management changes," and that includes other gear sectors. It will be important for the fixed gear fleet to fully participate in this study so that it can more accurately take into account the impacts this program will have on other gear sectors within the groundfish fishery. An email for inquiries is: NWFSC.Study@noaa.gov. To download the survey, go to: www.nwfsc.noaa.gov/research/divisions/cbd/groundfish-survey-tool.cfm. The main webpage is:

www.nwfsc.noaa.gov/research/divisions/cbd/groundfish-study.cfm.