TRAFFIC
Motorists are being advised to stay away from Backfish, Massachusetts for a while because of a certain situation going on there right now.
All types of officials are on the scene, walking back and forth, drinking coffee, eating doughnuts, scribbling notes, scratching their heads, talking on their cell phones, flirting…there’s the medical examiner, a forensic expert, local cops, state cops, FBI, CSI, CSW, a selectman or two, an intern from the governor’s office, a radio guy, a newspaper guy, a TV news bunny, an anthropologist, a German shepherd, a suntanned, hair-plugged, patchouli-smelling lawyer…all on hand to bear witness to whatever seems to be the problem.
According to sources on the scene, the problem stems from the recovery of a dead body in the Housatonic River, right there across from where Backfish Boulevard meets Route 183, just up the street from the I’m Cool, You’re Not Art Gallery.
The dead body that was pulled out of the river only minutes ago has been identified as Hernando Desoto who died in 1542. Mr. Desoto was a Spanish explorer who is credited with the discovery of the Mississippi River in 1541.
Logical thinkers here in 2007 might well ask: “Wait a minute, what about the Native Americans who lived by the Mississippi for centuries? Don’t they get any credit? Were they too busy drafting casino blueprints to discover the Big Muddy?”
Twenty-three hundred miles of river, hundreds of tribes around and about for hundreds of years…and yet this Hernando Desoto-come-lately is recognized as putting that highly conspicuous waterway on the map.
Calls have been made to descendants of various tribes from the Mississippi River region—the Illini Confederation of Peoria, Kaskaskia, Tamaraoa, Cahokia and Michigamea; also, the Choctaw, the Chawasha, the Washa and the Quinapisa.
Representatives of each tribe are being asked if they believed that Hernando Desoto really discovered the Mississippi. So far their responses are essentially the same and can be summarized as: “Get off of my phone, you blah, blah, blah!”
Upon the death of Spanish explorer Hernando Desoto 465 years ago, his body was sunk in the Mississippi River, apparently as a tribute. But because of the topsy-turvy effects of our global warming catastrophe--and because of a far-flung, oil-happy, neo-con conspiracy--and because of bleach-blonde, Democrat women leaking hydrogen peroxide into our water system--Hernando Desoto’s body washed up on the banks of the Housatonic River in Backfish, Massachusetts causing Route 183 to be blocked off right now, about a quarter of a mile north and south. The road is clogged with police cars parked at severe angles and the corpse area is cordoned off with yellow caution tape.
Actually, the corpse isn’t much of a corpse after all these hundreds of years, right there at the bottom of the Mississippi. It’s just standard skeletal remains churned up by an environmental snafu related to a nagging little climatic meltdown. Plus regular doses of toxic partisan politics.
And before you could say “inconvenient truth,” those bony leftovers were flushed upstream through a series of arteries and tributaries and estuaries and conduits and sewer lines and leach fields and catch basins and car washes, until those bones of Spanish explorer Hernando Desoto were part of the primordial soup known as the Housatonic River.
And there in the swift, spring current of the Housatonic, billions of mutant General Electric PCB’s took over and put meat back on the bones of Spanish explorer Hernando Desoto, a new spin on the old GE slogan: “We bring good things to life.”
So, for the next hour or two, maybe a bit longer, the village of Backfish, Massachusetts is officially quarantined. No ingress. No egress. No kind of “gress” you can think of.
This just in: Sources at the scene are reporting that a new environmental catastrophe is occurring right there by the banks of the Housatonic. It’s not global warming. It’s not the General Electric PCB’s. It is, in fact, the suntanned, hair-plugged lawyer wearing the patchouli cologne.