Unstoppable Poem by Percy Dovetonsils

When Lewis & Clark
began exploring the Northwest
there were still plenty
of grizzlies
and one on one
they could tear a man
to pieces.

But confident as they were
they should have sent out an alarm
because they would soon be
all but gone.

The Shoshone, the Nez Perce, the Blackfeet,
the Sioux,
should have been alarmed
as well,
but they probably thought
what harm
could one tiny party
of white men do?

At least the buffalo,
60 million strong,
knew this was a problem,
and bought weapons
from the British
and organized themselves
into an invincible horde
which massacred
the U.S. cavalry
and the railroads' hunters
and the settlers
in their Conestoga wagons.

OK, that's a joke.
The buffaloes didn't get it either,
and within a few short decades
were reduced from thundering
endless herds
to near extinction.

Even the salmon
traveling all the way
from the Pacific Ocean
up the Columbia
to the headwaters
of the Snake
should have been
worried.
But instead
blithely swam upriver
andspawned by the millions
in the sparkling
free flowing waters,
unable to imagine
that some day
in the not too distant future,
hydroelectric dams
would destroy them
and their rivers
and their future,
which had seemed
infinite
until that little party of white men
with their Shoshone translator
Sacagawea,
made their way
to the mouth
of the Columbia.

A whole paradise
that had thrived
for thousands,
even hundreds of thousands,
even millions,
of years,
was soon to become
browsing cattle, feed pens,
barbed wire fences,
Wal-Marts, Seven Elevens,
transcontinental freeways,
railroads, power lines, airports, seaports,
saw mills, nuclear power plants,
tourist traps,
gold, silver, lead, copper, and uranium mines,
not to mention
open pit coal mines,
not to mention
oil and gas wells, and sprawling cities,
and ski resorts,
and ICBM sites
and air bases.

As for the salmon
and the tribes
and the buffaloes
and the grizzlies,
well, a few are still with us,
fighting their way up
salmon ladders
onhydroelectric dams,
getting ground up
in turbines,
running casinos
on the concentration camps
called reservations,
roaming National Parks like Yellowstone
and Glacier
or private ranches like
Ted Turner's.

Even the glaciers
in Glacier National Park
are rapidly melting,
even the vast forests,
of the Rockies
and the Sierras,
those not already
hacked down,
are burning.

The Great Northwest
just isn't
what it was.

If the grizzlies
and tribes
and buffalo
had put their heads together
and devoured and scalped and wiped out
the Lewis and Clark Expedition
could the whole Northwest
have been saved?
Or was the situation hopeless.
Was the tide of invaders
inevitable and unstoppable
no matter
how many
were scalped,
or gored, or trampled,
torn to shreds
and eaten?
And what new tides
of invaders, destroyers,
are riding in
and are they
even more
inevitable and unstoppable
and murderous
than their
predecessors?