BAYFIELD BANANAS

Tuesday,  8:45 AM.  –10 degrees F, wind WSW, calm to light. The humidity is 83%, the barometer up slightly at 30.39 in.  the atmosphere is heavy with haze but I don’t think there are any real clouds and it should clear. We got another three inches of snow last night, and everything is covered with a heavy mantle of white.  There was only a faint pink hint of a sun as it rose through the dense lake fog this morning.  It is all very mystical and magical if one can ignore the biting cold long enough to appreciate it.
    W are pretty well buried in snow, well over a foot-and-a-half by my snow-shoveling estimate, since it started falling almost a week ago.  The cold weather has been with us even longer, as this is turning out to be a real old-fashioned winter, or at least the most wintry in a decade.
The Wisconsin State Senate and Assembly Mining Committee is holding a hearing this morning on a revamped mining bill.  They have been criticized for not holding the meeting in Northern Wisconsin where the mine would be located, but Madison is after all the capital, although maybe it ought to be located  in Wausau or somewhere in the middle of the state, but that is a moot question.  In any case, all the arguments for and against a new iron mine in the Penoke iron range have already been heard, and the new law promises to be more or less similar to that proposed last year.  There is every reason to be cautions about the environmental impacts of a mine, but many of the objections are, in my estimation, more obviously obstructive than instructive.
Remember the acronym NIMBY, “Not in my back yard”?  Some of those who still reject the mine regardless of its positive economic and social impacts, and regardless of how environmentally safe it may be rendered, can now be properly called  BANANAS.  “Build absolutely nothing, anywhere near anything.”  This is a cold climate for a tropical fruit, but many seem to survive in Bayfield.,