Move your environment!

Merced County and our elected supervisors care deeply about the lack of entertainment and job opportunities in their jurisdiction. For this reason they have paved the way for a genuine NASCAR-level racetrack and the wise leaders of the City of Merced will undoubtedly approve a WalMart distribution center in the coming year.

We will have entertainment and jobs galore right here in Merced.

The only problem will be measurably worse air quality caused by:

· all the people also thirsting for entertainment who will come from out of town to Riverside Motorsparts Pork for races and concerts;
· and thousands more trucks arriving and departing from the WalMart distribution center 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

But, San Joaquin Valley leaders are nothing if not competitive. They thirst for glory. Perhaps, after the two projects are built, we will rest securely in the top slot for the most polluted air basin in the nation, finally defeating our only rival, Los Angeles. Our leaders may also hope to gain the prize for being the noisiest rural county in California. Their ambitions are endless.

Not all Merced County residents appreciate the entertainment, the WalMart jobs or increased degradation of the air quality. Some of these people will move their environment.

Barring an extraterrestrial method, they will move their environment by selling their homes and land, leaving their old, noisy, polluted, traffic-jammed environment, for a new, better environment.

They’re telling their realtors, “We ain’t no fairy shrimp! We can move and we will move.”

The realtors reply, “Whatever.” Then they explain that today’s Merced real estate market is a Buyers’ Market and they are sellers, therefore certain enhancements are considered wise by motivated sellers.

One set of movers offered a dairy herd to sweeten the deal. Their realtor explained that today’s buyers aren’t interested in dairy herds. They want, what in the trade has come to know known as “pasture ornaments” and lot splits.

“Your burros, your llamas, your emus, your cutting horses, and your 5-acre parcels,” the realtors explain. “No dairy herds. Some acreage in your merlot grapes is also an incentivizer. And your olive trees are getting to be a popular for the Mediterranean-type villa look to your double-wide.”

Motivated environmental movers stop to consider the incentivizers and frequently remark they wouldn’t mind a place like that either, but ask how they’d make a living on it. Realtors urge them not to dwell on the higher regions of the real estate market, where only trained professionals should go.

So, the next day the farmer is out buying pasture ornaments from Bobo’s Abatoir, Pet Cemetery and Used Pasture Ornaments LLC, located on primo sweet potato land until Bobo sold an easement for a sewer line south of war-torn Livingston.

“I got a herd of llamas, fresh off a corner lot an oil company bought last week,” Bobo said. “Real stylish, llamas.”

The farmer looked at the llamas, the llamas looked at the farmer.

“What the Hell?” the farmer said. “How much for the lot?”

“Well, these are genuine corner-lot used llamas, premium grade pasture ornaments.”

The farmer took Bobo’s price because who knew what a llama was worth, anyway? His whole dairy herd? But things had to look just right because it was a Buyers’ Market and the farmer was going to move his environment.

Bobo felt so sorry for the sucker he threw in a new flock of Bantam chickens.

“Commuter wife hasn’t been born yet who could resist your Banties,” he said.

The farmer went to town, leased himself a supervisor and rented a county planner and got his parcel splits.

He did everything the realtor told him to do and still the realtor kept trying to drive his price down.

“You know there’s going to be a lot of traffic on this road and the air quality is going down,” the realtor said. “We need incentives to make this sale.”

“I know. That’s why I’m selling. But the buyers don’t know that. You haven’t told them, have you?”

The realtor made a cold, professional realtor face and said nothing.

“Sorry,” the farmer said. “It’s just that I have some payments to make.”

“Knock off another $25,000 and I think I have a buyer.”

But the realtor didn’t have a buyer and next month asked for another sizeable reduction in price.
“You have to be realistic,” the realtor said. “If you’re not going to get rid of the double-wide and build one of your up-scale home products there’s not much more I can do. In today’s Buyers’ Market you need at least 10,000 square feet in either a Los Altos Chat-oh, a General Vallejo hacienda, a Napa Coppola or a McTaj Mahal.”

Time went by. One evening at the end of another month in the Buyers’ Market, he drove back to the farm. He saw the kids petting the llamas, the farmer’s wife was feeding the Banties, the Merlot vineyard was about to produce its first crop and the row of olive trees was rooting nicely. And the cow stink was gone. In fact, the milking barn was gone. He heard birds because there was no cow sounds. I t was incredible to him because he’d lived his entire life on dairies.

“So, this is the real farming life. It ain’t half bad,” the farmer thought.

We didn’t see the farmer much after he said he was going to move his environment. Eventually, they moved. Most of us, like the workers he fired when he sold, couldn’t get out. We were tied to the county in one way or another as tight as a fairy shrimp to a vernal pool. Moving our environment wasn’t an option. We wished the farmer well but told him not to let the door hit him on the way out.

Bobo, the used pasture ornament dealer, got the llamas back, “spoiled rotten,” he said. But then he scored a kit fox and advertised by word-of-mouth a new line of “rare pasture ornaments,” and made some big money.

We heard he moved to the coast.