Hillbillies at the airport

From the hill folks archives.

The other day we found a perfect addendum to our old post "Hillbillies R us". We took a trip the Irish might describe as 'just down the road' to the part of the Rhine River valley where the Lorelei used to be busy distracting ship captains, making them run on the rocks in the river. Said captains would then drown in a most dramatic fashion, their last view the gorgeous blonde who continued to ignore them even as they expired.

And there we found ourselves in the middle of a controversy between the hill folks and the valley people. For a couple of thousand years, the inhabitants of the river valley had an economic advantage, being right on this major transportation route. To be sure, there were Roman roads up into the hills and then west into Belgium and southwest into France, but the river was the economic artery.

The controversy we had walked into dealt with recent changes to the economic environment, mainly with the new uses of a military airport the US Air Force had given up.

An engaged and enraged citizen from the valley had written a long open letter to the state prime minister (governor) and the local paper had published it.

In the letter, Mr. Citizen reminded everybody that "one hundred years ago, all the captains' and pilots' licenses for this stretch of the river where held by valley people. The inhabitants of the valley were the traders and retailers. The folks living up in the hills were only farmers, and most of them did not even make enough money by farming, so they had to take jobs on the river steamers, shoveling coal, performing manual labor while their better educated peers did the important work of keeping commerce working smoothly."

Now, in the view of Mr. Citizen, the conversion of the airport up in the poor and forsaken hills demonstrated once again that the hill folks "were not up to the job".

In a last stab, Mr. Citizen, noting that he himself came from a long line of river boat captains, suggested to the state governor to bring in "educated, qualified personnel from one of traditionally enterprising towns in the lowlands and just accept that the hill people were farmers and manual laborers who have shown for centuries that anything more demanding is beyond their capabilities."

We rubbed our eyes in disbelief. We checked on the laptop that we really were in 21st century Germany and not in some weird separate universe time bubble.

Eventually, we talked to a local descendant of the hill tribes who let us look at a draft response to the concerned Mr. Citizen.

We congratulate you on your smart ancestors of one hundred years ago. Times have changed somewhat, if we may say so, which you may have missed because you were busy compiling the achievements of the riverboat captains who spent their whole life going up and down the river in the same monotonous routine. Up, down, up, down, up and down on Europe's largest open air sewer. We doubt that you, sir, know where port and starboard are on a horse or how to use a plow. As to the intelligence of your ancestors, we find it noteworthy that they were so easily distracted by a blonde girl on a rock and wrecked so many ships in the process that the stories have become international folklore. We do not hold the limited working life of your ancestors against you, but we do need to point out that the children and grandchildren of the intellectually challenged hill folks have grown up to be engineers, lawyers, doctors, to name just a few professions.

We left with a smile.