As Linda drove Euchre Creek Road and climbed in elevation, sleet turned to snow. She parked her car at the cabin, bundled up in a couple layers of clothing, donned the rubber boots, and clomped through the snow toward the grove. About an inch of snow had accumulated and everything was quiet like only a quiet produced by falling snow can produce.

Linda entered the grove and the snow stopped falling on her. She wandered around, making her way to her favorite tree a ragged, lightning-split, half charred Sitka Spruce that seemed to evince wisdom if you stood in front of it long enough.

She sure could use some right about now.

Linda heard a crackling behind her. She turned around and beheld a tall, dark-skinned man with long black hair wearing black from head to toe: ball cap, duster, boots. He was elderly in the face but not in the body.

There were no traces of snow on him.

In all her years visiting the grove, Linda had never met another person outside of the Christmas decoration event. She stepped back, frightened. She said hello.

The man said hello back and reached out his arm to shake her hand. She took it and felt a powerful but gentle grip.

He introduced himself as Albert.

“I’m from the Euchre Creek band of the Tututni tribe. This valley was our home.”

Linda relaxed a bit. “I’ve read about your history and displacement,” she said.

“We’re all gone. But some of what we were is still around.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I can save the grove.”

Linda looked at Albert. She instantly believed him. She told him to tell her how.

“Follow me.”

An hour later, Linda sat in front of an imposing steel desk. Behind it, sat one Wilson Wormonger, county road manager, dressed crisply in a bright blue suit and brown tennis shoes with white soles, (the latest dumb American men’s fashion). His Apple Watch was black and his hair styled like all the new hot shot NFL coaches. He was fresh out of engineering grad school and full of fresh ideas how to better manipulate nature to serve human needs. He was the very flower of enlightened bureaucracy tasked with ruining the planet.

Wilson Wormonger didn’t hail from Oregon. He grew up in some dreary Midwestern state no one ever dreams of moving to, only leaving. He scored this new job because he was the only one who applied. No one with above average professional aspirations as a road engineer moves to the Southern Oregon Coast to begin a career. One only goes there to end a career and end up fulminating against liberals and displaying the flag every national holiday (except Labor Day) and calling it patriotism.

No, it wasn’t really about civil engineering with Wilson Wormonger. He was no mere pedestrian road man. He had chosen this locale because it was a Congressional district with the least amount of registered voters and highest percentage of Republicans. He’d looked it up on the internet and made his plans to relocate forthwith. Five years of road improvements and endless fawning press releases in the newspapers and congratulatory blasts on social media meant he’d waltz into a seat in the Oregon Senate. One term there of delivering the juicy pork paid by Portlandia and adopting a retarded kid with his trophy evangelical wife (she’d had two abortions in college) and he’d become a member of the US House of Representatives, serve six years, win election to the US Senate, and then start cutting off the funding to impoverished rural areas in America except for wolf eradication and building more prisons.

And his illustrious career would all began with smoother roads in the middle of nowhere that taxpayers from somewhere else would pay for.

Linda stared at Wilson Wormonger’s suit. She was wearing a poncho. It almost felt like High Noon, time for a shootout, and Linda sort of resembled an older Grace Kelly and Wilson Wormonger sort of resembled a younger Gary Cooper.

She presented her case to save the grove. He’d never heard of it. Linda said the county could reroute the improvements ever so slightly and preserve a sacred spot. She could show him on the ground. Wilson Wormonger texted from his Apple Watch as she talked. She never saw his eyes, but smelled his aftershave that was redolent of a spruce forest before a clearcut.

Wilson Wormonger was curt. He didn’t have time to visit the site. It was too late anyway. The contract was awarded. The materials and heavy equipment were soon to be in position. In fact, they were already enroute. This was progress!

Linda offered to buy the land from the county. He informed her it wasn’t for sale and even if it was, that process took years.

He texted a few more messages and ratcheted up his demeanor of boredom.

The construction was starting in a few days. He was sorry he couldn’t help her but a straight road is a safe road.

Linda got up to leave. Wilson Wormonger didn’t stand up. She felt weak in the knees and that she might start crying. She left his office and walked out into a sleet. The sleet slapped her around and stung her hard. In the distance, a cacophony of chainsaws roared, the sound of legal murder in Oregon.

This mean war! But Linda didn’t know how to fight it. It was no use appealing to the road manager’s boss, the hick and hack board of commissioners. There was no time to mount a major protest campaign, either in person or online. Wilson Wormonger had beaten her. She might have had a fighting chance if he’d mailed out the letter months ago like he was legally required. That might have bought her some precious stalling time and created an opportunity to win. But he was a party politician first and a public servant second and that’s the way they played the game. It’s called democracy in America.

What I am going to do?

Linda searched her mind for an idea, any idea. Maybe a stunt of some kind. Perhaps she could rally the fans of the grove for a hand-holding encirclement out of Whoville or get some hippie chick to live in a tree. But Wilson Wormonger would wait that out patiently with no controversy and then build his road some months later and take credit for busting the tree huggers’ will.

She got in her car and started driving home. The sleet was turning to a sloshing snow. Linda turned on the radio and “Happy Xmas (The War is Over)” by John Lennon came on.

It was over. John Lennon was always right, except for that line about instant karma’s gonna get you. Men like Wilson Wormonger never received appropriate instant karma.

One day, three weeks before Christmas, Linda received a letter from the county’s road department. A new manager had taken over a year ago and was a real go-getter. He’d applied for and received a fat federal grant to fund road improvements in impoverished rural areas. The county was going to widen and repave Euchre Creek Road. The project was starting in a week. Merry Christmas! No more potholes and dangerous blind curves.

Linda scanned the map included with the letter. She traced the road with her fingers and where the widening and straightening would occur. Oh God! Linda shuddered. The county was going to wipe out her beloved grove of trees just off the road near her cabin.

This was no mere ordinary grove of trees. It had somehow escaped massacre when the area was logged over a century ago to build the road. Some old coot without heirs who owned the parcel willed it to the county after his death and then the county promptly forgot about it.

The grove was an acre of Western red and Port Orford cedar, shore pine and Sitka spruces, hemlock and Douglas fir, myrtle wood, huckleberries and a dozen variety of mushrooms. Behind it ran the crystalline waters of Euchre Creek that nourished salmon, beavers, otters and eels.

How the grove came to be naturally seeded the way it had been was a miracle of nature. It was almost another miracle how the grove had turned into a maze of sorts with paths, alleys and secret passages.

Not long after Linda’s husband died, she wandered through the grove one early December morning, and the idea struck to turn it into something special. She began decorating it to the hilt every year at Christmas. By the second year, word got out for a hundred miles around that something magical was way up Euchre Creek Road if you were willing to drive. But only the three days before Christmas.

Linda never put up signs. She never mentioned it on social media (although others certainly did). People began making an annual pilgrimage to the grove and the county’s newspapers wrote passionate features about the grove’s special properties for inducing the right kind of Christmas spirit.

Every year Linda decorated the grove differently with a new theme and new lighting. One year it was whales, another elk, another Druid, another Charles Dickens, another socialism, another gnomes and fairies, and so on.

The theme didn’t really matter to the visitors. They came because they wanted to feel and smell and touch the essence of a true Christmas, one utterly removed from advertising and consumerism. These people were starving for the antithesis of the lust and lucre of the typical American holiday season and Linda served them up a heavy antithesis like so much steaming mashed potatoes and gravy with a side of green bean casserole!

People talked quietly at the grove, they held hands and locked arms. They hugged and kissed. They often spontaneously burst into song. Every year, there were always marriage proposals and teary declarations to get a divorce, get that gender change, or get off the sauce.

Dogs never whizzed or dumped in the grove. They knew.

And now the county and its fancy terrible equipment was going to slice the grove to smithereens and let the wood chips fall like so much snow.

NO! I will not stand for it!

Linda lived on the Southern Oregon Coast in a Thoreau-like cabin a good 15 miles up a narrow and potholed county road that the county had forgotten about years ago. The road somewhat followed Euchre Creek from its meandering mouth at the Pacific Ocean up into the watershed until the creek disappeared into the rocks and its mysterious source.

The cabin was the last home on the road. After that, the pavement turned to gravel and led into one of the most depraved clearcuts in Oregon.

Linda lived alone if you don’t count the menagerie of deer and elk and other woodland creatures that frolicked in the meadow outside her cabin. They were her best friends and she had names for them all.

It was a simple and quiet life, off the grid, solar powered, water from a catchment system, outhouse. Linda tended her fenced garden, split firewood, read 19^th century novels, listened to old radio shows on CD, and volunteered three times a week at the local animal shelter, where she walked dogs and read them Shakespeare to calm their troubled minds.

Linda subsisted on her Social Security and late husband’s IRA and Treasury bills. He was dead going on ten years now. He died falling a Douglas fir on the property when the tree didn’t drop the way he reckoned. It was he who had found the property and built the cabin on his vacations away from Hollywood where he had served as an executive producer on some stupid action films and came to utterly loathe what he did for a living and everything connected to Southern California. Two decades ago, during an existential jag, he had driven up Highway 101 and turned on Euchre Creek Road on a whim. He kept going until he ran out of pavement and then bought the property from an astonished real estate agent who didn’t know it was still listed.

That evening, while feasting on a vegan lasagna and drinking a local ale, Santa outlined his mission to the Misers. They merely nodded and smiled during the presentation. The Big (now jolly again) Man was on board! Nothing could stop them now.

Santa said he’d lifted his plan from an old and aborted Cold War CIA scheme to contaminate Moscow’s water supply with LSD. He’d read about in a history of bizarre CIA operations. Most were bungled with astonishing incompetence or abandoned altogether at the last minute, but Santa knew he could pull it off. You simply fly over all the uncovered reservoirs and drop in the mushrooms. Several days later and everyone is lightly dosed and nudged to open the doors of perception and some basic human decency.

When Santa had finished, Heat pointed out they only had enough stock to dose half the continental United States.

“Fine,” said Santa. “We’ll start with Red states. They need it more than any place on Earth. Alabama is first.”

The next morning, Santa and the Misers went to work loading up the sleigh and poring over maps. It was like preparing for a great battle in the current American Civil War that would one day result in a lasting peace and release the fear, anger, paranoia and terrible darkness that had engulfed so many Red state citizens. After an initial dosing, Santa would take to social media and talk radio and spread the gospel. Obviously a single dose, even a massive one wasn’t going to be nearly enough to transform the average American hate machine into something decent, but it was a subtle initiative, a quiet inauguration, and Santa was ready for the long haul always required to enact positive change.

It was finally Christmas Eve and Santa grabbed the reins of the sleigh, stood up, made his signature call to the reindeer, and the mission was launched. Drizzle fell as he lifted off with the Misers fist pumping and hooting and hollering below him to send him into the sky on his merry way. They also gifted him a special psilocybin Ding Dong. As soon as the sleigh was well into the clouds, Santa pushed in his favorite Christmas album into the cassette deck, the unreleased and long lost Sammy Davis record that should have been a classic. How Santa got a copy of it, well, Santa has his mysterious ways when it comes to procuring unreleased Christmas music. “Christmas Time All Over the World” blasted on and Sammie never sounded so good doing his hepcat thing.

Santa peeled the tin foil off the Ding Dong and chomped into the creamy filling. Delicious!

Somewhere over Central Oregon, Santa turned off the the Christmas music and turned on the radio. It was one of his favorite things to do while working on Christmas Eve, picking up a real live JD in a studio in the middle of nowhere still playing songs he dug and not chosen by a damn algorithm.

It was just outside La Grande when Santa heard a voice, a real languid, stoner-of-a-voice, announce that he was through playing Christmas music for the rest of the night and Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On would lilt up the airways for the next 24 hours because, “This album is the answer to all America’s problems. It poses all the right questions. It is our new Bible and Constitution so toss the other ones in the fire and let’s start over starting right now!”

Santa had never heard the record. It came on. So did the mushrooms.

The jazzy and relaxed intro to track one danced out of the speakers…then Marvin began singing:

Mother, mother
There’s too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There’s far too many of you dying
You know we’ve got to find a way
To bring some lovin’ here today, eh eh

It started snowing but Santa could still see traces of the moon. Marvin was singing truth and Santa heard it infiltrate every atom of his being. Every line was like throwing a large stone into a placid lake and hearing the deep kerplunk of knowing, watching it ripple outward. The world needed to hear Marvin’s truth and let it ripple. They didn’t need truth coming from politicians or the pulpit. Look where that has got us.

Santa kept flying. Snow kept falling. Marvin kept crooning. The mushrooms jingled and jangled. It was going to be one helluva groovy night over Red state America.

And that was only the beginning.