It seems to me not so long ago when most every Second World War veteran I met looked hale enough to still wield an M-1 Garand or drive a Sherman tank.

But that era, however near it might feel to me, has passed us all by, inevitable as the tides.

There is nothing to be gained from pretending otherwise.

Although I’ll bet some of those aging fellows still get their buck.

The math is simple, and blunt.

The war ended in August 1945.

Even allowing for those soldiers and sailors who turned the military’s flank, as regards the minimum enlistment age, it’s unlikely that any veteran is younger than 82.

Which means even those men, who probably took up a weapon before they ever handled a shaving razor, have already been defying the actuarial tables for all of half a decade.

I keep waiting for Charles Manson to get involved in politics.

Yes, the old lunatic is still around, although he doesn’t make the news much these days.

Manson is 75 now. And judging by the most recent photograph I’ve seen, he probably has to strain to achieve anything like the wild-eyed glare that earned him such infamy during his murderous heyday, when even a president, without provocation, once mentioned him during a press conference.

Yet the Manson mystique — his brand name, if you will — could still carry a certain cachet, I think, if only Charlie would cast his lot with one side or other of the political spectrum.

As a villain, Manson has few peers among the living or the dead.

And villains have rarely been as valuable, when deployed as political pawns, as they are today.

Hitler, for instance (who was, by the way, Manson’s favorite world leader), is launched so often as a propaganda missile that it’s hard for somebody who is at all deficient in partisan zealotry to figure out just whose side the fuehrer was actually on.

Or would be on were he still alive.

Every now and again, while I’m standing in my kitchen and chugging a glass of cold tapwater, I think about the journey these refreshing ounces had recently made through many miles of concrete pipe.

I wonder whether I’m quenching my thirst with the bounty of Mill Creek or of Goodrich.

Probably this is a riddle which has no solution.

Baker City diverts water from fully a dozen streams and springs, and it all goes into a pipeline that spans more than a dozen miles between the mountains and town. I suppose that by the time the liquid flows from my faucets it’s been mixed up as thoroughly as a well-made martini.

(And as mixed up as I would be if I had just knocked back a couple of those.)

It seems to me rather wonderful that when I wish to see where my water comes from I need only look west at the forested slopes of the Elkhorns.

Were I asked to name my favorite animal — and I’m still waiting patiently for that particular query — the list of candidates would certainly include the American pika.

Whether this diminutive mammal — it’s about the size of a squirrel, only more adorable — would win, I can’t say.

I’m rather partial to the mountain goat, to name one competitor.

Also I have long harbored a peculiar fondness for the fisher.

I say peculiar because I’ve never actually seen a fisher, which is a sort of weasel, in the wild. It might well be that if I ever do see one I will come away feeling rather cheated, like a man who is told again and again about a certain charming woman and then, when he finally meets her, is chagrined to realize she has the personality of a bobcat that has one foot caught in a trap.

And she has bad teeth besides.

Of course it’s conceivable that I wouldn’t impress a fisher, either, were one to ever catch sight of me.

Not that I care what a fisher thinks.