So I got another letter from Lester Robert Peeples, who goes by “Les Rob” with his friends. Since my first letter from him in September, a few folks have asked me, “Steve, is Les Rob Peeples real?”

After the presidential election, the line between fiction and reality seems more blurred than ever. But as far as I can tell, Les Rob is real. At least as real as Donald Trump, and it strikes me that the Donald is as real, true, honest, consistent, predictable and trustworthy as most career politicians.

I hope that helps. And here’s the letter, which appears to be about a pipeline and some recreational facilities most of us probably don’t know about, but which lie only about a 45-minute drive to our west.

Les Rob: Richfield 360 and other Wood County parks

Dear Steve Hill,

I’ve been reading your continuous whining about community volunteers and bikes and protecting parks and all manner of other communist trip-trap jibber-jabber. I don’t like it, but you ran my last letter, so you seem like a reasonable person. For a writer, I mean.

Now that we all are blessed with the possibility of my good friend Sarah Palin being named U.S. secretary of the interior, I thought I’d fill you in on what’s ahead. Personally, I was hoping they’d name her as chief executive officer and chair of the board of directors, but whatever – as secretary, the lady who revises the bosses’ letters before sending them and fetches the coffee is always the real power in a corporation anyway.

So she’ll probably do just fine fixin’ up the National Park Company and the Bureau of Land Marketing and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Grocery Store, or whatever that one is called.

She’ll get us back on track with the civilization of this country, which stopped around the ’60s or so when all those hippies took over Congress and made it illegal for us to bulldoze Nebraska.

Most folks don’t know that the Exxon Valdez got wrecked and spilled all that oil because it hit one of them pesky salmon or maybe an otter swimmin’ around in Alaska. And it was in Alaska because we couldn’t dig the Missouri River deep enough and wide enough and long enough to allow the Valdez and other oil tankers to go directly from St. Louis to Anchorage as is their natural right.

But Sarah will allow us to build more canals and pipelines and burn up all those darn trees that get in the way of them.

Don’t worry. There will still be a few parks and stuff for all the poors to play in, like the ones over in Wood County, no more than 25 miles due west as the bald eagle flies from that cesspool of a newspaper you write for.

That is, if the bald eagle is not in its natural state, which is stuffed over one of my four dozen fireplace mantels.

If you go out to Wood County, you’ll see the natural coexistence of recreation and an oil pipeline. As a matter of fact, Enbridge has a pipeline that runs smack-dab through the middle of the Richfield 360 Area and down a corridor right between North Wood County Park on the west and Powers Bluff County Park on the east, which are less than five miles from each other.

Now, some folks might say that having an oil pipeline around a bunch of parks might be kinda dangerous, but in this case, it’s not a big deal. Because if the pipeline happened to puncture, all the oil would just run right into Puff Creek and then on into the Yellow River and then the Wisconsin.

Once it’s there it’ll eventually end up in Mississippi, and who cares about Mississippi?

I doubt that oil would mess up Puff Creek and North Wood County Park for more than 25 or 30 years, and in the meantime, lots of my rich oil friends could get richer, providing somebody for the poors to look up to. Win-win.

Anyway, hardly anyone uses the 360 except a bunch of hunters and primitive campers and hikers and especially cross-country skiers, who oughta be outlawed, because who can ever hear them coming?

Any mode of transport that doesn’t have a leather interior and near-silence inside while sounding good and manly – like a drag race – on the outside is just unnatural.

What is natural is expansion. Now that the Wisconsin Legislature is trying to help Enbridge out, there’s a good chance that maybe we could make the 80-foot-right-of-way in the middle of the Richfield 360 Area into a 240-foot zone that will allow us to clear a bunch more unsightly forest.

Some folks think that might ruin the beautiful ski trail that goes through those woods, but you can always just put it somewhere closer, like the Clark Street Bridge.

That way you namby-pamby journalists could simply step outside your door and ski once or twice over the bridge before you scurry back to your offices to produce all that pinko placeholder copy to fill your paper until I write my next letter.

Yours, humbly and respectfully,

-Les Rob Peeples