Poosey Digest: The great walls of Roscoe

Greetings from the Poosey.

Every town should have a local nutcase and here ’round Poosey we’ve bestowed that title upon Roscoe Peabody every year for the past half century. It was Roscoe who came up with the Roving Goats idea. He tried to sell the city council on a plan to buy a small herd of goats, some portable fencing, and move the goats through Poosey yard by yard, thus alleviating our need to mow our lawns. This idea lasted until about Tuesday of the first week when the temperatures rose and the stench finally reached the mayor’s house. This scheme followed close on the heels of the Roscoe Peabody Self-Flushing Toilet. The first and only customer for this device spent most of the Christmas season in physical therapy. It was also Roscoe’s idea to give folks ’round Poosey a Fourth of July bash that’d never forget and in that respect he was right. It’s not wise to set off two tons of fireworks while smoking a cigar. Poosey lost a dozen nice trees, Georgia Conkright’s back porch, and a fairly good-sized cat that night.

But give the man his due, he is never deterred. An avid consumer of the nightly news, Roscoe got wind of the rumor that someone was planning to build a wall between Mexico and the United States. Since Mexico’s national debt is around $9 trillion and the U.S. owes around $20 trillion, he figured that it would take a mighty big bake sale to pay for the thing, but somebody was going to have to do it. Last Monday we drove to the west side of Poosey to see a sign proclaiming, “Roscoe Peabody Enterprises, Wall Manufacturers.” Roscoe had come up with a plan to build a portable wall and hall it down to the border.

To his credit, Roscoe knows how to crunch numbers. He did some research and found that the border between Mexico and the U.S. stretches for just short of 2000 miles and underlines four states from Texas to California. He read that the Berlin Wall only went for 96 miles and it cost about $200 million in today’s dollars. Figuring the cost of concrete and rebar that totaled a conservative estimate of $17,073,806,000 that would be going into his pocket and this didn’t figure the cost of labor. The existing 600-mile stretch of fence is built on some of the mildest topography so he added another couple billions for roads, housing for workers, restrooms, a water supply, and a little Bud Lite every Saturday night. The head of nation security said that a wall was useless unless you had cameras to see who was climbing over it, so Roscoe plans to build an adjoining camera factory to his wall plant. The current setup for the existing 600 miles of fence is about $6 billion, so Roscoe plans to rake in a bit extra for his repurposed digital cameras.

Of course, this is going to take a good deal of concrete. At the cost of $9 million a mile, the U.S.-Mexican-Peabody Wall would require 12 million, 600,000 thousand cubic yards of concrete. This is three times what it took to build the Hoover Dam, plus 10,190,000 cubic feet …about 5 billion pounds of steel. Roscoe sent off letters last week asking what it would take to buy then melt down the Eifel Tower and the Brooklyn Bridge then realized the result wouldn’t come close. In fact, it’d take every scrap of iron in our current naval battle fleet.

Of course, Roscoe has touted this scheme as a great boon to economy. He swears that it’ll provide jobs for all his family, his friends, and even a few folks he doesn’t much care for since the last time anyone built a wall of this size it took centuries and millions of Chinese slaves. To be effective, experts agree that the wall must extend at least five feet underground and rise to over 20 feet in the air. That would be more material than in all the Giza Pyramids. Think of a one-lane road stretching from New York to Los Angeles — but going the long way around the earth!

But God bless Roscoe, the man will not be discouraged. He’s now taking applications, ordering concrete forms, renting portable toilets, and looking at color swatches. He took a few days off last week to measure the border between Canada and the U.S. in case the idea catches on. It’s hard to stop a lunatic.

You ever ’round Poosey, stop by. We may not answer the door but you’ll enjoy the trip.