Travels of the Myopic Juice Hunter (Chapt 4)

As he
reaches
the edge
of Fog Land,
our Myopic Hero
finally starts to under
-stand
why they
call it
Fog Land.
It is shrouded
in a low lying fog.
Here, everyone has a vision problem. They cannot see far up along the road ahead. They cannot see the extent of the precious Tree of the Life Juice. It's just guess work.

"You must be a new guest worker," opines a suspicous looking and yet smile happy stranger.
"How rude of me. Sorry. Welcome. My name is Corny Porcupian. Welcome to my home country. Welcome to Fog Land. Here everything is bea-u-tiful. No? The Tree she is bea-u-tiful. Our future, it is bea-u-tiful. We have always had acces to The Prize, to our precious Juice of Life, and it will go on for ... well, basically forever. Think of it as a Bottomless Well."

Hero is stunned.
As far out as his myopic powers let him see, a sea of ladders stretch across the visible ground, each rigged to go high up into the dense fog, to access another part of the unseen tree.

Everything he had imagined was wrong. The natives had not surveyed the full scope of the juice-giving tree in detail. Instead they climbed up their rigs wherever they could, and if lucky, they brought down all they could grab from a low-lying branch.

"What happens when the low lying branches start to run down?" Hero asks.

"Oh that will never happen," quips Corny Porcupian. "Gloomers and doomers have been predicting that we will run out of Juice for hundreds of years. They have been wrong every time and they will continue to be wrong. Malthus was wrong. The famines never came because technology saved the day. Hubbert (a Juice oriented gloomer) will also be wrong. Technology will come through as it always does and help us to extract ever greater amounts of Juice from the Tree practically forever.

Hero says nothing. He thinks to himself, "Why is this cornucopian grinning fool all so eager to meet me at the frontier edge of Fog Land and bend me towards the cheerful view of life? Every bird brain knows that no tree climbs to the sky and beyond. Why is Corny Porcupian so yearning to give me the false impression that the Tree is without limit and that the juice will flow forever? Who pays him to do this? What is their goal?"