Swamp Rabbit and I stopped for an overnight at a motel midway through a sales trip in upstate PA – Trump country. Some cadaver in camo gear checked us in and said there would be no meals until 7 a.m., so we settled for pork rinds and coffee from the vending machines. The coffee was rotgut, so we added sugar and a powdered milk substitute made of mercury or something.

We sat on a couch in the lobby, not far from a paneled wall hung with an elk head looking down on us with black marble eyes, very judgmental. Its jumbo antlers seemed to reach for me.

Swamp Rabbit told me gun-toting rednecks were less of a threat to wild things these days than human-made toxins, that scientists were finding tiny bits of plastic on polar ice, thousands of bits every square foot.

Not that there was much ice left at the North Pole, as the Washington Post noted yesterday. Swamp Rabbit pulled out his phone and showed me a picture of a polar bear standing on a small slab of it, surrounded by a thawing-out sea.

“I feel like that bear,” I said.

He threw a pork rind at me. “How you know how that bear feels? I don’t know how he feels.”

I told him all the bear wanted was a decent meal and a safe place to hang out, but there it was in the middle of nowhere, on a surface that becomes more fragile by the day, thanks to guys like Trump’s boy Scott Pruitt, the climate-change denier who heads the Environmental Protection Agency.

Swamp Rabbit said, “You’ll feel better once we’re out of Trump country. Even better when Trump and his gang get kicked out of office.”

“That’s the problem,” I replied. “Climate change is happening now. By the time Trump gets kicked out, the whole world might be Trump country.”