Talk about poor planning. The day I normally write this column fell on the eve of moving day. Miss Peggy and I have taken pity on our aging knees and dwindling stamina and are moving from our two-story home on a large lot on a hill overlooking Lake Hartwell and taking up residence in a single-level home on a small lot close to town.

I called AT&T a couple of weeks in advance to have my telephone, Internet and cable-TV service transferred from the old residence to the new as of the moving date.

As it happened, the closing date on both our old and new residences had to be moved back a day, and I forgot to inform AT&T.

So as I sat down to write this morning, I routinely clicked the AOL icon and the little guy who goes racing across the screen to usher me onto the Information Highway just stood dead in his tracks.

I reached for the telephone. No dial tone.

AT&T had kept its appointment at the old house. Because of its busy schedule, it couldn’t transfer the service to the new house on the same day. In fact, I won’t have telephone, television or Internet service at my new home until I return from a 10-day vacation in Maggie Valley. Meanwhile, there’s my cell phone and … smoke signals?

Writing a column without access to the Internet is like working a crossword without pencil or pen. My dictionaries and other references have been packed and moved to the new place. My emails from readers, which are valuable source materials for columns, are available only through the Internet.

There’s a Wendy’s near my new home, and it has free Wi-Fi, so in a pinch I can get on-line there, I think. But I’m not sure my wireless laptop’s battery can hold out for the duration of the writing process, although it should  keep me going long enough to email the column to the newspaper.

Fortunately, I keep a file of potential column subjects on a flash drive that doesn’t require the Internet to jump-start it. Each subject requires access to the Internet to flesh it out, but I can skip through them to let you know what topics were under consideration before my communications network went dead.

At the top of my list was a piece on the difficulty American farmers are having getting their crops harvested now that it’s become hazardous to hire immigrants from Mexico. One would think that the jobs would quickly be filled by out-of-work Americans, but apparently these folks are busy occupying Wall Street and can’t take the time to get down in the furrows and harvest food. So we may face two choices: Let the food rot on the vine, or leave the harvesting to that evil, brown-skinned horde of workers from Mexico who want to grab all the Yankee dollars they can earn and send them back to their impoverished families south of the Rio Grande, to be squandered on tacos and tequila.

My notes contained a message from my friend Karl Hein of Yonkers, N.Y., who read about a Louisiana nutria hunt that netted 338,000 tails worth $1.6 million. I ran that one through my computer’s calculator (not dependent on the Internet) and came up with roughly $4.75 a tail. I don’t know what people do with nutria tails to make them worth $4.75 apiece. When I was a boy, real-gone cats would fly fox tails or coon tails from the radio antennae on their cars. It served a dual purpose: It proved that the guys were macho hunters, and it suggested that their cars had radios. I think that was before the nutria invaded Louisiana. Nowadays, people in Louisiana fly LSU banners from their antennae.

Karl asked me whether Southerners ever ate nutria.

I doubt it. The nutria, like kudzu, is a comparative newcomer to the South. It was imported from South America to be farmed for fur. A hurricane down in Louisiana set a bunch of them free, and they quickly took over the wetlands, devouring everything in sight, much as kudzu has taken over the high ground. The rodents gobble the roots of erosion-stopping marsh plants and they burrow into banks and levees. If there’s anything New Orleans doesn’t need these days, it’s something that eats into its levees.

I saw my first nutria around 1958, when I was covering Aiken County, S.C., for the Augusta Chronicle. A fellow from one of the mill towns called me to say he had just killed the biggest rat he had ever seen. I went to his house, camera in hand, and saw an ugly, rat-like creature about the size of a big possum. The man said it was roaming around his back yard near his chicken pen, and he was afraid it would eat his layers.

The Chronicle ran my story along with a photo of the creature. The next day, an angry reader called to say that wasn’t a big rat; it was his pet nutria. And while it would eat marsh plants voraciously, it didn’t care for chicken.

I can assure Karl that given a choice between nutria and chicken, I’ll take the clucker any day of the week, and especially on Sunday, if it’s fried. My guess is that along the bayous in Louisiana, the folks would prefer possum.

Readers may write Gene Owens at 104 Belspring Lane, Anderson SC 29621, or email him at WadesDixieco@AOL.com.