It’s a rainy and cool Friday in South Dakota. We’re pretty much staying put, and so is the still-recovering Dipstick — he’s doing just fine, considering what he’s been through, but the performance of his GI tract hasn’t yet met the veterinarian’s ok-to-go-home standards. He’ll be kept another day.
Forrest Gump had his “peas and carrots.” I have my bourbon and cigars, tequila and enchiladas, beer and barbecue, sweet tea and Southern cookin’. Last night, in the mood for a snack before bed, I brought together another ideal pairing — a Royal Crown Cola and a Moon Pie.
I can’t, for the life of me, explain how we’re this far into our journey and I’m only now getting around to doing that. The RC-MoonPie combination is perfect in every way.
It was five months ago this morning that our wheels first rolled. We sailed off into blue water, unconcerned about when we might return to Second Chance Ranch. Since then we’ve covered 7,000 miles and now here we are, a thousand miles from those sticks and bricks.
Our odyssey is a dream we willed into reality. Pleasures have been simple and many. We’ve stared down a bunch of challenges — physical, mechanical, logistical, financial, medical, veterinary — and we’ve pressed on.
As I sit here today, I can tell you when we started, where we’ve been and what we’ve done. But I still can’t tell you where this is going or how long we’ll continue — that’s the nature of our American Life.
Both our resources and our physical capacity have limits. As much as we’d love to “ride off into the sunset” forever, at some point we’ll stop and our American Life will change again. From the very beginning, we pledged that we wouldn’t talk about that for six months.
Of course, we talk about it almost every day.
The seasons are changing. The weather’s turning colder. We’re headed south to a place where winter will be milder, if not exactly temperate, a place we know and love. Come the First of November — six months into this — Deb and I will begin considering earnestly what lies ahead.
There’s something else influencing our life and our decisions, something I don’t often talk about (and try like hell not to think about) these days. Since we hit the road I’ve steadfastly avoided getting mired in political and cultural muck, consequential though it may be.
I’m not sure I can do that anymore, and that saddens me.
For five months I’ve maintained a singular commitment to the life we’ve chosen. It’s been easy to keep that commitment and escape the morass when I’m standing on the shore of Kintla Lake or watching the sun set over the prairie. Over the last 153 days I truly haven’t given a flying fuck about what’s going on in Washington or Columbus or the wellsprings of conspiracy theories.
But since I remain generally aware of the wider world, and because some people have decided that I simply must know about this or that — I almost never react, and more than once I’ve asked them nicely to stop sending that shit to me — I can no longer resist the “tug” of the current climate.
It will have an effect on the choices Deb and I make. That’s happening sooner than I might’ve liked.
I launched Ubi Libertas Blog a year ago this month. One phrase I’ve used repeatedly to describe Democrats’ and other progressives’ efforts to dismantle our country is “the unmaking of America.” Stark as that sounds, it doesn’t come close to characterizing the damage being inflicted by the current occupant of the Oval Office and his leftist cabal.
Apparently I wasn’t pessimistic enough. The institutional destruction of America — a free-for-all at the now-wide-open southern border, vax mandates, tax increases, runaway inflation and more — is well underway, and it will get worse.
As long as this anti-American regime runs the show, our country and its People are in grave peril.
Bottom line? The course that Deb and I chart from here will be confined by political reality. I’m sorry, but I don’t know any other way to say that. We’ll seek out and gather with Americans who still value Liberty, people principled enough to resist a totalitarian State’s attempts to undermine our birthrights. We’ll bypass states and localities that haven’t the balls to defy federal decrees meant to unmake the country we love.
I closed yesterday’s blog post with my assurance that America — the real America — is still out here, and it most definitely is. It’s just a lot smaller than it used to be, and it’s shrinking by the day.
Take care of yourselves, Patriots. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Stay free.
#WiseUp #LibertyOrDeath