Last night, my third here on The Mountain, I slept the sleep of an exhausted old man — well, that is. I didn’t stir ’til 6:30am. Taking care of the dogs followed, then coffee.
Combined it made for a less-than-early start to another sweltering day. We didn’t fret about that.
I loaded the truck bed and left for a round of errands. First I deposited odd’n’ends at our storage unit in Gassville, then ran back west of Yellville to the Marion County Transfer Station.
We don’t have a garbage-pickup service, so whatever we don’t burn or compost we haul to the transfer station. This was my first visit — it’s a drive-through operation, staffed by friendly locals.
“That’ll be four dollars, sir,” said the smiling woman who took my two bags of trailer trash. “Y’all try’n stay cool out there.”
After picking up our mail at the post office, I paid a visit to a new coffee shop between Yellville and Summit — not quite Southern enough for my tastes, and way too pricey for me to come back again, but I figured that Deb would appreciate the surprise of an ice-cold fruit smoothie.
I slowed for a wild turkey crossing the county road down in the bottoms. Just shy of the homesite I had another silent, up-close conversation with my favorite black-faced whitetail doe.
We fired up the generator around 11am, two hours later than yesterday. Forecasters had backed off to a double-digit high for today, and we were optimistic to try out a new scheme for keeping the generator cool — blocking it up on scraps of wood, directing a fan on the control panel and sheltering it under the dogs’ canopy next to the fifth-wheel.
So how’d that go?
To start with, the forecast was off — we saw 102°F in Yellville today. As for the generator, and at the risk of jinxing us, what we did worked. The unit never saw direct sunlight and it wasn’t within five feet of anything that did. The fan drew cooler air from under the RV all day. I could put my hand on the top panel and leave it there without fear of getting burned.
The only downtime was refueling.
Mind you, we’ll still exchange it for a new one. At least now we’ve proven that we can keep it cool enough to run trouble-free through an extended stretch of hundred-degree heat. And we’ve bought ourselves time.
What else today? We took cold showers. I topped off our fresh-water supply again afterward.
We still haven’t found our rhythm here yet — there’s just been too much goin’ on to get into a groove. But lots of shit went right today, and that’s a start.
Take care of yourselves, Patriots. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Stay free.
#WiseUp #LibertyOrDeath #Ungovernable
#LetsGoBrandon #FJB
