Hot tires rolling over cold pavement miles away made a soft and steady hissssss that I could hear from The Mountain this morning. The sound drifted toward me from US Route 62, the sound of life, commerce and commuting.
It would’ve been foolish of me to consider that an intrusion on my world because, well, I know where I am. I don’t harbor any sort of misanthropic delusion that somehow we live alone in the wilderness. The hum of traffic on a distant highway simply reminds me that my fellow Ozarkansans are up and about their day. No less than the whitetails or the foxes or the eagles or the wind in the cedars, it’s part of the pulse of this place.
I consider myself fortunate. I mean, there’s a good chance that The Mountain at 5:30am today was a damn sight quieter than wherever you are.
One year ago today, Deb and I — along with three-month-old Smudge Puppy, who’d been with us only since the 7th — spent all day on The Mountain. We were waiting for delivery of materials for a house that ultimately we wouldn’t build.
Development of the site was underway by then. The clay base of the driveway was here, but there had been no excavation of the spot from which the house would rise. The septic system hadn’t gone in and the well hadn’t been drilled. While we were glad to see some progress, the place still was pretty rough.
Trucks carrying our building materials did arrive late that evening. But we didn’t consider that the best part of our day then, nor is it what we most remember a year later.
It was on January 11th, 2023, that we witnessed our first sunset from The Mountain.
We’ve seen lots of those since, and yeah, through this blog, so have you. It never gets old — but, as the saying goes, you always remember your first.
Today was tantalizingly pleasant (cloudless sky, 60°F), almost cruelly so, knowing what the next week will bring. We ran a few pre-arctic-blast errands this morning — groceries, gas in the Wrangler, vape juice and coils — in Flippin and in Mountain Home, then returned to the homestead to see if there was any other advance work we could do.
I hauled four straw bales up from where I’d stashed them behind the shed and fashioned a windbreak next to the camper’s wet hookups. The bales won’t block the west and northwest wind entirely, and I don’t expect them to, but they should help divert some of the icy wind away from that part of the belly where tanks, supply lines and drains live.
It’s all about doing whatever we can to keep shit (in one way, quite literally) from freezing. I’ll have more to do tomorrow.
A few chores I’ll be knocking out sooner than our routine calls for. For example, I’ll take a not-quite-full load of trash to the transfer station in the morning, because waiting ’til after the harsh weather passes would exceed our holding capacity. I’ll top-off the dogs’ food canisters before they’re empty. We’ll do laundry on Saturday instead of Sunday, and I’ll dump tanks as late as possible Saturday afternoon, two days early.
We’ve made these and other weather-driven adjustments before. The idea is to get regular tasks out of the way before the deep-freeze hits, so that if we have an emergency or an unexpected failure, we can devote more of our attention to handling that.
We know from experience, however, that no battle plan survives the first shot fired. We’ll have to adjust our adjustments, most likely.
This is all part of the deal. And y’know what? It’s good to be preppers.
Take care of yourselves, Patriots. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Stay free.
#WiseUp #LibertyOrDeath #Ungovernable
#LetsGoBrandon #FJB