We’re heading back to Oregon today. We’ll need one motel stop in Santa Nella, California, then make it to Gold Beach by tomorrow night. It’s been a great trip and I’ve been able to do lots of magazine work thanks to my laptop and the ability to keep in touch via internet with editors, writers, and staff for both the print issue and internet site. We’re in pretty good shape going into the two-week print issue deadline period.

We logged about 6500 miles on this three-week trip. The energy show was a big success, and the get-togethers with Lenie’s relatives and my daughter Annie’s family were very enjoyable. But I’m anxious to get home. I’m not a natural travelling kind of person, preferring instead to stay at home and enjoy my place in the Oregon mountains.

My magazine batteries have been thoroughly recharged from the energy show in Wisconsin. I have a better understanding from meeting many readers first-hand of how important BHM is to a lot of people, and I’ll do my best to keep the quality of content high. Plus, I have a lot of thoughts I need to explore in future writing. For example, I can’t get the plight of Bradford Metcalf and thousands of other prisoners out of my mind. Every time I drove by a prison on this trip, and there are many prisons in this “land of the free,” I thought of all the average Americans who are locked away on convictions that I believe are not justified. I travel freely for 6500 miles and they languish in prison.

BHM, in my mind, is basically a magazine about freedom, garnished with lots of self-reliance information. But it’s freedom we are all really after. Hard core criminals and violent people need to be locked away, but not Americans who have technically violated laws but who are really no threat to society. Sixty percent or more of our prisons are loaded with drug offenders. Our prisons, in my opinion, are the modern gulags. But how do you get reform for a prison system that is now the livelihood for hundreds of thousands of bureaucrats and guards who administer them. This giant bureaucracy makes its living by incarcerating their fellow countrymen. Unbelievable!

We arrived at my daughter Annie’s house in time to celebrate her 25th birthday at the 29 Palms Inn in 29 Palms. Both Annie and I, as well as Jake and Robby, had their grilled salmon, which was as good as any I’ve ever had. Annie is tall and pretty and married to, as she likes to say, The Man, a tall, handsome Marine Corps sergeant named Erik Tuttle. They were high school sweethearts and now have two little grandkids, Olga and Gavin, for Lenie and I to enjoy.

Keyboardest and singer Beverly Derby and trumpeter Bill Church performed at the Inn, as they have done twice a week for the several years we have been coming here to visit, and they sang happy birthday to Annie with the poolside crowd joining in. Very nice! Beverly and Bill are an extremely talented duo and I bought a copy of the lone CD they have produced as a present for Annie.

Annie will ultimately take over the editorial duties of Backwoods Home Magazine, after I am so old and senile I sound like an idiot when I write my libertarian editorials. She is a very good thinker and writer, also libertarian, and keeps a sewing and knitting blog, as well as an online store. She’s the perfect person to eventually succeed me.

Annie and Erik have already packed much of their belongings in anticipation of their early August move to Erik’s new station at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. I think they’ll enjoy the break from the 107-degree heat here and the endless miles of desert, but they’ll have to get used to North Carolina’s summer humidity.

On the way here we visited Meteor Crater in Arizona and the Grand Canyon, two sites everyone should see at some time in their lives. Meteor Crater was caused by an iron-nickel meteor hitting the earth about 50,000 years ago. It is 4000 feet wide and 700 feet deep.

Grand Canyon gives you instant religion. Even an agnostic like me is left wondering about this majestic unfolding of the earth’s crust. Its oldest rocks are 1840 million (1.8 billion) years old. (The earth is only 4.5 billion years old.) But the Canyon carving itself, which was created by the relentless flowing of the Colorado River, is only 5 to 6 million years old. The Colorado drops about 4600 feet as it travels the 277 river miles through the canyon. The canyon width ranges between 8 and 16 miles. Words cannot describe its immensity. I’ve posted a few photos, but they don’t do it justice either. You just have to come here to understand.

We’ve travelled 5419 miles now. I’m ready to drive the final 1000 miles home tomorrow. Time to do some salmon fishing in the Rogue River, and catch some blacks in the Pacific. Not to mention do deadline for next issue.

Every time I drive through Indian Country of the Southwest, I am struck by how desperately poor most of the Indians appear to be. Their culture seems to have imploded ever since their first contact with European civilization back in the 16th century. BHM has done articles about how the diseases of Western Civilization killed as many as 95 percent of the indigenous populations of the Americas, but we’ve never explored the cultural and psychological shock that seems to have devastated the remaining Indian populations even to this day.

Maybe I’m not even stating the phenomenon properly, but it is evident that most Indian populations of the Southwest do not fare well
financially compared to Americans descended from either European, Asian, or African stock. Rates of alcoholism and drug use are also much higher in the Indian communities than in the other communities. We’re entering Navajo country now, and their overall poverty is evident. Maybe that would be a good topic for Silveira to explore with O.E. MacDougal, perhaps getting Jackie Clay’s input as well, as she is part Indian.

We made it to the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest of Arizona, both of which are stark but magnificent. The trees that have turned to stone are 225 million years old, which is the very beginning of the rise of dinosaurs. It would be another 40 million years before dinosaurs would come to dominate earth and then reign supreme for 120 million years until a meteor the size of Mount Everest would hit on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico and wipe them out and lead to the rise of mammals and finally humans. How’s that for a quick history lesson.

We’ve got another week of travel to go, then we’ll be back in Oregon and go right into two weeks of deadline for the next issue. Thanks to my laptop and the fact every motel you stop in has free highspeed internet, I’ve been coordinating things with various writers and my staff back in Gold Beach. While in Rush, Colorado, Don Childers and I even worked up a tentative cover he will paint for the new issue. It will be of the totally self sufficient house of one of Don’s neighbors. I toured it and took a lot of photos, so I’ll have to write up the text for it when I get back along with my other jobs.