According to in the campground office, this is the 2183rd day of our Montana property hunt. Thats almost six years weve been here, if my math is correct, though some people are certain that the aliens have messed with the timeline, and that it may be much longer than that. Were having to search farther and further afield, still looking for that perfect place to land. This morning were heading north to look at a ranch in Fairbanks. Then later in the afternoon weve got a showing in Santa Fe. So another day with lots of driving. I hope we can find gas.
The driving is slow going these days, even though the speed limits are now anything we want them to be. What with the war thats been sputtering along since the second Trump election (and running now into his third term) theres nobody patrolling the roads. But having had that old VW Microbus welded to the top of our Odyssey to give us more room, we dare not travel much over sixty, for fear of toppling over on a curve. The mashup looks either like a stack of derelict vehicles at the junkyard or a London on acid, depending on whom you ask. Our fellow campers here at the KOA might laugh at our rig, but that didnt stop them from electing us Kamp Hosts of the Year for the third year straight. Let ‘em laugh. It works for us. And now we get free site rent AND water and electricity and official KOA windbreakers. When theres electricity. And water. Which mostly there is. But not always.
I think the whole Kamp Host honor from our ability to diffuse and help resolve conflict, of which there is no shortage these days. Its not too bad here, when all is said and done. I hear the vast shanty towns outside Billings and Bozeman, filled primarily with refugees from the East Coast urban corridor (fleeing either deadly invisible particles or political insanity, take your pick) have had no end of trouble. Food and water riots. Government crackdowns. Gang warfare. All the health problems associated with bad food, toxification, modern medical practices, and All of that. Here in Big Timber its small potatoes While people at the KOA certainly polarize around all sorts of political and social issues, most of the down to a matter of how to wear your mask.
After there was and each pandemic more mild and deadly than the one before, each more frightening than we could possibly imagine, according to those brave, corrupt journalists of the corporate media machine. In all the time weve been out here, the masks have never gone back into peoples drawers, and whole religions have sprung up around matters of their import, usage, and style. Some now wear masks even while sleeping and bathing. Some, like Sally and myself, never wear them. And while the insist on a medical mask which covers both nose and mouth, theres a group, the Mask Mafia, that dangle masks from their ears, and another group, the Thieves, that wear nylon stockings over their entire heads, and, my favorite, a group, the that wears their masks over their chins, as if the CDC had published a study showing that the chin is the most vulnerable part of the human body. So righteous and vociferous have people about these details that rarely a day goes by that we dont have at least a shouting match, if not fisticuffs, over some issue of mask etiquette.
The reason I have to use the is this: my laptop started falling apart about ten days into our journey. Enough of those tiny specialty screws had finally fallen out of the case that it started to pull apart and, with no ready or easy source of new screws, or of the specialty screwdriver needed to screw them in, I resorted to the obvious fix: duct tape. That worked well enough. Until it didnt. My guess is that either dust, water, or grasshoppers eventually got in and gummed up the works. One morning, it just wouldnt turn on. That was it. is gone now as well, though it suffered a different fate. Sallys habit of looking at while in the bathtub finally caught up to her. I will say no more about that.
