“The Revolution had come and passed,
And Young America, gathered about,
Received his tales with many a doubt…”
– George P. Webster, Legend of Rip Van Winkle

Thomas Nast

Sunday Reader – 
By Glynn Wilson –

THURMONT, Md. — The heat pressed down over Washington and came with a suffocating invisible cloud of ozone, making it hard to breath in the city and the suburbs. So we hightailed it out to the northeast on Sunday morning on the next phase of a journey that will take us to Walden Pond, dog willing.

By afternoon we landed in the Catoctin Mountains near Camp David with electrical hookups to power the AC, TV and computer with enough of a cell phone connection for WiFi.

While the high temperature here was 97 and it’s only going down to a low of 74 tonight, we caught a pocket of clouds in the trees with a breeze from small thunderstorms to the north and south of us. It made it possible to sit outside a little before dark.

As I sat there listening to the rumble of thunder off in the distance like a game of nine-pins from the Legend of Rip Van Winkle — which by the way was a tale told in the aftermath of the American Revolution — it occurred to me this journey I took up five and a half years ago has turned into something more.

We launched the New American Journal from Washington in February, 2014.

We’re Moving On: New American Journal Launches From Washington, D.C.

In one of the first ground-breakingly different stories, we were about the only press to cover the heads of the Sierra Club and the Steelworkers union sitting at the same table and talking not only about how to save the economy and the environment, but how to save democracy itself.

How Unions and Environmentalists Might Build a Political Coalition to Save American Democracy

Unfortunately, it turned out many rank and file union members are just too conservative and concerned with race and religion more than making the government work for them and all of us, so that coalition fell apart. The union boys helped give us Trump in the election of 2016, so now we live with the consequences.

I was there in the same tent in the cold by the Washington Monument when Bill McKibben of 350.org staged the first major march on Washington for climate change.

About 35,000 March on Washington for Action on Climate Change

Now all progress seems lost, after two years of Trump gutting the federal government of staff and regulations, inevitably setting us up for another financial crash, probably worse than the Bush Great Recession. Another two years have gone by with no progress on the environment.

People don’t “believe” it because the so-called experts say the economy is booming. It may be booming for Wall Street, but it still doesn’t seem to be booming enough for Main Street, as the swiftness of changes in technology transform the job market at rocket speed. It’s hard for a large segment of the population to keep up and figure out ways to prosper in the “gig” economy.

Many average folks have to juggle more than one part time job to make ends meet, in some states finding it hard to get health care and in many jobs no retirement plan.

Musicians have taken to traveling from house to house across the country, playing private “salon” shows in peoples’ living rooms for tips.

Some journalists have taken to the MoJo Road, selling advertising and taking donations to fund their travels and work. Some charge for subscriptions like the newspapers and newsletters of old.

After going back south for awhile to make final preparations to move mom into a retirement community and sell the house, I came back to Washington in the fall after the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian picked up one of our photographs for the ‘Nation to Nation’ exhibit on treaties with the U.S. government and Native American tribes.

Smithsonian Opens ‘Nation to Nation’ Treaty Exhibit in National Museum of the American Indian

On this trip I explored every campground I could find within about a 150 mile radius of Washington, and planted the seeds to come back the next year as a campground host. I outlined my plan to move to the woods like Thoreau.

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived…, ” Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden. “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…”

Heading for the Woods to Live Simply

Climate change due to global warming from the burning of fossil fuels has never been far from my attention. I wrote about it in Shenandoah.

Climate Change Comes to Shenandoah

Even after Trump walked out on the Paris agreement and hired an entire cabinet of anti-science and anti-environment clowns, a significant majority of Americans, 60 percent, still support dramatically reducing the nation’s use of fossil fuels over the next two decades as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and address the growing environmental and economic disaster posed by climate change.

A Significant Majority of Americans Support Efforts to Reduce Energy from Fossil Fuels to Combat Climate Change

But we can’t seem to keep the issue on the front burner, as Trump the Master Distractor and top clown in the clown car, fed by the media frenzy that follows him around like panting puppy dogs at the feeding trough, keeps diverting our attention to immigrants on the southern border, his fake trade war with China and the rest of the world, his cheating at golf, sex scandals with women, and how his strange hair blows in the wind when boarding planes and helicopters. We can’t take our eyes off of him him long enough to focus on the real issues requiring our attention.

I have tried everything I could think of to get “the people” to focus on the problem and take action to do something about it, but at the end of the day, like Pogo said, “we have met the enemy and he is us.”

As I recently wrote:

“The destination is the destiny. The journey is the path to enlightenment. Without the enlightenment, we may as well just get drunk and watch football games, vote to reelect Donald Trump as president, and find a lounge chair to sit back and watch the world come to a fiery end.”

There are days when I feel like I have already lived my destiny, wrote every story I could possibly write, done everything humanly possible to try to save the country, the world and the planet.

I even wrote a book about it.

Jump On The Bus: Make Democracy Work Again

But my journey is not at an end, yet.

Last year, the influence of Thoreau on this journey was spelled out as clear as I could make it on the 200th anniversary of his birth.

An Update on Thoreau’s Necessities of Life

This year, the way things have turned out, my path seems to literally be taking me to Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts.

I don’t yet know what I will find and learn once I get there. But camping in the mountains along the way is one way to get through the mean season of July and August, what we used to call the “Dog Days of Summer.”

Astrologically, this refers to the time of the dog star Sirius and its position in the sky. To the Greeks and Romans, the “dog days” occurred around the day when Sirius appeared to rise just before the sun, in late July. They referred to these days as the hottest time of the year, a period that could bring fever, or even catastrophe.

This is even more true now, since the heat waves, heat domes, droughts, wild fires, hurricanes and other outcomes of the dramatic changes in earth’s climate are worse than ever before and will only get worse still, even if we made dramatic changes to our lifestyles now.

I’ve changed my lifestyle. I’m living about as low a carbon footprint life as anyone can live in this land.

It’s probably a good idea to hunker down somewhere with some strong air conditioning.

But I’m going to take a long, slow camping road through rural North America and see if I can make it to Walden Pond to see if I can do it, and see what I might learn from the journey.

With the luck of the cowboy road, I might just make it and learn something worthwhile.

But there’s always the threat of catastrophe in the dog days of summer, even out on the MoJo Road where you can run if you need to from the threat of the ultimate disaster.

The doctors in Maryland say I’m healthy. I feel good and pure and strong.

My mission is an honest one, even if some people in the old newspaper business don’t seem to think so.

Wish me well, dear Hobbits and other creatures of the realm. Come join us if you can, my dog and me. Or at least help us along the way.