Hoping to have a show about cots uploaded before the weekend.
I love cots. It’s a shame most of them can’t make the trip into genuine wilderness, because they provide my favorite sleeping experience. But even the really “light” and compact ones ain’t light enough or compact enough to carry 30 miles up and down mountains when there are other, more-important things that have to be included in a pack.
Still, I love them, and I’m looking forward to showing several different types off. One in particular makes my favorites list.
Also, I was competing with the locusts (cicadas). Daggaum, one in particular was trying to drown me out tonight. Here’s a little taste to hold y’all over.
The school textbooks tell you the settlers crossed the Atlantic for religious freedom.
Some of them did, partly. What the textbooks leave out is the thing that sits in the actual letters, in the sailors' accounts, in the merchant pamphlets circulating in English ports from the 1580s onwards: a major reason people came to America was the wild game. Meat you could take. Meat nobody owned. Meat that walked into camp.
For a population legally separated from the animal for five hundred years, this was the whole pitch.
Consider what they were leaving.
A family in a Devon cottage in 1618 eats pottage. Oats, barley, an onion, whatever greens grew near the back door. No meat in it this week. No meat in it last week. There will be meat in it on Christmas Day, God willing, if the chicken is still alive by then. The deer in the forest at the end of the lane have been the king's property under the Forest Laws since 1066. Taking one is a hanging offence. The father has never taken one. His father never took one. The institutional...
