If you’re reading this, our trip is over.
If you’re reading this, something has gone wrong, and our trip is over. Each morning, we schedule this post to publish the next day. Then when we wake, we move it out another day. This post is our insurance, our safety blanket.
It wouldn’t have been a problem if we hadn’t returned to Death Valley and figured everything out — the whole thing. When we first broke the news of this trip to our friends and family, one of the common responses was that it was a risk, that we were taking quite the chance leaving behind our jobs and our salaries and our security. But that’s not how it started at all — no, we were hired to take this trip.
At first it seemed perfectly fine. We were getting paid to travel! It was easy peasy. We were told to go to national parks and public libraries and observe. We filed reports on what we saw and trivialized it on our blog. The blog was our cover. The photos were a requirement. We’ve taken gigabytes of photos during our reconnaissance. You’ve seen a handful. We’ve got detailed photos of nearly every park and library in the southwest. We were paid to take them.
We put the puzzle together in Death Valley when we stumbled into the control room at the bottom of Eureka Mine. It was locked, of course, but Lisa loves a good tunnel. And we’d been forbidden to enter that portion of the park — something that seemed odd at the time. We had to explore, had to see what was there.
We saw everything — we saw our photos, we saw the plan. Everything. We were working for the enemy: our employers were RNC jihadists bent on dissolving the National Parks System and the public libraries along with the public school system, Social Security, the military, the highway department, the post office — everything.
We weren’t the only ones. We saw work detailing life extension research as a means of extending the profitability of consumers. A consumer that’s dead is worthless, of course. The only way to kill the inheritance tax is to stop the death of the elderly! We saw work explaining the evolution of school vouchers into a fully privatized school system where only those whose parents can pay are taught to read and the curriculum is controlled by the highest bidder — nutrition sponsored by McDonald’s, science sponsored by the Catholic Church, history sponsored by Halliburton. We saw photos and reports for the privitization of everything, all of it hidden below the earth in the least-hospitible place in America, Death Valley. It was disgusting. And we were found out. So we fled east.
When we had our boat in Chicago, our disaster plan was simple: we’d meet on the boat, sail to a bigger boat, commandeer it, and sail to safety. That was still the plan. We were racing to Chicago to commandeer a boat. If you’re reading this, we didn’t make it. Only on the water could we avoid detection and alert President Obama in Washington. There are cameras everywhere on the roads. The waterways were our path to freedom.
Alas, we didn’t find freedom. But you can. The government should provide “free” stuff — like libraries and parks and, yes, even hospitals. Our National Parks aren’t just log growing lands for the timber industry or drilling zones for the petroleum industry. Our bodies and diseases aren’t profit-centers. Our lands and our bodies should be protected by our government. We should not just be protected from bullets by the military but protected from drug company profiteers and insurance industry poachers too.
Let’s start by enjoying our parks. Until then, we’ll be writing dispatches from Gitmo.
