Antiquities Act Reversal Policy

Campfires and Candelabras

Antiquities Act Reversal Policy

Point of Light

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

            We sat through a video auction Thursday.

            The results were certainly not indicative of any Bell Ringer even though that was the name ostensibly applied to the sale. We sold part of our calves and now face the music of concluding the conditions of the transaction. We will do that and another crop of our red calves will travel deeper into the inner workings of the cow business to eventually be harvested and or contribute to the bounty of the American table.

            These are bitter sweet moments.

            That evening, I chose to sit in front of the fire and was drawn into its warmth and serenity. The TV was turned off and only quiet prevailed. For a few moments, it was a retreat from the world, and, in that, I found comfort.

            Campfires and Candelabras

            So many times in life, the fireplace or a campfire have provided that same warmth and serenity. Candlelight offers a semblance of that comfort even though it may be overshadowed by place and events. In another life, there was a dinner I ate alone at the Conrad just under the tram on Victoria Peak in Hong Kong. Hong Kong at night is one of the world’s great experiences. At that time, before the Chinese reunification, it had to be the cleanest city I have ever witnessed. The lights were at once subdued and yet magnificent. The flight down from Taiwan had concluded an objectionable experience of collecting debt on a table grape deal gone bad. The whole experience including the pollution and chaos of Taipei had changed as the plane settled into the basin formed by Hong Kong on one side of Victoria Harbor and Kowloon and the Chinese mainland to the north on the other.

            The scene was truly breathtaking.

            That impression didn’t change when I checked into the Conrad and rode the elevator to some upper floor and the room. There I stood looking out over the city. I showered and decided I needed to eat something. I wound up in the one of the restaurants in the hotel staring at a crystal candelabra and a huge marble ball elevated in suspension and propelled in a rolling motion by water. After awhile, the glowing candelabra gained my attention and I ate alone in a place more foreign than the actual miles from the Gila River and my boyhood and preferred home.

            What a far cry that source of light was from that previous fall when Dusty and I had chosen to hunt Schoolhouse Mountain. We had hunted hard without any success only to get caught in a wind driven rain and sleet storm that soaked us to the bone. We remedied our problem by building a veritable bonfire and stripping to dry our clothes and warm our bodies. There we stood turning trying to warm one side before we froze the other. We laughed while we were reminded what a great chapter that little episode would mean in our book of experiences.

            On another hunt on Granny Mountain, we arrived at the campsite in time to put things together before an all night rain storm set in. We built a fire in the stove and sat there warm and dry and listened to the rain pummel the tent. No symphony was more impressive than that night listening to the river to our backs, the rain overhead, and the crackling fire before us.

            That was the same tent Steve (the Steven one) joined Dusty and I on a hunt in Woodland Park. It was cold, and, by the time the fire played out, our breath in the tent replaced the stream of smoke out the top of the stack. Sometime after midnight what we think was a C-131 came over at treetop level scattering horses, mules and our sleep in all directions. The cold had set in with earnest and we would have been better off building a fire and waiting for daylight.

            There were many other, similar fires that never failed to subdue the anxiety, the failure/success of the day, or the weariness/elation of the experience. Staring into a crackling fire never fails to regenerate positive expectations. It is not just therapeutic.

It is primordial … a point of light that offsets the chaos all around.

Notice of Hinterland Final Policy

In the face of broad opposition from local communities and elected officials without rings in their noses, this government continues to transfer the Crown’s land from conditional multiple use to conditional access for the subjects as if it was ordained by the great mother Earth, herself, to save it all from intangible global warming Armageddon. The Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument is on the table at the moment, and, before the 20^th and inauguration day finally gets here, there is no clue to what might be next.

 Those of us who have witnessed the landscape scale Valhalla harvests up close and personal have to smile at the outbursts from the locals who finally have their day in the barrel. As long as this fellow is in office and his SOI is in the enviable position of creating outdoor wear and equipment sales potential for her future business ventures at this rate of burn, there is nothing safe.

Even if we make it to January 20, the Dems have vowed to do everything in their power to derail any glide path back toward sanity. One of their bald headed transhumans, California governor “Moonbeam” Brown, has served notice.

“We’ve got the scientists, we’ve got the lawyers, and we’re ready to fight,” he threatened.

What we do know is that as long as special interests are “dignified” at the expense of local communities, the knot will tighten and the animosity toward the federal government will only grow. True local interests must be heard and the unrelenting abuse of power by bureaucrats and elected national leadership alike must be altered.

Summary: We, the Western Hinterland Citizenry (WHC) announce the final Antiquities Act (AA) Compensatory Reversal Policy. The new policy steps down and renounces recent Executive Office, Department of Interior, and Service land designation policies that reflect a shift from multiple use legislation and Constitutional supremacy to bureaucratic and extra legal executive branch, landscape-scale approaches of custom and culture destruction. The new policy is established to recognize and install an equal footing doctrine that puts the West on a level playing field with the original thirteen colonies and all subsequent states up to and including all states admitted to the Union east of the 100^th Meridian. This policy renounces all global warming mitigation, conservation banking, in-lieu fee programs, and all third party NGO partnerships and stresses the need to hold all constitutional interpretations to equivalent and effective standards.

Point of light

            In retrospect, campfires have always had more appeal than the majority of candelabras. Even huddling there trying to catch some warmth beside a flickering fire, booted and spurred and bedecked with leggin’s, slicker, and soaked sombrero, the preference of a naked, raw American West exceeds anything I have ever known. I’ll take it every time. I’ll also take the kinship of those who are similarly impacted by this way of life.

            We can manage our surroundings better than anybody. Our campfires and our Antiquity Act Compensatory Reversal Policy form a place to start.

            Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “President Trump … don’t treat us like subjects.”

Wilmeth refers to the "Crown's land", equating federal land in the U.S. to those owned or controlled by the monarchy in the United Kingdom. Let's take a closer look at that.

 The United Kingdom contains 60 million acres. According to Wikipedia the Crown Estate owns just under 2 million acres of agricultural and forested land, or 3 percent of the total. Compare that to 29 percent in the U.S.

The Sheriff of Nottingham still rules in the American West.