11/4/14 by KBC

Today I walked down to visit a neighbor who is very ill with cancer...he's on morphine patches and can hardly walk. The struggling couple have two neighbors within a mile, and thousands of acres of government property bordering their home. And you know how hard it is for the woman to care for the love of her life during these trying times.

Last weekend it snowed and she finally, finally got a heap of wet paper and stuff in a pile to burn. Historically, since Adam and Eve, there has never been a law against burning stuff outside in the snow where we live in Modoc County. In the summer we get permits because of fire danger and air quality, but never winter.

As she was nursing her fire, two men who had been hunting came walking onto her property, grabbing things from her pile and lecturing her about burning.

Lets back up and consider. She was on her own property. There was snow on the ground. She did not know the man scolding her who said it was against the law to burn her stuff. He did not identify himself but she knew his friend. Besides paper, he saw small pieces of things in the fire and said that it was illegal to burn those. It would destroy the air quality. There was a cotton blanket. Somehow that was going to cause cancer. She got a hose and put out her fire.

My neighbors moved here to be out in the country, where you don't breath smog constantly and where you will be left alone. Where her husband can rest in peace. Where friends and neighbors care and help each other. From their house they can see four or five other homes several miles away. They can see farmers burn their stubble. They can see hundreds of acres of National Forest and National Monument go up in smoke with government agency 'controlled burns' that sometimes make it hard to see from their smoke, and that often get away and burn much of the wilderness and habitat. Evidently that doesn't count; government-sanctioned smoke does not effect air quality.

She today discovered that this man was a county agricultural inspector who came on her property while hunting and lectured her and pulled stuff from her little fire. So, does that make it ok for this man to trespass, not identify himself, lecture, and rip apart a little fire in the snow?

And government agencies wonder why the locals do not trust them. Unfortunately several of the 'public servants' have been putting forth effort to gain our trust, especially after the government decimated our community in 2001. At that time the neighbor was ill and our government took water from farms and wildlife for the first time here in all history. You know this was a deep lake. When our land dried up there was no water in our canals, and farmers had to pump their untested aquifer and it dried up her well. The clean refreshing well water had been another reason that she moved here. She had to drill a new well and the water was colored and it stunk

So here we are, a grieving couple living hundreds of miles from any major city, fifteen miles from the nearest town, trying to cope with the horrors of cancer, and having to worry about a flame in the snow.

God help us reclaim America. God help us.