Declaration of Independence

On a July Monday in the year of our lord, 2025, Ronnie and Rocinante woke up to a new day, in a strange land. And with all apologies to the natives, it appears they brought the Kanorado weather with them. Average July temps in Derry New Hampshire (no, not that Derry) is between the upper 70s and mid 80s. Today, it’s 92 with tomorrow’s forecast predicting temps up to 96! Fortunately, no one in the Derry Public Library knows it’s Ronnie’s fault… woo hoo!

Anyway, New Hampshire, the Granite State. The first to weigh in on the various candidates making bids to run the most powerful nation on the planet (till it’s not). These loopers are fiercely independent, proving themselves resilient and worthy from the jump.

On January 5, 1776… long, long ago, the cantankerous loopers of New Hampshire decided they’d had enough of old King George. Wham… first colony to declare independence! Nearly half a year before those other guys got around to signing the Declaration. Brave souls, or maybe just impatient.

“Live Free or Die!” It’s what they say.

Established in 1629, named after some place in England… typical. Then came the British troubles. In 1774, before most folks even knew what was what, New Hampshire jumped the gun seizing Fort William & Mary, just like that. Two years later, they had their own government and constitution. First again. No dilly-dallying for these loopers.

“Live Free or Die!” Sounds about right.

Later on, when the big American family squabble happened, the one they called the Civil War, New Hampshire was all in for abolition. Thirty-two thousand soldiers, give or take a few, marched off to fight for the Union. After that unpleasantness, boom… factories everywhere! Textiles, shoes, paper. The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company in Manchester was the biggest cotton mill on the planet. Can you imagine? Then came the French Canadians, by the droves. Now, a quarter of the population has French-American blood. And these days, New Hampshire is rich and smart. Go figure.

“Live Free or Die!” A mantra, if you will.

They’re not big on religion here. Least religious U.S. state, they say. Staunchly libertarian, they won’t be taking orders from priests… they really like their freedom. A Pew survey in 2014 showed that thirty-six percent here were part of the fast growing demographic known as the “nones“. Thirty percent Protestant, twenty-six percent Catholic. Not many Mormons or Jews. They don’t go to church much, these New Hampshirites. Only fifty-four percent are “absolutely certain there is a God,” compared to seventy-one percent elsewhere. Curious, isn’t it? Oh, and here’s a kicker: New Hampshire is the only state to have a woman governor and two women as U.S. senators. There’s another kick in the agates for the patriarchy.

“Live Free or Die!” And make room for the ladies in your ol’ boy network.

Now, before all the European colonizer hullabaloo, the Abenaki tribes were here, minding their own business. Different cultures, different gods, but same language, mostly. People were living near Keene up to twelve thousand years ago! Imagine that. You can commune with the sacred spirits in the White Mountain National Forest, winding through the Appalachian Trail.

“Live Free or Die!” A long, beautiful nature hike.

On Mount Washington, they call it… the “World’s Worst Weather.” Hurricane-force winds every third day. Through the years, more than a hundred visitors underestimated that fury, and now they cant. Little dwarf trees, all matted and gnarled, like angry bonsai. So it goes. And the Old Man of the Mountain, a face carved by nature itself, watched over Franconia Notch for ages. Then, one day in May 2003, poof! Gone. Just like that. And Ronnie thought Kanorado had windy days.

“Live Free or Die!” Until you can’t.

Lakes, ponds, rivers, streams. Eight hundred of the first, nineteen thousand miles of the second. Hard to keep track of all this windy river vertigo. Sometimes state boundaries get bungled. New Hampshire and Maine had a little squabble over the Piscataqua River boundary, specifically some islands. The Supreme Court said Maine owned them. But New Hampshire still says the naval shipyard on Seavey’s Island is theirs. Stubborn, these Granite Staters.

“Live Free or Die!” And don’t tread on me.

New Hampshire has the shortest ocean coastline in the whole darn country, eighteen miles. Blink and you miss it. Hampton Beach, where folks go to get sunburned. And the Isles of Shoals, nine tiny islands offshore. Four of them are New Hampshire’s. Poet Celia Thaxter had an art colony there. And Blackbeard, the pirate, supposedly buried treasure there. Treasure and art. A strange combination.

“Live Free or Die!” For rum, booty, and framing services perhaps?

And New Hampshire has produced an impressive list of notable people: Mary Baker Eddy, who started Christian Science. Robert Frost, a poet who knew a thing or two about lonely roads. Alan Shepard, who went to space. Ronnie James Dio, the flaming heavy metal icon. Dan Brown, who writes those mystery novels. Adam Sandler, Sarah Silverman, Seth Meyers… funny people. So it goes.

“Live Free or Die!” Or at least, take it with a generous sense of humor.

And with that, again we point out the fact that New Hampshire’s average July temperature ranges from the mid-70s to mid-80s. As this entry gets logged the thermometer is in the mid-80s, on the way to a high of 96! Now without sounding like a total narcissist, Ronnie is rehearsing excuses in case anyone were to irrationally put the blame on him and Rocinante for bringing the Kanorado “Dawg Days” all this way north. You gotta admit, it is an astonishing coincidence. On the drive from Burlington VT to Derry, NH, the conditions were gorgeous. Light rain and upper 60s to mid 70s. Ronnie was breathing a sigh of relief for getting away from the punishing Kanorado summer heat, only to find he had apparently brought his customary suffering with him, to the astonishment of the Yankee natives.

PS: There is a silver lining… Ronnie always manages to find one. That being, evening temps cool down significantly so that Ronnie’s able to switch the ceiling fans off around 10 or 11 P.M. as they aren’t needed for the rest of the night. So… there’s that.

Onward through the fog… Rohlfie

You won’t get far…
In the Granite State…
With Shuck and Jive…
They can’t relate…
First to weigh in…
On the Presidential Race…
Live free and chalk it up to fate.

LISTEN: If you want to understand the United States of America, and you’re in a hurry, you could do worse than look at Connecticut. It’s a real grab bag of a place. It’s got all the shiny things and all the sharp, rusty things America keeps in its pockets. It’s a place of beautiful, brilliant minds, some of which are put to work making new and interesting ways to blow people to pieces.

C’EST LA: They had a war there, once. The Pequot War. This was long before the powdered wigs and the Declaration of Independence. It was just plain, old-fashioned barn-burner. And then, not so long ago, a young man walked into a school called Sandy Hook and did something so awful it’s hard to write words about it. Between those two points, you will find a long and profitable history of making tools for the unfortunate vocation of killing people and breaking things.

A man named David Bushnell built a submarine there called the Turtle. This was way back. It was supposed to sneak up on British ships and make them go away forever. It didn’t work so well, but we’ve been perfecting the idea ever since. Now Connecticut is home to companies with names that sound like comic book villains. Raytheon. Pratt & Whitney. Lockheed Martin. They make clever things that fly very fast and then explode. Busy, busy, busy. And the money rolls in.

But here’s the thing about people: they are messy, unpredictable creatures. For every looper building a bomb, there’s another sitting in a quiet room, trying to write a letter that might save the world.

Connecticut had one of the best letter-writers of all time. His name was Sam Clemens, but he called himself Mark Twain. He lived in a big, beautiful, goofy house in Hartford. He had a mustache. He saw all the greed and the violence and the hucksterism, and he thought it was the saddest and funniest thing in the world. He used free speech like a fire hose. He pointed it at hypocrisy and cruelty and tried to wash some of the filth away.

And not far from him lived a woman named Harriet Beecher Stowe. She wrote a letter about owning other human beings. It made a lot of powerful people very, very angry. That’s how you know a letter is doing its job. She was using her brain and a bottle of ink to fight against loopers using whips and chains.

It’s enough to give you an existential whiplash…?

And get this: back in the day, the political party of Democrats in Connecticut thought the Civil War was a bad idea. They weren’t too bothered about the whole slavery business. Now, of course, that same party in that same state plants signs in every lawn about diversity and inclusion. The names on the jerseys have stayed the same, but the players, and the rules of the game, have gone topsy-turvy. It’s all very confusing. It’s a good reason to spark up some of Snoop Dogg’s doobois.

So what’s next for the little state with the big contradictions? Now we’ve taught the machines to think, or at least to write book reports and make up pictures. We’re feeding all of our nonsense into these things, all of our history, and our hatreds, and our love poems. What will the thinking machines make of Connecticut? Maybe they’ll tell us to keep building the bombs, only to do it more efficiently. Or maybe they’ll read Mark Twain and decide the whole human experiment is a joke. A bad one.

I imagine old Sam Clemens would have a thing or two to say about it. He’d look at the internet, where everyone has a megaphone and no one has an editor, and he’d probably light a cigar, pour himself a whiskey, and rack the billiards. He might have watched that movie, Idiocracy, and said, “They got it mostly right, but it should have been sadder.” He knew the score. He knew that human genius was a beautiful and dangerous thing, like a bottle of nitroglycerin. You could use it to help prevent a heart attack, or you could use it to blow up the world.

C’EST LA: We have the angels of our better nature, and we have the howling monkeys who want to burn it all down. They both live in Connecticut. They both live in us. Words are nice. Books are nice. But they might not be enough to keep the monkeys from the matches.

We’ll have to do better. We’ll just have to be kinder. And that’s all we have to say about that.

Next Stop: Jersey, Baybay!

Onward through the fog… RH

You got your swords…
You got your ploughshares…
Visit Hartford…
They’ve got it all there…
Commune with ghosts…
Converse with brilliant minds…
All await you in Connecticut!

Loopcircus

Loopcircus

Declaration of Independence

This Land: New Hampshire

This Land: Connecticut