(The Mount Pony facility in the Cold War. From the real estate flyer advertising its sale).

I am still down at the Farm, luxuriating in the return of green growth and a certain warmth in the early Spring air. Windows are wonderful things.

It has been a blessed relief to have the kinds of material that have flowed through the Socotra Portal over the last week or so. We are gifted with some great contributors here at the vast Socotra Enterprises complex that lurks below the summit of famous Mount Pony, whose cavernous bunkers once stored half of the paper currency held by the Federal Reserve District of the of the Eastern United States of America.

It is an even cooler bunker now, housing the David H. Packer film restoration center and theater. When the Government decided to divest itself of the remarkable infrastructure designed to minimize the kinetic effects of the Cold War, the inventory of strange facilities strewn around the National Capital Region were startling.

(The Library of Congress Packard Campus today at Mount Pony)

By accident of fate, after 9/11 I was assigned to the duty of babysitting Cabinet Secretaries (designated Survivor) and bored White House staffers supporting them.

Our accommodations were impressive but stark. I mean, blast doors are a major decorative statement, but I prefer an Arts-and-Crafts decor. The smart people wanted some air, so we got out of the hole in the ground.

It was fun, since we got to leave the undisclosed location in those unobtrusive giant black Chevy Suburbans and drive around green and growing places that held what once were the bolt hole for JFK, and antenna fields that might (or might not) be looking into orbit.

Anyway, that was then and this is now. As the thinking went at the time, a dozen feet of concrete over your bed might be a desirable thing, and an air filtration plant would be a feature, not a bug.

I have recently posted the experience of Sam Cox, joined the hunt for missing US Navy ships (and crew) in the waters off Guadalcanal in the South Pacific. I will get it compiled and posted as a unified document on the usual suspect web sites. If you have never thought much about how close-run and desperate the Pacific War was at it’s inception, I recommend Sam’s adventure and a read of historian James D. Hornfischer’s

“Neptune’s Inferno.” It is a remarkable account of the running gun-battles between formidable ships of war in The Slot. I highly recommend it.

It scared the shit out of me, anyway.

Meanwhile, there is life. I watched some of Attorney General Barr’s testimony this morning. It was Swamp Kabuki at its finest. But this is all hot air now, since everyone knows what can and cannot be released about a three-year investigation which documented thoroughly a non-event. The firing of the DHS Secretary over the weekend seems to have sunk out of sight, though the undocumented invasion continues to steam north.

I have no solutions to any of that, except resolute action by the Congress to fix the current immigration system and eliminate the incentive to illegal immigration.

Note, please, I did not say “legal immigration” where you actually know who is coming. Hahaha. This posturing and agony will be with us until the November after this one.

In common with a human tide rolling north, Mother Gaia is throwing us a late curve after Opening Day. There is at least one more of those vortex events happening in the Midwest. I am hoping it misses Refuge Farm. I am done with winter and have had the windows open the last few days, even in the evening. About mid-morning. I heard a distinct and unfamiliar sound- that of a full-throated bell reverberating under the shadow of Mount Pony.

(Ship’s bell. Obviously not brass, but a wartime exigency and another sanding-and-painting project I will never get to. Works fine, though, for local allertment purposes).

As you know, I have had a ship’s bell since the family lived in suburban Detroit. It once hung in the fireplace at the house, but in my petulant adolescence, I demanded it a accompany us on the move to Western Michigan. I have been hauling it around ever since, hither-to-yon and vice versa.

When I washed up at Refuge Farm, I thought it could be a working device again, and commissioned a mount for the back porch. You know, just in case you need to alert the neighborhood to anything untoward.

Anyway, the gentle tocsin of the bell provoked a physical response, and made me clamber out of my chair and listen hard. My arrangement with the Russians is that if there was trouble at The Farm, I would ring it as a signal to go to General Quarters and action stations.

I called Natasha once I could find the phone. She indicated a robust response was not required, though the thought was welcome. they had not secured a bell-signaling device, but that Mattski had immediately responded to a potential threat with the same note of caution that I had.

Good neighbors are really good things to have. Best we could figure is that bells in the old Winston private chapel had been chimed for some reason unknown to those of us who have not been here for a couple centuries.

And being under the shadow of Mount Pony is pretty cool.

Copyright 2019 Vic Socotra
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