Steve and Judy's Travels!

Drying in the sun.

My faithful companion.

Hang from the bar and let all your muscles relax.  Feel the stretch.  Then pull your shoulders back and down.  Engage your abs.  Fire the muscles in your arms and back, pulling yourself upward until your chin is even with the bar.  Then slowly lower your body back down to the starting position.  Repeat.  I can remember how it feels.  Satisfying.  We did them in high school.  We did a lot of them in Army training.  I try it today.  I can hang from a bar.  I still have the grip strength.  Pull the shoulders back and down.  I can do that.  Engage the abs.  Seriously?  That’s as far as it goes.  Fire the muscles in my arms and back.  Nothing happens against that much body weight.  The satisfying part is nowhere to be found.

Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to do pullups again?

When we were kids, back when the only thing in car radiators was water, we would see barrels along the side of mountain roads; water to put in the radiator when your car overheated going up the hill.

In current times, in South Texas where there are no hills, there are blue water barrels along the side of the highway.  These are not for radiators.

These are to try to help the undocumented people, who have made it this far, stay alive out in the brutal hot ranchlands.  The people may be breaking our rules, but they are still people that live and breathe and dream, until they can’t anymore.  Human rights groups put these barrels out.  Ranchers put them out so they will find fewer dead bodies on their remote properties.  That’s how it is here.  The better we get at our highway checkpoints at apprehending migrants, the more the migrants are pushed to higher risk routes, and the body count escalates.  Unintended consequences of our efforts to control a situation that defies control.  It’s not just here.  There is a global surge of human migration.