I have a few more things that I’ve been trying to haul away; worthless junk that I just haven’t had the heart to discard.

I have at least two more loads of stuff to deal with yet, as soon as I can get enough money together to put more gas in the truck.

I now have to factor in the price of gas in my old truck in most everything I do. The truck, which gets around 15 miles to the gallon while rolling downhill, is not cheap to operate. Judging by my recent experiences in pricing replacements, it will need to last a few more decades.

Being a junk man of sorts, it is hard for me to throw things away. Useful parts and pieces may come in handy for some future masterpiece. But sometimes it is cheaper to throw things away once than it is to haul them around several times. Since I sold my other land, I already have more stuff in the laying around than I need. My mother has threatened my life if I put anything else in the old barn and building on their property. At least if she kills me, someone else will have to buy the gas to haul me away.

With the way things are going with hurricanes and fuel supplies here lately, I just hope that I can get the gas I need to keep the vehicles going.

A few days after Katrina hit, there were lines at most of the stations and prices jumped by 50 cents or more in a day and still several stations ran out of regular fuel. If you raise the price and still sell out, what does that say about things? Maybe the price isn’t high enough? I fear those are signs of the times, with more to come. We’ll tell our children about driving big cars and trucks and buying all the gas we wanted before rationing. “Those were the days, back when a gallon of gas costed less than $2,” we’ll tell them. Sort of like my father telling me about living a week on a dollar bill. I think gas was around 60 cents per gallon when I started driving. Cigarettes were about 50 cents a pack. I could fill up the car and get a carton of smokes for just over $12. I can’t afford to smoke anymore these days. If I started back now, my mother wouldn’t need to kill me. Besides, after I finished filling up both tanks on my truck the other day and ran up a bill of more than $80, I don’t know how much more my heart can take. I had a fourth of a tank in the little van and it was $30 to top it off.

The next thing you know, there will be Jimmy’s Gas and Pawn, where we can trade in our rifle for a tankful of liquid gold.

A friend and I were recently discussing the situation and he said he thought hydrogen vehicles were the answer. They use water for fuel, he said, and produce oxygen. I’m just not much of a believer in hydrogen power, probably because I have yet to read that edition of Popular Mechanics in the dentist’s office. It must be newer than 10 years ago, because that’s the date of most recent periodical in the office. Not to be confused with Poplar Tree Mechanics, to which I am a contributor. That’s not the answer, I told him. Once gas hits about $5 a gallon, we can start making white liquor cheaper. The main problem is the ‘revenuers.’ The government ought to drop the taxes on the stuff if we’re making it to power our trucks and not our drunks. I don’t know what the byproduct of burning liquor would be, but as I recollect, it isn’t water or oxygen.

The other problem is the sugar needed, but that could also be fixed by dropping the government price fixing. If we are going to participate in the world economy, then protecting one market and allowing others to be crushed by foreign competition hardly seems fair to me. If we’re importing oil to power our cars, why not import more sugar to power our stills? When it means we can make cheaper liquor, I mean fuel for our vehicles, then why not?

Maybe then we could go back to the separate and independent nature of the mountains, with stills popping up along creeks and streams like oil rigs in Texas. Filling stations would also be more plentiful — most folks would have their very own ‘recipe’ right in the back yard. Maybe we’ll even see new companies: Hillbilly Fuel, “Taste our gas and you’ll come back.”

Horses are still viable for most little jaunts, especially after we get all the cars off the road.

If that doesn’t work, we can always go back and work with the steam engine fired by wood, if we can get the wife to keep the fire stoked all the way to the shopping center.

If that doesn’t work, we can try wind and solar power. There will be a terrific breeze up here once all our county gets cut-over like U.S. 21 mountain.

Then again, how long has it been since folks walked wherever they needed to go? Isn’t that what’s wrong with us now, we’re too lazy to put one foot in front of the other? It’s cheaper than gas.

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