The Reality Behind the Dream of Total Freedom – The Wall Street Journal

A few years ago, three friends and I walked from D.C. to Philly to Pittsburgh along the railroad lines. Wed all been in a certain amount of combat and wanted to zero out our lives for a while, sleeping under bridges and cooking over fires and drinking from creeks. We walked 400 miles, and most nights we were the only people who knew where we were. There are many definitions of freedom, but surely thats one of them.

Even in the cramped jumble of the East Coast its possible to remain pretty much below the radar, but real freedomthe big, raw consequential kindseemed to start around Harrisburg, Penn. Thats where the Juniata River runs into the Susquehanna at her great breaching of Blue Mountain. Fast clean creeks chase off the ridges and the riverbanks are filled with flood-wrack for firewood and the woods are so thick, you can practically sleep within sight of a police station or church steeple and not worry about getting caught. Not two days walk from Harrisburg we passed a sign nailed to a tree that warned the federal government that the property would be defended by any means necessary. It struck us as serious country, this Juniata, where you kept an eye on the weather and slept next to whatever weapon you had. All we carried was a machete, but at night all of us knew where it was.

The mouth of the Juniata has long marked the boundary between organized society and something wilder. In the early years of settlement, life in populated areas farther east was brutally rigidthe most common civil offense was contempt for authorityand many simply wanted to escape the scrutiny of church and state. Because the Pennsylvania frontier was so dangerous, though, its vaunted freedom was a kind of mirage: The closer you got, the more danger you were in and the more you needed your neighbors for survival. That just meant following their rules rather than the governments. Any man who refused to fight during an Indian attack was shunned by the entire communityeven failing to carry a rifle and tomahawk was cause for censureand crimes were adjudicated by an ad hoc tribunal of neighbors. The punishment for most transgressions was flogging and banishment.

There was neither law nor gospel, recounts a late 18th-century settler named Joseph Doddridge. In a sparse population, where all the members of the community are known to each other and every man capable of bearing arms is considered highly valuable, public opinion has its full effects and answers the purposes of legal government.

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The Reality Behind the Dream of Total Freedom - The Wall Street Journal