After forty-six years of living in Pennsylvania, I have left my beautiful mountains, snow, and blazing autumns behind. A poem written by Davy Crockett, put to music by Disney, and sung by my favorite group, Riders in the Sky, puts to words that which I feel in my heart far more accurately than anything I could write. I cried when I first heard it, and will share, to the best of my ability, the deep emotions it uncovered.

Farewell to the mountains whose mazes to me

Were more beautiful far than Eden could be

No fruit was forbidden, and nature had spread

Her bountiful board…and her children were fed.

The hills were our garners; our herds wildly grew

And nature was shepherd and husbandman, too.

I felt like a monarch yet thought like a man

As I thanked the Great Giver and worshipped His plan.

Wow! He felt what I have felt! How does one rip one’s heart out of a place of such stunning beauty as I must now do? How do I leave behind the gentle hollows and ridges I have come to know so very well, where my daughter shot her first deer, then her first buck, then her first archery buck? How can I leave the Tuscarora Mountain, where Lisa and I hiked during muzzleloader season, and I felt like Davy Crockett must have as I gazed upon the valley and the surrounding peaks? I am not the first to feel the bittersweet longing of leaving one’s beautiful home state…

The home I forsake where my offspring arose

The grave I forsake where my children repose

The home I redeemed from the savage and wild

The home I have loved as a father his child

The corn that I planted; the fields that I cleared

The flocks that I raised and the cabin I reared

The wife of my bosom, farewell to ye all

In the land of the stranger I rise or I fall

Well, thankfully, I leave no graves of my immediate family behind, but as I look out at my farm animals I feel the sense of accomplishment and satisfaction of a decade of breeding. Unlike Davy, I would be able to hire a hauler to take my fine looking Charolais cows and my Saanen goats to my new home in the South. Still, I will lose much. The house is finally looking as beautiful as ever, my shiny white kitchen tiles, accented with floral print tiles, are finally installed, my bathrooms painted and coordinated, just in time for strangers to fall in love with the house enough to buy it. Will I ever have a place I will call "home" for good? Most of all, it pains me to leave my beloved black walnut trees. I planted them when I moved in, and they just started to bear. They set down their roots as I had hoped to do here, but now they stay and I must go. Will I ever have my own roots planted firmly in place? The new Lady of the House, a sweet young Amish gal, has promised me she will not cut them. I have promised to buy walnuts from her every year. One thing about handing my beloved farm over to the Amish is that they will love the land and make it bountiful as I had tried to do.

Farewell to my country, I fought for thee well

As the savage rushed forth like the demons from Hell

In peace or in war I have stood by thy side

My country for thee I have lived, would have died.

But I am cast off, my career now is run

And I wander abroad like the Prodigal Son

Where the wild savage roams and the broad prairies spread

The fallen despised will again go ahead.

This verse describes how Davy felt when he lost an election, but if he could see the sorry situation in Pennsylvania these days he would be absolutely enraged that any state in our fine nation could stray so far from what our Founding Fathers worked so hard to established. Freedom is but a hollow memory, as rural Pennsylvanians have come to learn. Land rights are something nearly lost, and government seeks to micromanage almost every move we make. Land ownership has become almost a liability, and rural people now live in constant fear of over-zealous environmental agencies that go far beyond simply protecting the beloved land from pollution. During the last year of my residency, I fought tirelessly to expose the fact that the government was after total control of private property. At first my cries fell on deaf ears, but by the grace of God, I found some friends who helped light a firestorm of advocacy in my valley and across the entire state. They must now carry on without me.

Another thing that would enrage Davy Crockett is the deliberate destruction of our deer herd by radical environmentalists who infiltrated our Game Commission and betrayed the trust of sportsmen, using their license dollars to further their far-left cause. In a strange way, the demise of our deer was the one thing that has kept this move from being too painful to bear. The awesome beauty of my mountain has taken on an obscene appearance to me, as I know the mazes are no longer wandered by more than just a few remaining deer. Some sections are even totally devoid of sign. All that remains are the rotting old growth trees in the "protected" and sterile Gaian temples called state parks and state forests. Wolf-sized coyotes outnumber deer, and will soon seek livestock as they have eaten most of this year’s meager crop of fawns. My mountain is no longer a place I long to hunt, for I see only emptiness where bounty once was. Davy would feel the loss just as deeply, for his hunting heart and mine share a timeless bond. Farewell, Pennsylvania, I fought for ye well….