A Country Journal with John Helms
It’s Autumn
If it doesn’t rain soon, I may get nothing planted.
As I said, it is autumn, and the leaves from the sweetgums are beginning to fall and cover the ground. Although it is early, the oak trees are shedding their leaves and the pines are dropping their needles. When I walk through the woods, the leaves rustle under my feet, but because of the unseasonably warm weather, I find myself watching very closely for venomous snakes hiding beneath those leaves. Like many people, I rely on The Old Farmer’s Almanac for my long-term weather forecasts. To summarize, The Almanac predicts this November’s temperatures to be average, while precipitation will be one inch below average.
On the first cool day, I will begin construction of my small greenhouse. A greenhouse will provide me with the opportunity to control at least a small area of the environment to grow a small number of vegetables and herbs.
Chickens vs. Raccoon Update
Since my last posting, we have had no hen casualties. I seem to have deterred the masked bandits from stealing and massacring our flock. On the other hand, we cannot let our hens roam free range in the daytime because we have five red-shouldered hawks patrolling our property. They seem to have culled a lot of our wild cottontail rabbits, and we don’t want to allow them to do the same to our chickens.
This means our egg production is remaining constant. We are still giving eggs to our friends, but far less than before the raccoon raids.
Thinking Back to My High School History and Civics
I remember sitting in a high school classroom with the windows cracked just enough to let in the smell of freshly mowed grass mixed with the constant smell of the memograph duplicator—Mississippi spring trying to sneak past the blinds. The teacher, a wiry man with a voice of southern eloquence mixed with a coloring of gospel, stood at the chalkboard and wrote three words: “Bill of Rights.” He paused, turned, and said, “This is where liberty put on his boots.”
That line stuck with me.
Years later, after decades in marketing, research, business, and a lifetime of watching the world twist and turn, I find myself back on the porch, thinking about those first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The amendments to the Constitution are not just a legal text, but rather a covenant between the people and the power they have granted.
James Madison, quiet and bookish, was the one who carried the torch. He didn’t shout like Patrick Henry or thunder like Jefferson. He reasoned. He listened. He stitched together the fears of Anti-Federalists and the hopes of Federalists into something lasting. Madison worried that without clear protections, even a well-designed government could drift toward tyranny. He believed liberty needed scaffolding—something sturdy enough to hold up under pressure. Madison reminds me of the kind of man who’d fix your fence when the cows wandered onto his place, and do it without asking, then leave before you could thank him.
George Mason, on the other hand, was the stubborn neighbor who wouldn’t sign the Constitution because it didn’t protect the people enough. His fear was sharp and specific: that the federal government would overpower the states and trample individual rights. He had already written Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, and he wasn’t about to let the national version go without a fight. I respect that kind of grit and devotion in a person.
Patrick Henry—now there’s a firebrand. “Give me liberty or give me death,” he said, and meant it. He feared that the Constitution created a president too much like a king, and a Congress too far removed from the people. He didn’t trust centralized power, and he made sure everyone knew it. I imagine him as the kind of man who’d argue with his preacher and still invite him over to Sunday supper.
And then there’s Jefferson, off in France, writing letters to Madison like a long-distance mentor. He feared that without a Bill of Rights, the government might slowly erode freedoms—especially freedom of religion and speech. He believed in the rights of man, in the power of ideas, and in the need to keep government in check. His fingerprints are all over the Bill of Rights, even if he wasn’t in the room where the sausage was being made.
These men weren’t perfect. They disagreed, they compromised, and they carried the weight of a nation still learning how to walk. But they gave us something enduring: a set of promises. Promises that say you can speak your mind, worship freely, and be secure in your home. Promises that still matter, even when the world feels loud and uncertain.
I think about those lessons often—especially now, with hens to feed and stories to tell. The Constitution may have built the house, but the Bill of Rights hung the front porch swing.
National United States Debt: Frightening
Here is a quick question.
Our national debt at the time of this writing is roughly 37.4 trillion dollars ($37,434,9776,225,430 to be exact). If you laid 37.4 trillion one-dollar bills end to end, how far would they reach?
The answer: From Earth almost to Pluto.
Step-by-Step Calculation
Length of a U.S. dollar bill: 6.14 inches
37.4 trillion dollars = 37,400,000,000,000 one-dollar bills
Total Length in Inches
Convert that to Miles
There are 63,360 inches in a mile:
Cosmic Comparisons
Earth to Moon: ~238,855 miles
Earth to Sun: ~93 million miles
Earth to Neptune: ~2.7 billion miles
Earth to Pluto (average): ~3.7 billion miles
So your 37.4 trillion dollars in one-dollar bills would stretch:
Over 3.6 billion miles—just shy of Pluto’s average distance from Earth.
Maybe that is a little dramatic. Let’s stack those greenbacks sky-high, like a column rising from your the Earth's surface at sea level into the heavens.
Step-by-Step Calculation
Thickness of a U.S. dollar bill: ~0.0043 inches
37.4 trillion dollars = 37,400,000,000,000 one-dollar bills
Total Height in Inches
Convert to Miles
There are 63,360 inches in a mile:
How High Is That?
Earth’s atmosphere: ~62 miles (Kármán line)
International Space Station: ~250 miles up
Moon: ~238,855 miles away
Stack height: Over 2.5 million miles
That’s enough to stack past the moon ten times over—a tower of currency so tall it’d make NASA do a double take.
I guess I have covered a little bit of everything in this post. Until next time...
Copyright © John Helms 2025
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