BoneFrog Family!
Two hundred and fifty years ago, a small group of men put their names on a piece of paper.
They knew what the signatures meant. If the thing failed, that document became the list. Names, in ink, at the bottom of a promise that was not yet true. They wrote "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor," and they meant all three, in that order.
The paper did not make itself true. Men did. Not once, in 1776, but every year since. Two hundred and fifty of them. The document only survives because generation after generation kept re-signing it, most without ceremony, a lot of them without their names ever written down anywhere you could find.
Some of them signed it with everything they had.
That is the part I sit with the day before the fireworks. Saturday is the celebration, and it should be. Cook out. Let the kids stay up. Watch the sky go loud. But tonight is the quiet part. The eve. The part where you remember what the day actually cost, who paid it, and that the bill did not stop coming due in 1776.
We do not do much flag-waving here. You know that. The men we carry were not the flag-waving type either. They did the work, let the work speak, and went quiet about it. If you know, you know. That is the whole posture.
So here is what I would ask, if you read this far. Tomorrow morning, before the grill and the noise, pour the first cup and take one minute with it. Not a speech. Not a post. Just a minute, for the ones who signed the long document and never got to see it hold.
Then, when the sun is down, I have a drink for you.
The Stone Fence. In May 1775, before the Declaration even existed, Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys sat in a tavern the night before they took Fort Ticonderoga at dawn. What they drank was a Stone Fence: whatever brown spirit was on the shelf, topped with hard cider. They took the fort by surprise the next morning. The cannons from it got hauled to Boston and broke the British siege. A tavern drink, then a fort, then a war.
Make it the way they would have: two ounces of bourbon or rye, cold apple cider to the top, ice, and a dash of bitters if you have them. Same simple build for 250 years.
God. Country. Team.
Tim Cruickshank
Founder, BoneFrog Coffee Company
LCDR, USN SEAL (Ret.)