Branson
I hitched lifts with college students from Brooklyn, then a diesel driver, and then two farmers who drove a vintage ‘57 maroon and white Buick with round silver louvers on the front fenders. One farmer was old, and the other was his son. They wore cliché’d bib overalls and brogans, their ball caps dramatic with [...]
Iowa City
Older Sister hemmed and hawed and pranced around from one foot to the other. A grin spread across her face. She looked a lot like the lady I had come for, but more beautiful, mature, and nicer. If my target had been trapped like this, she’d have lashed out like an adder and stung someone, [...]
Highway 61
Dawn snaked across the Texas Panhandle llano on the heels of a cool breeze and mist that soaked us to the fibers of our cotton Levis. The hippy kid from Philly sneaked west a quarter of a mile. Wayne stood like a destitute man with his thumb begging for someone to pick us up. Down [...]
Midnight in Amarillo
Long black hair draped over the hippy kid from Philly’s shoulders, like the dripping leather thongs that hung off his split-leather jacket. He wore fancy red-toed cowboy boots, although the first time I scoped in on him I knew he wasn’t any kind of Western hand . . . no calluses or rough spots on [...]
Red Cadillacs
10/22/2010 For the next few weeks I plan to ruminate on a hitchhiking trip I made in the fall of 1969 from San Diego, California, to Iowa City, Iowa, then back to San Diego. Lately, images from that trip slap down inside my recollection. My buddy Wayne was a Marine like me. I think it [...]
Wolves
Betty and I motored through the Rocky Mountains out of Cook City, Montana, where Soda Butte Creek cuts a sharp canyon. At the northeast gate into Yellowstone, I asked the young woman at the entrance kiosk if we might witness any of the Druid Peak tribe of wolves in the Lamar River Valley. She said [...]
Devils Tower
Remember that scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind when Richard Dreyfuss frenetically sculpted his compulsions out of mashed potatoes? Remember the scene where he first sees Devils Tower? If you haven’t seen this movie, maybe you should, as both an anthropological treatise on 1970s American family life and as an artistic rendition of [...]
Meat Bees
Yesterday evening Betty and I ate out on the back patio. Much of the year in Boise is too chilled or sizzly for us to enjoy dining on our bar-b-qued portabellas and pork roast out there, but yesterday’s mild weather allowed the white butterflies to flit from arctic willow to carpet rose. Dragonflies jetted back [...]
Amo, Amas, Amat
Wednesday morning I stood on the boardwalk in Nevada City, Montana. In shadows cast by the old ghost town’s buildings, my feet slipped on a thin sheet of ice and I caught my breath. A cool breeze blew out of the west and captured moisture rising off the roofs of well-preserved stores and shops that [...]
Richmond
Greetings from Canning, South Dakota. Last week, Betty and I went to Richmond, Virginia, to visit our friends Lee and Betty Plevney. They showed us around the city and took us to some historical sites. We ventured along the James River and watched the water roll over the rocks. We bumped along the cobbles on [...]
