Vesuvius, a beauty, couldn’t hold it any longer. Beneath the mountain seawater poured through fissures into Mother Earth’s fiery furnaces causing a titanic cataclysm, and in late summer79 AD she began a series of eruptions lasting two days, blowing clouds … Read More
Mamma Etna
Mount Etna is a reliable girl, as far as volcanoes go. Her last dramatic eruption happened less than six months ago, but at her 11,000-foot summit, activity is nearly continuous, with frequent eruptions from her flanks, where mantle magma spews … Read More
I was conflicted.
“When you come to a fork in the road…” Yogi didn’t prepare me for this dilemma. But I did end up taking his advice, in a roundabout way.
History in the Shadow of Six Flags
The end of prohibition killed the Smith brothers’ bootleg business. No matter. They opened two legal taverns, one in Eureka, one in Fenton. And when Route 66 came through Pacific, Missouri, in 1935 they opened the Red Cedar Inn. The … Read More
Mushrooms
Drove into a mushroom at sunset. Finally intersected its core. It didn’t look so menacing. And I was happy. Old skullman watched as we paired the mushroom with a giant hot pepper. And I inhaled french fries.
Somewhere in the Ozarks
On my first birthday I received a gift from a couple I did not know. The couple had asked, “Dear Mr. Wright: Would you design a house for us?” I found the gift 71 years later, a thousand miles from … Read More
Tom ‘n’ Huck
Mark Twain endowed us with more than literary masterpieces. He gave us a lasting river lexicon. America’s exclusive fraternity of riverboat pilots adopted a term for disciples of Twain who act on their fantasies of wild river adventure: Tom’n’Hucks. Because … Read More
