19 minutes at Burger King changed my life

  I was running behind. Miles of untraveled road awaited to unfold north of Springfield, and it was already nearing lunch time. I wanted to stop at the legendary Anton’s Coffee Shop, looming ahead in my windshield. The experience at … Read More

Spokes

Alone, none of them can turn the wheel. A village of spokes. Equal. Indistinguishable. Steady as a watch on a schooner. In turn, each spoke hangs from the rim and holds the wheel for a millisecond until the next spoke … Read More

Winter Camping Alone

If you wanted to hide from hit men or creditors, Lake Wappapello would do nicely. Isolated in rugged hills, wholly surrounded by the thick woods of Mark Twain National Forest, the lake stands apart from the crowd. Literally. The nearest … Read More

First Band on Party Cove

Millstone Lodge, as I remember it, is gone.  Too bad.  In its day, the lodge provided one of the hotspots that kept the Lake of the Ozarks steaming.  Of course, that’s a bygone era, before you could scarab from the … Read More

The Scents of Steinbeck

“Cannery Row in Monterey California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, … Read More

Caribbean Sunset. 35,000 feet

It was a cosmic gift in this season of giving. Aruba sent us home through a holiday light show. A circus parade of cloudtops roostertailing through shadows and light pointing to the outer membrane of this space bubble as one … Read More

Glacier

We don’t know what we don’t know. Driving up the Going to the Sun Road, I thought Glacier National Park had one big glacier. Nope. There are thirty five glaciers in the park. In 1850 there were 150. The survivors … Read More

Fly Fishing

Montana’s Madison River valley opened up like a Georgia O’Keefe flower. Big sky. Just past the cowgirl whose boyfriend lost his head, we spied a shotgun shack, a fixer upper we agreed would make a fine one-lane bowling alley. Helena … Read More

Big Ol’ Tetons

We expected to see bison, bear, maybe a moose. Not a bee. We waved at a dozen Buffalo Bill visages in Cody, Wyoming, and cruised into Yellowstone. Crossing the park, the traffic was sparse. The wildlife hid from us. Turning … Read More

Sturgis Surrounded

It was a butt-clenching rollercoaster ride on the Black Hills backroad to a park named for a man best-known for getting slaughtered. Halfway up the twisting mountain road to the park, our journey became a Custerfluck of swollen rain clouds … Read More