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
Road to Nowhere
Dare I drive the old road? Dismissed by a superhighway, this stretch of pavement beckons for diesel vibrations and the familiar feel of rubber. Brittle and crumbling, its most persistent passengers move up through the cracks, wave at the sun, … Read More
Return to the scene of the crime
This is a peek at a Missouri Life Magazine cover coming together. I’m at the helm of the second boat. The day before, that boat was damn near sideways in a thirty-knot wind. The story was fun, sanitized a bit … 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.
Aerial Ballet
She was young and impressionable. So I talked her off her limb and she demonstrated that she knew how to fish. She danced and dove, swerved and tumbled, and relished in her onlooker’s delight. Or so I believe. Her parents … Read More
Warp Speed.
Back before the Civil War, cattle had to get used to a new sound. Every day a four-horse stagecoach ran the fertile Missouri river bottoms, clattering along a bit of modern technology for the time: an oak plank road. This … Read More
Did Billy the Kid really light his farts?
After a day of snake charming, we returned to a favorite watering hole, La Posta in Las Cruces, New Mexico, a relic from the Butterfield Trail. Pancho Villa, Billy the Kid & Kit Carson passed through here. Good salsa. Hot … Read More
I’ll Never Go
Johnnie’s Bar has been serving whiskey in downtown St. James since the Irish laborers built the railroad through here. Even from the outside, Johnnie’s looks foreboding, with its big neon Stag Beer sign over a doorway into cold, smoky darkness. … Read More
Tighten Up
It’s tough when everybody wants a piece of you. It might be because you’re pretty, or rich. It might be because you’ve left a trail of bad deeds. But it’s especially tough when people want you just because of your … Read More
Spinal Flap.
Two agonizing pages into The House of the Seven Gables, the spine on my book fell off. Should I keep reading? The book itself was old and brittle, stiff as its author’s language. But I kept reading, whereupon from the … Read More