Scariest Cave Names Ever

Caves are fissures where evil seeps. And some of these must’ve been named by people who were scared shitless. In Texas, don’t stumble into Toad Frog Falling Floor Fissure, Left In a Lurch Cave, Coon Crap Cave, Putrid Pit, and … Read More

Bleach on the Streets

“Sedville will shine tonight, Sedville will shine. “When the sun goes down and the moon comes up, “Sedville will shine.” The old high school fight song rang true as we rolled into Sedalia. The sun was down, the moon was … Read More

Omar and the Phillies

The hotel staff dropped candles by our room at three pm. The satellite TV in the hotel breezeway lobby began cutting out late afternoon. Heavy storm interference. Islanders and guests took one last chance to squeeze out reassuring emails to … Read More

The Route 66 Bridges Across the Piney River

Four bridges cross the Big Piney River at a spot so rugged it was damn near the last section of Route 66 to be completed. We floated downriver into the shadow of each bridge, close together, from oldest to newest. … Read More

Ode to frost

Tonight your plants and mine sit outside under a carnival of covers. Old bedsheets and tarps. And six old deck umbrellas, cranky and unwieldly. My back yard looks like the circus came to town.

Home

That night, I had dinner with Sheryl Crow.  And a thousand other people.  It was a Kennett Chamber of Commerce event thanking Sheryl for providing a chunk of capital to help build the new city swimming pool. Friends in the … Read More

Crossing the Lexicon

“…ours is a mongrel language,” Mark Twain said about the world’s most expansive tool kit, “which started with a child’s vocabulary of 300 words and now consists of 225,000; the whole lot, with the exception of the original and legitimate … Read More

Strange Mussell Forkers

Cat Road

They were a ragtag gaggle of patriots. Somewhere north of Bynumville and Bee Branch, in the middle of an unicorporated area named for the Mussel Fork creek that runs through it, I met a most diverse group of Mussel Forkers.  … Read More

Boondocking in the Bighorn Mountains

Rarified air in the Bighorn Mountains of north Wyoming. I was apprehensive at first, not so much about boondocking in the remote back country among bears and bighorn rams, mountain lions and bull moose, but because my 70-year-old knees might … Read More

Class Act

            You can hide the gray hair. You can cover age spots, and employ a thousand different miracles to take a cosmetic sip from the fountain of youth. But you can’t stop class reunions.              Long before AARP starts welcoming … Read More