Goodness, Gracious, Great Bales o’ Fire!

Bales in a Field of Fire

We came upon the biggest black field I’d ever seen. Musta been 100 acres. I drove through miles and miles of the blackened fields of Harrison County, burned off after the harvest, to reinvigorate the soil. It’s a fiery, smoky … Read More

Oops!

Graveyard for Naughty English Teachers

We passed a sign that said Chapel Hill Cemetary (sic). Imagine any English teacher buried there, eternally damned to lie under a misspelled word. Then again, maybe the sign was painted by one of her students, in which case she … Read More

A Toast to the World’s Hottest Museum

A witling would say it’s a description of Hell: 4,000 toasters, no bread. But hey, if Richard Larrison ever used all his toasters at once, it might create Hell, or havoc, or at least a lot of heat, pulling enough … Read More

I broke in…

Lewis Café doesn’t look like much from the outside. It sits on Main Street in downtown St. Clair under an old 1930s-looking awning in an old 1930s-looking beige brick building. But in the restaurant world, the homely facade means there’s … Read More

Bothwellian

Detouring to the top of a high cliff, I stopped to see an old friend. On a clear day, she’s hard to miss, built on the edge of this bluff and sticking out of a forest canopy like a Bavarian … Read More

The fountains of Sundance Square

On a recent trip through Texas, we stopped in Ft. Worth to eat at Joe T. Garcia’s, world’s greatest Mexican restaurant. We greeted the cowboys in the paintings by Remington and Russell. And we played in the fountains in a … Read More

Mother Earth, Artist.

Beyond this peaceful spot, on this autumn afternoon, the Great Impressionist had turned expansive soybean fields into giant green-and-gold palettes. Some fields, planted earliest in the spring, already had turned brown, the beans ready for harvest. The drive through the … Read More

Deep Blue

After squeezing through Coot Chute and rounding Owl’s Bend, the Current River joins the Ozark Trail for about five miles. Along that stretch, many floaters miss the stunning blue water of Blue Spring, even though it’s only a quarter mile … Read More