Fender Bender

Early Spring. Jacks Fork running full. Don’t get caught sideways.

Who still owns a superball?

Not since Elvis left the building has Vegas laid a table so heavy with hyperbole. But it was a party. The show opened with gridiron visuals glued to Paul Anka’s lyrics My Way sung by Old Blue Eyes to the … Read More

The Day The Capitol Burned

Sunday evening, February 5, 1911. Unusually warm. A thunderstorm approached the state capitol from the west and lightning struck the dome around suppertime. Monsignor Joseph Selinger remembers, “I was standing on the front steps of the hospital [Saint Mary’s] about … Read More

My hero

He made it a lifelong practice to demonstrate creative uses for things people normally throw in the garbage. He believed that nothing around the house should be discarded if it could be used.As such, George Washington Carver became America’s foremost … Read More

Tour Guide on the Rio Grande

In 1818, Boonslick, Missouri resident Lindsay Carson was killed by a falling tree. His widow, Rebecca Robinson, raised 15 children by herself. Their 11th child, a kid named Kit, was sent to work in a saddle shop in Franklin, Missouri, … 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

Aruba dabba doo

The island has no stoplights. And nary a discouraging word about roundabouts. The people are too happy to bitch. Even the crabs are civil to the pelicans. And the iguanas know you want to feed them. The flamingos don’t worry … Read More

Jackson

The valley is Jackson Hole. The town is Jackson. Both are named not for the guy on the twenty dollar bill, but for fur trapper Davey Jackson, one of the first Americans of European descent to winter in the valley … Read More

Dakota Impressionist

Always wanted to drive through a Van Gogh painting. South Dakota may be as close as I get. Endless acres of sunflowers, blooms big as your head. Along a roadside papered with Wall Drug signs, two museum billboards stood close … Read More