She handles through turns like a dancer with the spirit of a sports car and the mileage of a miser. Her flanks show dings from parking lot encounters, and her roof is a quilt of dents from hail and scratches … Read More
Road Story
Erifnus waited patiently beside old hotels and farmhouses, chapels and prisons, diners and greasy spoons, graveyards, museums, creeks and canyons and unsavory encounters. She always escaped with a story. She won an Emmy. I just went along for the ride.
Nature’s Canvas
The Great Impressionist has turned expansive soybean fields to green and gold palettes worthy of Monet or Van Gogh, framed by hardwoods who slowly dress for autumn.
12,000 Poles Down
The storm spread a path of destruction through northern Arkansas and southern Missouri. In two Bootheel counties alone, the ice toppled 12,000 telephone poles.
SOS
See this and you know you’re headed into hell. From a dozen states a bucket truck convoy as far as the eye could see.
Nature Rocks the Bootheel
Seven years ago this weekend the Ice Storm of 2009 rolled across northern Arkansas and southern Missouri, thick as Dusty’s beard.
Looney Creek
It’s now a sanctuary for animals, this old church at Looney Creek Cemetery. Erifnus doesn’t mind. Buried here, my great great grandfather was shot by a Union firing squad, along with nine other young men, in a terrifying event that … Read More
Foggy Memory
It was a giant, to a kid. The old hotel towered over Route 66 at Highway 63. Atop a glass penthouse that crowned the roof, a green neon pennant glowed through the fog, framed perfectly by my bedroom window as … Read More
Kingdom Come
It was 10 p.m. when I reached Kingdom City. Fresh water filled a labyrinth of potholes in the parking lot of the Iron Skillet Truck Stop. The depositor, a monstrous thunderstorm, fled the scene, churning east down the highway, framing … Read More