I wander America on a Harley Davidson motorcycle, sleep on couches and in fifty-dollar motel rooms, eat at Waffle House and Main Street cafes, and have conversations with people whose politics I might not agree with. These are our stories.
Sometimes, Luck is All You Need
It was February 1975. I was eighteen and I’d enlisted in the Army. I was hitchhiking from Solana Beach, California to Minneapolis to visit my mother before riding the Big Dog to Fort Knox for Basic Training. It was evening and dark, six or seven o’clock, I didn’t own...
Shelly
I sat on a basalt stone in the warm sun and light breeze under a cerulean-blue sky in the New Mexico high desert and talked to Shelly and Ranger; Ranger the dog. Shelly’s from Minnesota, Spring Valley, and now she lives in New Mexico where she’s a campground host at a...
Training God
September 1977, NATO Campaign Reforger, I was twenty-one years old and I hadn’t a shower in as many days. I sat in my Jeep in a cold rain, no doors, rainwater drizzling off the canvas top, a poncho over my lap and the engine running for heat. I was reading Critique of...
A Breakup Letter to a Former Friend and Coworker
americaisabeautifulthing.com Xxxxx, I’m 67 years old, I’m a US Army veteran, I've lived overseas for many years in both Europe and Asia, and I've traveled the planet including 13 months riding a motorcycle around the world, the Sahara Desert crossing sticks in my...
Legacy
From left: Ron, Ronelle and Sammy The Red Roof Inn in Montgomery, Alabama is a U-shaped motel facing Zelda Road, a busy four-lane thoroughfare named for Montgomery-born Zelda Sayre, a rich white woman who knew how to party, married somebody famous, took his name and...
Metaphor Racing
americaisabeautifulthing.com My son, Eli, and I spent the weekend at Talladega, a NASCAR track in Alabama. It was our first NASCAR event. I might love NASCAR, the wholesomeness of it, the innocence, the obliviousness, the sensuality, the Americanness; the families and...
Bye-bye, Bud
Busch Light has taken over...
Hannibal to Cairo via East St. Louis
America is a beautiful thing… americaisabeautifulthing.com My plan was to follow The Great River Road, the Blues Highway, the Highway 61 Revisited by Bob Dylan, from Minneapolis to Memphis then cut across to Birmingham for two days of NASCAR at Talladega with my son,...
The Small Motel
Last night a friend asked me how I find the small, locally-owned motels where I tend to stay. I told him I just wander around whatever town I’m in until I see a motel-looking building that doesn’t have a Holiday Inn Express sign on top. You don’t meet interesting...
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