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.
Train Dork
A very good friend of mine is a train dork so for him we all get to contemplate the vanishing point…
Yellow Coffee
The yellow water of Winnfield, Louisiana makes excellent coffee, can’t even taste the yellow…
Juana
Juana Flores is sixty-two and has worked at the Shiloh Inn for twenty years. She liked the Harley Davidson; she rode on the back of her husband’s motorcycle until he died. She continues to work so that she can keep her house for her kids. We mangled two languages and...
My Brother, My Brother
This spring, I rode the Harley Davidson from Minneapolis to Portland, Oregon to visit my brother, Greg; eighteen hundred miles of hard, cold rain and sixty mile-an-hour winds riding the high plains and the Rocky mountains on two-lane asphalt. Greg is sixty-six, two...
Sometimes, Luck is All You Need
I'd joined the Army. It was February 1975, I was eighteen and 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 a...
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...
God’s Tattoo
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...
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