book of strangers:

donations accepted

2023-02-11T14:08:00.053-08:00

Free at last -- NOLA to the rescue.

“I moved to Aspen in 1968. Back then the motto was ‘sex, drugs and rock and roll’ and that’s what hooked me. I skied like a madman and I skied almost every day. Then I kinda fell into a business deal in 1975 when I bought a taxi company with two other guys on a handshake.

“We did lots of long hauls. We grew bigger. After twenty years we sold out for big money. I took off to Mexico for a couple years. But I came back to Aspen. I realized I wanted to stay here.

“So now I’m back, but what’s next, you know? So I started a taxi service, sort of. I was offering free rides and took payments sometimes. I called them gratuities. The local police were really irritated and wanted me off the streets. I was arrested for trespassing at the Pitkin County Airport.

“I was sentenced to 15 days in jail but I was out in nine. My first jail meal was shrimp cocktail. Before I was released I met a lawyer from New Orleans who told me my troubles were over.

"First off, he said I couldn’t be arrested for trespassing on public property. So that got my charges dropped. Next, he made my business a non-profit. Then I was legit. So now I accept donations. It’s all good."

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delicate but heavy

2015-11-13T18:12:00.001-08:00

Art — like hanging onto a squirmy fish.

“To me good art doesn’t get old, it endures, like a Beatles tune. But I also like the whimsical side to art. It gives people freedom to express. And a good teacher is an artist. And a plumber can be an artist. So I don’t know what the word art really means. It’s like hanging onto a squirmy fish.

“Michelangelo is a major inspiration but I owe it to myself to be open to everybody. People should do their own dance because life is so short. They have to do their dance to be part of the universe.

“Some [art] work is only a mathematical process. I need to cut loose and let the stone speak in order to make art. Stone is delicate, but heavy. I love stone. I would be distraught if I couldn’t do this.

“Young children are easy to teach. It comes naturally. Men want to make their piece all in one go. Women are better students because they understand the gradual nature of sculpting. It takes time.”

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closed my eyes

2015-03-03T06:15:00.000-08:00

Filling the gap — from business to music, and back again.

“About ten years ago I quit my stale marketing job. I realized I had put my music dreams on hold. That was the opposite of how I was raised. So I just closed my eyes and jumped.

“Along the way I fell in love with the business side of music life, the leg work, you could call it. This was what I call my crisis moment. It was when I knew my life's direction had changed. And it wasn't the direction I had planned. I was a musician and I had given up the business life, or so I'd thought.

“Now I see myself filling that gap between those who have the story—the musicians—and the people who can sell the story, the record labels.”

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make it fast

2015-02-10T11:59:00.000-08:00

Neglecting yourself — making good food on bad days.

"I always wanted to be a chef but I was the oldest in the family so I was busy helping my brothers and sisters grow up. I kind of neglected myself.

“To make good food, and make it fast, you need to know where everything is, so organize your kitchen. And keep people out of your workspace; the kitchen belongs to the cook.

"When I'm in the kitchen I'm in a kind of trance. I'm really concentrating. I make sure I'm preparing good food even if I'm having a bad day."

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unlawful knowledge

2015-02-03T06:36:00.000-08:00

A rough start — girlfriends, prison and government lawyers.

“I’ve had some bad breaks in my life. I spent three years in Fox Hill prison when I was fifteen. That was for Unlawful Knowledge with my first girlfriend. She was twelve at the time.

“Then I was set up on a drug charge when I was twenty. They found pot in a garbage bag on my lawn. I had a government lawyer so I went back to prison for four years.

“In prison I just hid in a corner hoping I’d make it out someday. I had to stay strong. I didn’t even have any friends.

“I wish a girlfriend would come my way now. Even once in a blue moon is okay.”

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frozen scared

2015-01-26T11:41:00.000-08:00

Across the water — one boat, two planes and a generous Jesus.

"I live here with my husband. We've been together twenty six years and I wouldn't give him up for anything.

"Once I was on a ship to Jamaica from Georgia (USA) to meet his mother and it was my first time on a boat—and I vowed I was never going on no boat—and it was full of tractor trucks and those big trailers. I freaked out and made them turn the boat around to let me off, and they did.

"Next I flew down to Miami from Atlanta and I was frozen scared. I always said I would never get on no boat and especially not no airplane. I asked where I was and found out I still needed to fly across the water to Jamaica and I almost quit right there.

"When I landed (in Jamaica) I got off that plane and thanked Jesus and kissed the ground. Finally I met his mother. She was 105 years old and she died at 106 so I'm glad I went."

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pushing along

2015-01-20T05:39:00.000-08:00

Stepping stones — keeping it fresh with hit singles.

"I've been lucky, straight through my adult life it's been pretty much just music. I work hard at making tunes that everyone can relate to.

"Our music isn't traditional Bahamian, and we paid a price for that. But we're way beyond that period where we were rejected.

"We don't operate like the big US acts. Our markets are smaller. We perform locally and more often, and to smaller crowds. We need hit singles to help push along our shows and keep them fresh.

"The American market is big, but the world is bigger. We're getting play in Portugal, the UK. We're using stepping stones."

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all around me

2015-01-13T06:41:00.000-08:00

Positive music — staying on the right road.

“Reggae was the music that was all around me as a kid, so it was my music.

"My songs encourage good behavior, righteousness. It's positive, not destructive.

“Some of my work is in the shops, but I sell most of my CDs at my shows. I’m working hard on my second album right now.

"My fans are like my blood. I could not live without them. They keep me on my right road."

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a fascination with sharks

2015-01-06T07:23:00.000-08:00

Quitting Italy — feeding sharks and falling in love.

"I was raised near the ocean. Early on I developed an appreciation for the sea and its creatures but I had never tried scuba diving. But once I visited The Bahamas and tried it, I was hooked.

"So I returned to Italy and cleaned house; quit my job, relationships, everything -- and moved to The Bahamas so I could spend my time scuba diving.

“Once I began diving regularly I quickly fell in love with sharks and they've been my main focus ever since.

“After all these years I'm still working with them. I'm also a scuba instructor so I can educate people about sharks and sea life. That's probably the most rewarding part of my life. Passing on knowledge is important.”

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the hard part

2014-12-03T07:19:00.000-08:00

From good to exceptional — if you really want it.

“It takes talent and hard work to be a professional chef. There are more ways to fail than there are to succeed. Many chefs plateau out before they are truly successful.

"It’s hardest to move from very good to exceptional. Mostly you need to want it. That’s really the hard part.

“Cooking is new every day because the customers are new. I always try to surprise them, sometimes with new flavors or a new combination of ingredients, but usually I shoot for a new treatment of an old dish. Nothing surprises more than a dish you thought you knew done in a totally different way."

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a serious trade

2014-09-16T08:12:00.000-07:00

Bartending and psychiatry — 55 years on the job.

"I left school when I was only 14 years old. My parents convinced me I needed to learn a trade, something that would sustain me. I joined the hotel industry and never looked back. I've been bartending for 55 years.

"Anybody can be a good bartender, but you need training. It's part psychiatry; you need to understand human nature. You need to mix with your guests and relate to them and know what makes them happy. Bartending is a serious trade."

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a nice warm place

2013-10-23T07:42:00.000-07:00

The single life -- after 18 years of testing.

"My father was a drinker. My mother used to let him drink because he was manageable and harmless when he was drunk.

"I married an alcoholic. I let him drink away, too. That lasted thirteen years.

"But I got lonely and married another one, but this one also had PTSD from the Vietnam war. He was a pacifist and wouldn't shoot a gun. Instead he fixed helicopters. But he figured he was still killing people by helping the choppers fly. That really tore him up.

"That marriage lasted five years. I've been single since then and I like it.

"I worked thirty years for the post office. For the last seven years I marked each day. I have an apartment, a car and I live in a nice warm place. I hate the cold. I grew up in the Adirondacks where it's freezing and dark."

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the clear blue

2012-12-27T11:45:00.000-08:00

Roadside confusion — stroking out on Interstate 10.

"I thought I was just being clumsy. I tried to close the door and it hit my foot, I missed the light switch three times. I went to the sink and turned on the water. When I looked up at the mirror I saw my face and tried to say 'Oh, God,' but I couldn't talk.

"Then I was scared but really confused. I turned to leave the bathroom and walked right into the door. I tried to holler for help but that must have been when I passed out.

"Some other tourist found me on the floor and called an ambulance. Someone had stolen my purse and money, too, I guess. It took a few weeks to put the memories back together. I still don't know exactly what happened, except that I had a stroke outta the clear blue."

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death factories

2012-12-21T09:54:00.000-08:00

Farming — moving right along, dead kittens and all.

"My dog died when I was seven. There's a lot of dying on a farm: cats, cows, chickens. Farms are death factories.

"I once watched our hired man casually kick aside two dying kittens on his way to the calf pens. He was what you'd call a gentle man, too, someone who'd stay up all night helping deliver a calf.

"The standards are different on a farm. You respect life but you also need to move along. There's no time to agonize over things."

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whatever it takes

2012-10-19T13:01:00.000-07:00

Working for a living — collecting the cash and calming down the boss.

"When I was about eighteen I worked for a guy who was a crook, really, but he was okay to me. He never hurt anyone that I heard of. He was only crooked because he loaned money to people and he wasn't a registered bank, if you know what I mean.

"Anyway, my job was to run around and collect the cash. I was a big kid, about 250 pounds and six feet four. I was always goofing around, and somehow that scared people. It made me seem unpredictable, I guess. That's why my boss hired me. He said even he flinched sometimes when he was around me.

"I worked for him for almost three years, collected a pile of money, and never once had to hurt anyone. He'd tell me to do whatever it took. I carried brass knuckles in my back pocket just so he'd calm down about me being too soft.

"I guess the biggest lesson I learned from that era was you can't tell much about someone by how they act or what they say. People say and do whatever it takes to get through the day. There's really no such thing as your personality."

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ode to a flat place

2012-09-15T06:32:00.000-07:00

for Sam

The Duttons of County Road 10. "If you're here, you must

be looking for us."

In 1870 a Confederate Army surgeon named Herman B. Tuttle settled on the Republican River in eastern Colorado. His ranch grew into an important outpost settlement, housing the first school in the county, a blacksmith shop, post office and eventually even a dance hall.

Today, nothing remains except for the crumbling carcass of what was once the Tuttle Store.

There's more to it than that, of course. Just as the Tuttle ranch was dissolving back into the soil, new families were building their lives right on top of it. Not that that's an unusual process; it's the way of the world, I suppose. But this reworking of the soil, this plowing under the old and hoping for renewal and working and waiting is more than a metaphor, it's the essence of life on the big American prairie.

An irrigation sprinkler works its magic around a circle of

nearly mature sugar beets.

A hundred and thirty miles east of Denver, way beyond the airport and the fringe suburbs and the last Seven-Eleven store is the town of Joes, Colorado. The town itself has seen better days; its two motels have long been closed, the old restaurant keeps trying to reopen. There's not much else town-like that meets the eye. There are farms though. Many farms, fewer in number than years ago, but larger in size. And the farmers there are generally pleased this year to be getting a decent price for their crops thanks to the run-up in wheat, corn and sugar prices. I say "generally" pleased because they're a wary bunch, by nature suspicious of markets and manipulations and hedge funds and all the rest. That aside, they'll take the higher prices and move on. After all, it's not that often they get a fair price, say nothing about a really good price like this year. Too bad it's not as simple as that.

Three generations at Hell Creek: from left, Lori Rehor,
grandson Ray Rehor and daughter Carrie Rehor.

I'm parked in Dain Wise's dooryard scribbling in my notebook. His pickup truck pulls in and he hops out and walks a cautious arc around me then beelines for the house. I quickly introduce myself. "Oh, I thought you were another insurance salesman."

Wise is a tall, athletically built man of middle age who has been farming corn for thirty-five years a little north of Kirk, Colorado. Inside his house we sit on stools at his kitchen counter. Neither of us takes our hat off. He's talking about fertilizer prices during the big commodity bubble of 2008.

"Some of that stuff was up 400% during that tear," he says, meaning fertilizer prices. This is the dark side of higher crop prices: fertilizer costs invariably run up in sync with crop prices and are slow to decrease when crop prices fall. Sometimes this can actually wipe out any extra profit, and then some.

Bill Kechter, age 80, has spent sixty years

raising cattle on his ranch near Vona, CO.

"It's a lot more fun when prices are high, like

this year," he says.

Wise's tone is dispassionate, matter of fact but convincing. His conversational style includes looking directly at me, almost through me, with his wide bright eyes. I'm thinking he would make a fine insurance salesman.

We talk about a few other farming issues before landing on a big one: who's going to take over when he retires? (A slogan I heard locally, attributed to a banker, goes "Farmers don't retire, they die.")

This theme of continuity, of heritage and who will carry on traditions was on many a mind here. There's the worry that their own kids won't want to, or be able to, continue on with the farm. And there's a higher level concern that maybe farming on these plains is somehow doomed because of high costs, climate change, lack of water.

For the first time in our conversation Wise seems to droop a little, he looks away; he is silent for a time.

"But I've got to be optimistic," he says finally, perking up, his eyes flashing again, his mouth ever so slightly turned up into a smile, "if I weren't I wouldn't have had my boy come back to the farm."

Homesteader's cabin, Kit Carson County.

++ Jogging around the prairie each morning, some notes: Long shadows from small stones. A wounded dove hops along the gravel, dragging a wing, dinner for a vulture. A large disfigured statue of a deer lies inexplicably in a weed filled ditch. If you run wearing a black shirt and hat you'll scare every Angus cow in sight. ++

Steve Sears is another man with something on his mind. Sears runs a five thousand acre farm, all planted to corn, in Joes, Colorado with his twin brother. It's a beautiful, warm early autumn day when I arrive and Sears escorts me into his field office, a tidy multi-windowed square brick building furnished straight out of the Crate & Barrel and Pier One catalogs. It's not what I expect and I feel more like I'm at an architect's office in Denver as we sit and talk shop around the huge dark-stained table.

Steve Sears worries about the farmers' image. "The public
distrusts the average farmer. They think we're making
frankenfood."

Sears is around sixty years old, has a full head of well coiffed hair and could easily pass for a man in his forties. He explains that he'll probably be the most helpful if I could ask him many questions and then proceeds to tell me everything I need to know, and some things I don't, in an almost nonstop, lively monologue. He touches on many issues: genetically engineered crops, apathetic farmers who "plagiarize their neighbor's" techniques instead of doing what's right for their land, information technology.

It becomes obvious though that the issue closest to his heart is the farmer's image in the eyes of the public or, as he puts it, "the big urban / rural PR gap".

One thousand pound hay bales.

There does seem to be a large chunk of distrust toward the farmer, or is it aimed at the scientists that create the scary "frankenfood", etc? No matter, according to Sears, the farmer gets the blame. He has a point. I manage to squeeze a word in edge-wise to note that farmers have no real advocates, no K Street lobbying muscle, which might help explain this. Sears slaps the table in excited agreement.

We move on to genetically engineered crops, which he seems especially conflicted about. Just the very term scares people, he explains, yet drought resistant corn is "the next big horse race in agriculture" and is critically important in this era of bigger, longer, more devastating droughts and dwindling aquifers.

A future world traveler currently based near Kirk, Colorado

It's evening now and the good light is here so we step outside and I pose Sears here and there amongst his towering grain silos for some photos.

++ On open spaces: It's not that there's nothing there; it's almost too much for the senses. So much space is disorienting. You stop thinking. Finally, you notice little things: sand spurs, windbreaks, vapor trails — trucks are beautiful. If you're bored you're just not paying attention. Space is possibility. ++

Years ago sugar beets were heavily planted in this area. Some farms still plant a circle or two. Just north of Kirk village I spy an irrigation rig back lit by the setting sun as it moves mantis-like and almost imperceptibly around the crop circle. It's irrigating sugar beets and soon I'm slopping around making photos, just out of reach of the spray — mostly.

The M & M Cooperative (CHS Inc) whose grain elevators,
above, hold over three million bushels of wheat and corn
is a major employer and agricultural resource in Yuma
County Colorado. Laws protecting farmers' cooperatives
could be eroding, causing a potential blow to farmers
already weak economic leverage.

It's nearly dark when I sense someone behind me. It's Aaron Frank who, with his father and brother, own and operate this farm. I half expected him to poke fun at my muddy city shoes and damp shirt. Instead he earnestly details everything I ever wanted to know about irrigation, which, as it turned out, was more than I'd thought. For example: an eight section sprinkler for a single crop circle costs seventy grand, plus the cost of the well; electricity costs run over one thousand dollars a month per sprinkler; he can control all his irrigation rigs with his Blackberry. How's that again? The rigs have onboard satellite feeds, he explains, that relay operating info to an analysis center and then to the web. Bingo. From a tavern in Helsinki he could stop, start, adjust or otherwise tweak his considerable irrigation operations. With his phone. Even a techno-freak like myself finds this borderline amazing.

The only game in town, Jo's Liquor Store.

We're swatting mosquitoes now. It's time to go. "Stop by anytime," he says, "anyone who wants to know about this is welcome." He gestures at the beet field. I know he really means it. This sincerely, openness and pride of place is a common trait among the people here on the plains. I found it very humbling.

The people here on the prairie share other qualities that can impress. Jason Rehor, a young man living with his wife and three children near the Kit Carson County line mentioned "the purity of living" the rural life and how it naturally leads him to "prepare for catastrophe, expect it, even". What he meant, I think, is that in living so close to nature you have to expect natural calamities; it's only fair. And it's worth it. How many of us living in cities and suburbs accept such unqualified responsibility for our lives and circumstances?

Tractor graveyard - Yuma County.

++ On driving here: Wave to every driver. Otherwise you'll be known as the one who thinks he's better than everyone else. Lift one or two fingers off the steering wheel to wave to strangers, use a full hand wave for drivers you know. There are no stop signs on the dirt roads. Yield to trucks. ++

It's been corn and cattle for a week. For a change of pace I'm visiting Odie Dutton who runs a dairy farm — a real oddity out here — in neighboring Washington County. Driving up County Road 10 I see a man on a tractor waving wildly. Nobody is expecting us and I give a quizzical look to my guide for the day. "We better go see," she says with a wry smile. And when we do we're surprised to find Kevin Dutton, Odie's son, jumping off the tractor and asking who we're looking for. Apparently the odds are good you're looking for a Dutton if you're traveling on this road. As it turns out it's his Dad's eighty-fourth birthday and in minutes he arrives driving a stake body truck followed by his other son, Davon, and grandson, Tyler. Odie is wearing a colorful birthday shirt and soon we're making pictures of the three generations of dairy farmers, camera shy all, except for the grand patriarch.

Near Joes, Colorado.

It's not long before I'm getting raised eyebrows from my guide meaning it's time to let these guys get back to work.

Later, up at the main house, I talk with Dutton about dairy farming out here on the high lonesome. It's a simple business he explains; grow the corn, alfalfa and oats, then keep the cows milked — he has 200 of them — then sell the milk.

A simple business but not an easy one. First, there's the weather, an increasingly wild, wild card. Then there's the price he gets for his milk, which varies dramatically. Finding good hired help is a challenge, too, but that's one he's solved lately by hiring "three Mexican woman milkers" who he emphatically endorses as better qualified for the job than men. "They're gentler with the cows — if they need doctoring they'll tend to it. Men just push on to get finished," he says with a nearly straight face.

King corn drying in the sun.

Lastly we talk about water. If there's one large, overriding issue that's common to every single person living and working on these prairies, it's water's future. Without it nothing is possible. And there's a real and palpable concern among the farmers here that the water supply is in peril.

There's been water trouble of the legal kind in Colorado for over a hundred years. For about that long Kansas has maintained that surface water flow into Kansas has been decreasing because of Colorado's overuse of groundwater. There has been a dizzying and complicated series of lawsuits between the two states during that time.

The biggest lawsuit was filed by Kansas against Colorado in 1985 and, many years later, yielded four legally binding opinions from the U.S. Supreme Court, all favorable to Kansas but some just barely. For instance, Kansas was awarded $34 million dollars for prior damages; they were seeking much more than that — but wanted payment in water, not cash. Also, a system for calculating ongoing aquifer depletion in Colorado was approved by the court but not a specific remedy for damages. Surprisingly, the rulings did not settle the lawsuit and it remained on the active docket of the U.S. Supreme Court until the summer of 2009 when the two parties reached an agreement of sorts and dropped the suit.

An agreement of sorts; that's where the problem lies now. The money part is easy; thirty four million dollars as restitution to Kansas for decades of "overuse" is a small price to pay. The other parts; figuring out if and how much groundwater is getting "overused" and getting water — enough water — across the Kansas border from Colorado, as payment; that's the tricky stuff. And finding the water to make the payments with. That, too.

Twenty five feet of serious business, a corn combine
awaits harvest time.

There is a plan to pump water up from the ground and give it to Kansas. That would mean Colorado would pump water from the underground Ogallala aquifer — the same one that's being "overused" — and then pipe that water into Kansas. I'm not making this up. Few people I spoke with had anything good to say about this plan unless you count derisive laughter, snickering and eye rolling. That plan's on hold now anyway and a Federal judge is trying to sort things out.

So the out of court agreement that settled the big lawsuit is up in the air. Water's future, and groundwater irrigation in particular, in Colorado is once again frustratingly unclear. There's concern among the Colorado farmers and ranchers that things could go sideways for them. It's possible that some irrigation wells will be shut down as an outcome of the judge's ruling. Some wells have already been deactivated, voluntarily, such as a few on Bob and Phyllis Wood's ranch in northeast Kit Carson County. "They pour cement into them, just to make sure," Bob Wood told me.

Most farmers I spoke with didn't think it likely that wells would be shut down in droves. Possible, but not likely. There's too much at stake.

I ask Mr. Dutton what he thinks. He chuckles and starts to reply, then backs up a little. Finally he offers that he has no idea except that things will have to change. Most people here, when asked the same question — what will happen to your water? — answer similarly. They know it will be a tough slog.

Lost to history. What's left of the Tuttle ranch - the old

store and post office - sits alone and abandoned on the

prairie in eastern Colorado.

Technology will help save water, no doubt. It already has. Irrigation efficiency is closely monitored by sophisticated electronics, sprinklers use drop nozzles that spray close to crops, increasing accuracy and reducing water loss from evaporation, drought tolerant crops are continually in development. Clearly, from what I could see, most farmers here practice good water conservation techniques and it has paid off. Steve Sears, for example, estimates he uses a quarter less water now by doing so.

Perhaps more crops could be dry farmed, without irrigation, using only natural rainfall. That's considered a long shot though. Regarding weather, it seems that weird is the new normal. It would be too risky to plant corn where it "averaged" fifteen inches of rain but sometimes gets only three, like John Miller's gotten so far this year at his place in Vona, Colorado, while his neighbors a few miles away received four times that so far.

It's hard to see how any mitigation technique available now or later can really solve this problem. It would be easy and maybe accurate to call it intractable, hopeless.

That's not the way the locals see it though. They know their way of life and livelihood hang in the balance here. But along with their deep concern there is also an optimism or, if not exactly that, then a kind of determination or belief that things will work out okay. It's not wishful thinking. These people go up against tough things on a regular basis. They know a lost cause when they see it and this isn't one of those. They'll wait and see and then they'll live with the new reality. They'll work it out because they have to.

They have a lot to worry about — crop prices, weather, bankers that don't make loans, water — but they're not much for hand wringing. Instead they get up every day and do what needs to be done. That's just the way they are. I wouldn't bet against them for all the water in Kansas.

Denver on Dwellable

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we can't stay home

2012-08-28T14:21:00.000-07:00

Saving you — no matter what.

"Rescuing someone is a death defying act. We are the ones who come after you first, to save you, no matter what. We save people first, then we go back in to make a living."

"There's no time we aren't on duty. We answer our phones 24 hours a day. When there's trouble we can't stay home."

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short slashes

2012-07-21T18:53:00.001-07:00

Feeling alive — barely bloody cuts.

"I would carve short slashes into my arms and ribs. Just barely bloody cuts. The pain was dull and sharp both.

"Everybody cuts. Everybody does something that makes them feel alive. Abusing yourself is a stupid term. Abusing yourself is living with the boredom."

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for my protection

2012-06-10T13:31:00.000-07:00

Beating the mafia — idle threats of burning cars and truant kids.

"On the 3rd of every month this guy would come around our shop. He was classic hood; dark hair slicked back, leather jacket, Jersey accent. He'd stand at the counter glaring at the clerk.

"I would always ask if I could help him, just like he was a customer. He explained that for my protection I should give him $500 and be glad it wasn't $1000 like the bar next door had to pay. He called it 'neighborhood insurance.' I never paid him because he was an idiot, an amateur.

"About the sixth time I told him if he ever came back I would have my uncle burn his car and my boys would get his son kicked out of school. I didn't even know if he had kids, or a car. He never came back so now I joke that I beat the mafia."

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how wrong you can be

2012-05-15T08:58:00.002-07:00

Life in Darwin — pulling anchors in the crazy heat.

"I lived in Darwin off and on while I was working on the water. I stayed at a youth hostel. It was a big room right next to a really rowdy bar. That's why it wasn't rented out to tourists.

"My job was with an outfit that mostly pulled anchors on those big offshore oil rigs. We'd go out for weeks. There was no schedule because of storms and things that could mess up plans.

"Darwin is hot all year, there is no winter. It rains like hell in the summer. People go crazy there when it rains all the time and is so hot. If you think you like warm tropical places, then spend a few months in Darwin and see how wrong you can be."

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paper targets

2012-03-09T09:33:00.001-08:00

Good clean fun — the mystery of gun culture.

"Way away from Gillette, over past Sundance a ways, or into the Black Hills is where I used to target shoot. Me and my friends would go at the drop of a hat because we always had our guns and ammo in our trucks. We weren't married, mostly, either, so we didn't answer to anyone.

"We would set up our paper targets on two by four frames. Once in awhile we would plink off bottles. We'd put a big tent up for some shade, slide a cooler full of beer in there, and sit around and shoot and talk and drink.

"It's good clean fun, at least it was to us. I've been around the world a bit since those days, and I can tell you most people don't approve. Gun culture is mysterious, except to an American."

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acting pretty rude

2012-02-02T09:53:00.000-08:00

Montreal — cruising around, whistling and looking for a mate.

"I met my wife in Montreal, in the Old Town section. She was leaning against a wall having her picture taken. She was gorgeous. I walked by and sort of wolf-whistled.

"An hour later I was eating lunch at a little restaurant and she came in. She walked right over to my table and asked was I feeling okay because I was acting pretty rude out in the street. I didn't know what to say, so I offered her a seat and a drink.

"She nearly fell over from laughing so hard. She said I looked like a little trouble-maker school kid who was being scolded by his teacher. When you meet someone with a sense of humor like that, you don't let them get away."

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they still call us

2012-01-27T14:21:00.000-08:00

A perfectly satisfying life — selling insurance and raising the kids.

"I've had an average life. With my wife I raised a family, two boys and a girl. They're okay, working, have good lives, I think. They still call us once a week or so.

"I worked many years as an insurance salesman. I think it was good work. People always thanked me for providing them with insurance. Selling the insurance was nothing special, but the people were interesting.

"When my daughter was younger she used to flare-up and call me a boring old man. She thought my life was dull. She called me stupid more than once. I would just smile and butter her toast or something."

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the tourist bureau

2012-01-24T14:05:00.000-08:00

Bribes and bad behavior — a principled approach.

"It was a comedy every day, working for the tourism bureau. We had our standards. We had our principles. But the locals would pay us to do their bidding, and we did. It was obviously a corrupt system. My superiors pretended to be above it all, even as they pocketed the cash.

"A woman and her two children were badly injured on a jungle tour one year. The tour operator had paid us to promote his company and he expected us to help him with this disaster. My boss refused, but changed her mind once she realized she had no choice.

"Everything went wrong. The court convicted the operator of negligence, which was fair. The operator told the press about the bribes. My boss denied it all and tried to implicate me instead. We were both fired. Whatever."

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sanderson texas

2012-01-19T12:42:00.001-08:00

Sanderson Texas — soft air and that floating feeling.

"I was hitchhiking 'cross-country about 30 years ago. It was after my wife died of cancer. I felt useless so I took off.

"In San Antonio I had a sort of breakdown. I had a cop take me to the hospital and I stayed there for four days. It was nervous exhaustion, they said. They gave me medicine to calm me down but I flushed it and left the hospital late one night.

"I was in rough shape. I was weak and angry and almost hysterical. I caught a ride all the way to Sanderson. I rented a room there and slept like a dead person. I ate dinners at a little restaurant there in town. I remember the big white "S" on the hillside across the road.

"One evening I was leaving the restaurant and I paused outside the door. I remember I felt like I could float. The light was melting into the hills, the highway was empty, the air was soft. Everything was beautiful."

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