Hobbs, New Mexico
Hobbs, New Mexico glimmered through the dust. It shrank into his rear-view mirror, a wobbling string of distant lights back in town flickering and fading. That’s how it was, along with warm memories of the Saxony Steak Room. The memories reminded him of another...
Ajo, Arizona
Ajo, Arizona sank into restless sleep under a sky without stars. Each night the townspeople dreamed each pretty much the same dream. They kept walking along scarred railroad tracks out toward the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. They kept looking for the...
Sheridan, Wyoming
Sheridan, Wyoming is where he wound up renting a drafty warehouse by the Sheridan County Airport. He quickly filled it with old Wurlitzer jukeboxes. They came in by the truckload, all of them beat up, windows cracked or shattered, turntables cockeyed, tubes burnt...
Kanab, Utah
Kanab, Utah probably wasn’t going to become a town where you could get a decent cup of coffee. But there was a redeeming quality. That clutch of angels parading down the highway around sunrise every morning past a Mexican Restaurant. They were as real as the...
Hesperia, California
Hesperia, California was where it dawned on me the hellhound was on my trail. Robert Johnson knew what was happening. “Blues fallin' down like hail, blues fallin' down like hail.” This is precisely what seems to unfold when you drive through Hesperia, California. You...
Nipomo, California
Nipomo, California was where Dorothea Lange took a picture that seemed to sear us with all the anguish of the Great Depression. That woman whose picture Dorothea Lange took, she stood as a bulwark against all those forces working against her. If your first glance...
Gunnison, Colorado
Gunnison, Colorado is where he landed after they paid him off and suggested it might be best if he disappeared. He rolled into town in a brand new 1961 DeSoto, drew on what he had learned long ago about the backcountry up in the Adirondacks, and went to work as a...
Klamath Falls, Oregon
Klamath Falls, Oregon was eventually chosen as the site for the campus of the International Academy of Provocateurs. Some had suggested Cairo, others Istanbul, sentiments leaning toward cities where raffish elements were well entrenched. In the end, Klamath Falls,...
Farmington, New Mexico
Farmington, New Mexico would never see anyone like her again. When she first hit town in 1906, they were just finishing up the railroad to Durango, Colorado. She was dispatched to Farmington by the president of the Denver & Rio Grande Western to inspect the...
El Centro, California
El Centro, California suddenly shook with invisible fury. The sun had just set on a spring evening in 1940 when the earthquake struck. Geologists called it a right-lateral strike-slip. Centered five miles north of Calexico, it ruptured the Imperial Fault, tore up...
Cody, Wyoming
Cody, Wyoming, she made it clear at every opportunity, was the last place she wanted to be. She never mentioned how she wound up in Cody and never shared any of the particulars of an often alluded to fall from grace back east. After she flunked out of real estate...
Gold Beach, Oregon
Gold Beach, Oregon was the return address handwritten on the large manilla envelope, no name, just a post office box. She was certain she didn’t know anyone in Gold Beach or anywhere in Oregon, although a cousin she lost touch with long ago once worked for a summer...
Stockton, California
Stockton, California was his hometown. He spoke of growing up there with an infectious fondness none of us could help but enjoy. He told us about how his grandfather would duck off into a storage shed when he worked overnight shifts at the Rough and Ready Island...
The Land Of Little Rain
When The Land Of Little Rain first appeared in 1906, it’s author, Mary Austin, guided us through areas of the west that were unsettled, unappreciated and unknown. Rooted in California’s Owens Valley and the Mojave Desert, the book unfurls across the barren west. It...
Pismo Beach, California
Pismo Beach, California never looked better. Late afternoon sun hit the salt-stained buildings along Cypress Street in a way that rubbed gentle warmth into their old walls. She took this as a comforting reminder that gentrification comes with limits. Then, when it...
Wenatchee, Washington
Wenatchee, Washington was hesitant to reveal its charms. Then it all changed. The town blossomed. The Wenatchee Mountains began to glimmer and the Columbia River took on a luminous shade of blue that couldn’t be found anywhere else. It happened suddenly and for...
Victorville, California
Victorville, California turned out to be where the devil could be found, not at the crossroads of Highways 61 and 49 outside Clarksdale, Mississippi. Legend has it he tired of all the tourists on the delta, decided to light out for higher ground and took up residence...
West Wendover, Nevada
West Wendover, Nevada was where I last saw him. We figured it best to part ways. Somehow our business dried up faster than we noticed and turned just about everything sour. We spent more time eating breakfast at the Peppermill than necessary. Then the waitress...
