Author: colter

Last week Katherine and I were perusing the wares of Freebee’s in North Little Rock (she having just purchased a house in Park Hill, I was showing her the neighborhood). As we were on our way out, the lady who works there asked me, “do you have a blog?”

I think this is the first time I’ve been recognized for my blog in public by a stranger. Turns out she had Googled “Frostop” (Freebee’s and nearby Frostop are under the same ownership) and found this page in my photoblog, and surfed around enough to find a picture of me, I guess.

So that was a pleasantly random surprise.

Today it occurred to me that I could make a mix CD of my all-time favorite pieces of music and I don’t know anyone who would want to listen to it more than once. I’ve always known that there is no one person who really likes what I like, but the distillation of that fact into the idea that my ultimate mix CD would appeal to no one is pretty depressing.

Via a series of MySpace messages, I said to one of my old students the other day: “send me your address and i’ll mail you a box of blah busting materials.” She replied, “my mailing address is [whatever]@gmail.com.” Then I said, “I meant your snail mail address.” And she said, “snail mail? [whatever]@gmail.com is the only other email I have. Other than my Zune one and one I use for MSN messenger.”

So I sent her this MySpace comment:

“Snail mail” is a system whereby a guy in a little truck drives or walks from house to house delivering actual, physical messages inside things called “envelopes” or “packages.” He has a little office where he sells things called “stamps” that you affix to whatever you’re sending. Outdated and quaint, yes, but far more handy a system for delivering three dimensional objects than conventional internet protocols allow.

It has been brought to my attention that I have entirely omitted mention of Jessica and Josh Ebert, Our People in Tacoma. They accompanied me to the Space Needle (forewarning me of the photographic troll planted at the entry, with whom I regrettably tangled) and the EMP/Sci-Fi Museum. Sadly I only got to hang out with them for that one afternoon, but this should not in any way diminish the intense significance of Jessica in my larger existence. I also neglected to take any pictures of them[1], further establishing my status as foppish churl and itinerant mountebank. I hereby apologize unreservedly.

1.) Taking pictures of people is something I have to really work hard to remember to do. In fact, after having dinner with Odie and Mona in Arlington, we said our goodbyes, and I had made it almost to the edge of their neighborhood when I realized I didn’t get a picture of them, so I turned around and went back to snap this shot. Here is a list of people I neglected to photograph on this trip:

• Heath and Mary Beth in Oklahoma City
• Kevin, Michelle and Chris in Kansas City
• Cousin David in Los Angeles

The little mechanism in my brain that says “ooh grab the camera” is so attuned to the strange and unusual that I forget that my own friends need to be photographed for purposes of personal reflection and posterity. So I try to remember to do it.

It has come to my attention that “The Texas Panhandle” is the northern rectangular protrusion, rather than the pointy western protrusion. I had always assumed it to be the latter, given that, if one were to make a pan in the shape of Texas, one would probably prefer to grip it by the El Paso end rather than the blocky, cumbersome Dalhart end. But people don’t name state panhandles by application, as so few people even bother to make pans in the shape of states. So it’s the top part, the part I had been referring to as “The Texas Stovepipe.” I think that’s a better metaphor anyway, but then it only causes confusion.

On Friday I drove from Laramie to Dalhart, Texas. Dalhart is by far the smallest of my various destinations, with only 7,000 or so souls in town. My mother’s family lived there in the late 1950’s. My grandfather was a civil engineer who worked on a reservoir and park south of town, so there is a street named after him. I wanted to take a picture of the street sign, and I thought it would make a nice diversion into smalltown America.

I stayed the night in a motel, and ate breakfast at the 50-year old Sands Restaurant. I had the ultimate greasy-spoon diner breakfast of my life here. I could not believe how great the coffee was – I asked the waitress and she just said it was Cain’s Coffee (a restaurant supplier so generic I couldn’t find a website for them). So I’m forced to assume there is a rich, dark, chocolatey magic in their mugs and carafes. I dare even say it was the second best cup of coffee of my trip. And the hash browns were fluffy. Fluffy! The eggs and toast were great as well. I set off to explore the town and found an Alco. Much like my A&W experience in Oregon, this was a trip back in time. Alco in Harrison closed around 1992 I think. It even smelled the same! I could’ve written Proustian volumes of the memories this place triggered in me. Even the price tags were the same. I really wanted to find something in the toy department to buy just to have something with the price tag. I couldn’t find anything worth buying though, although I did find some bargains in the music bins – for $4 each I got Spies Like Us on DVD, the remastered Police albums Outlandos d’Amour and Reggatta de Blanc as well as a lesser-known gem, Traffic’s Low Spark of High Heeled Boys.

I set out in search of John Todd Drive, to no avail. I asked three people, including a cop, who informed me that I was essentially standing on it. He pointed me toward the street sign, and theorized that it had most likely been removed for re-painting. Had I not experienced the joys of Alco and The Sands breakfast, I would have been greatly dismayed at having driven 8 hours to find a blank sign frame.

Laughing quietly in the face of misfortune, I set out toward Amarillo on some very rural north Texas roads – the kind of lonesome stretches of highway where the telephone poles blur into a low sine wave over the long rolling hills, and the towns you pass through only have one cash-only gas station if they have one at all. I actually enjoyed this a bit more than the Interstate at Amarillo. From there to Oklahoma City you can trace the route of the old Route 66, in a far less romantic fashion. I took a picture of this leaning water tower, which I later discovered makes an appearance in Wikipedia’s Route 66 entry.

I arrived in Oklahoma City on Saturday evening to hang out with fellow Pointed Stick founder Heath and his wife Mary Beth. Oklahoma City’s street plan, it’s worth noting, is a marvelously convenient grid, but its freeways make no damn sense at all. On top of that, I got stuck in a Heller-ish limbo[1] wherein I could not get back on the freeway after accidentally exiting, so I went to down to the next on-ramp, which also prevented me from going the direction I wanted.

Today I’m in a coffee shop in Kansas City’s Westport district. I’m staying with my old high school chum Kevin, and hanging out with fellow HHS grad Michelle as well. I have to get back to Little Rock for Superflux rehearsals on Thursday (I’ll be playing my last gig with them in Stuttgart on the 24th), so I think I’m heading back to Arkansas tomorrow, stopping off in Harrison tomorrow night. That will conclude the larger portion of this trip, which will resume the weekend after Thanksgiving, when I set out for New York with various stops along the way.

1.) I apologize for making two literary-figure adjectives in one blog post, but seriously I-40 in southwest Oklahoma City was a damned Catch 22 for me around the Portland exit. Plus there was a dead cow blocking traffic. Click here for a funny bit of Heller trivia I just read.

For several days I pondered the prospect of making the 5 1/2 hour drive to Devils Tower. This is a distance greater than the trip from Little Rock to Dallas, and as I preferred not to stay the night in a motel, I would be going up and back in the same day. Fortunately, the magnificent desolation of Wyoming is infinitely more interesting than the featureless plains of Texas, or even the constant thick of Arkansas trees. I accepted the challenge and set out at 8AM.

The journey was mostly uneventful until I turned onto highway 59 outside Douglas. I cannot describe the magnitude of the roadkill, mostly rabbits in various states of decay, that I saw. In less than a mile, I counted more than 100 remains. For several miles, I could not drive 50 yards without seeing something dead. I noticed the lack of trees, and guessed that there was probably a lack of scavenging birds in this region to pick the roads clean. I’ve also heard that many animals choose to sleep on highways at night for the warmth the roads absorb during the day. And on roads so infrequently traveled, the animals are more likely to be taken by surprise. Not only was this somewhat traumatic to experience, I also was reminded of the scenes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind where the animals near Devils Tower have died as a result of the government coverup.

Fortunately the roadkill tapered off after a few miles. I did see plenty of live fauna along the way – mostly antelope, but also some bison and deer. I reached Devils Tower around 2PM. It was as freakishly magnetic as I had always imagined it to be. For awhile I just sat and stared at it. I went to a couple of different gift shops looking for souvenirs, and took pictures of some abandoned structures nearby[1]. I only stayed for about an hour. It is the geological equivalent of a question mark. Even geologists can’t quite agree about how it was formed, or why it is so rare. I get a peculiar enjoyment[2] out of shifts in my environment, particularly when something that is known for permanence changes – for example, when the full moon gets large in the early evening, or when clouds allow the sun’s outline to be made distinct at sunset, or even just unique cloud formations after a storm. Devils Tower is like that: it’s something that simply does not happen often, and it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen in life or books.

Not wanting to be tempted to stay very long, I didn’t pay the $10 to enter the park. I wanted to get as much daylight driving on the way back for fear of running into antelope on the roads at night. I got to see a spectacular sunset on the way back to Laramie. The sun is gone by 5:30PM up here, and I got back around 8PM.

1.) One building contained several documents: order forms from Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck, and canceled checks from the late 30’s and early 40’s.

2.) I think this enjoyment is the sense that I’m getting as close as one can on Earth to experiencing life on another planet.