And it feels good. Good keyboard, the familiar push type instead of the go-lightly tap screen, which to me is not real codger-friendly. I tried a few models and settled on this 13-inch with a bright screen and a real computer inside -- not the cheapest thing but familiar, and as light as a little dimestore novel. Fits in a tote bag.

It's pretty much the same breed as the big old five-pound 17-inch pooch I've been hauling around, more like a little road pup than a replacement. It replaces a piece of baggage and is part of a hassle reduction scheme for the upcoming spring expedition; getting it all down to a tote bag for the overhead and an easy-rolling 4-wheel spinner -- am I the last person to hear that name applied to a suitcase? -- for the carousel. One might also set the spinner on a truck passenger seat or throw it back in the sleeper, if one were persuaded to travel in a truck. Holds twice as much as a typical suitcase.

The weeks in off the road are hurtling by and I have photos of the old-time big-bore winter we're getting. Here's that barn lowering its icicles; you can see the break in the snowpack just beneath the ridge. Moving like a mini glacier.


Easy there big fella... easy...

And here is last year's snowthrower sitting on the trailer after its persistent (insert multiple blasphemies) refusal to start. Had to push it up a ramp onto the trailer and it took so long the shop was closed for the day. The final straw. Big snow fell that night. You can see the orange spout sticking up like a submarine thinking it's about to surface. Next day it was hauled away and traded. Replaced by that red one shown gallantly trying to eat a fifty-foot yellow electric cord in the last edition. Nothing seriously wrong with the old one, just neglect, fuel gumming it up, but rather than another trip to the shop I solved it with my handy little credit card in the showroom. Doing my part to juice the economy (he said righteously.)


You can't hide under there, pal. You are outa here...

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So the snow was cleared but now we are buried in it again. And the integration of this new computer into sweet harmony with the old guys -- meaning myself and the old Big Boy Seventeen clamshell -- has taken an ugly turn and is not going well at all. Two 25-mile trips to the desk wizards have managed to stuff years of typing and 900 tunes into the rookie machine, and they have found my missing list of phone numbers, but sharing photos between the two has descended into real ugliness.

Passwords are the devil's own playground, a beach where you really get the sand kicked in your face; made worse by the chronic incurable computer ineptitude one would expect in a trucker anyway. Blasphemy is of little value, perversely amusing only the devil without much soothing the blasphemer. Not this one anyway. Can't even use 'em for passwords.

So I scheduled another appointment for the morning and in a beautiful fresh blinding snowfall slid off the lower part of the driveway. My mighty all-wheel-drive lies akimbo and snowbound, butt halfway down the slope, awkward and helpless, a bit of cautionary entertainment for viewing by my fellow citizens. Ditched. Too melancholy to photograph.

It's real winter this year, the kind we oldtimers talk about; especially we who grew up in small towns in North Dakota within shotgun range of the Canadian border. We who are usually not so sympathetic to our neighbors down here in the tropical regions of St Paul. But here it is, that cutting cold snowbound misery we've bragging about all these years.

Snow and more snow and relentless cold, much of it below zero. But of course we walked a mile to high school in it and there was never ever a Snow Day. Like, Dude; never. Forty-eight below one year and they didn't cancel one minute of school. Walk and don't be whining about it either.

The farm kids had it a bit better; they rode a bus into city school. But it wasn't a real picnic standing for them out there at the road waiting for the bus to get there, and when they got home at night they'd have outside chores to do.

So here I sit, frozen in place with a ditched automobile and dysfunctional passwords. I think right now I will put on a fresh pot of coffee and maybe sit here until Spring.

Author ponders his next move.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

These are offered as situations amusing only in retrospect. Both incidents, as you might suspect, were peppered with some shameful foul language. We're thankful there is no accompanying audio track.

What the author ended up doing was to get up, go out with a grain shovel and the red snowthrower and try to dig his mighty AWD some clearance for a cable from a tow truck. But after two hours of shovel work it looked like it might actually move a bit, and some gentle backing and forthing it finally did nudge an inch. If she'll move an inch she ain't stuck, goes the maxim. More shoveling and scraping underneath the belly and it moved six inches, and once more with the digging and then a gentle touch on the accelerator and it was ahead a bit more. Backed off and hit it and she lept happily forward and upward and wow what a feeling. Drove right out. Couldn't believe it. Connected again to the mighty highways they write all those songs about. Wow.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Back indoors, more hot coffee, take a look at the few photos that have somehow made the passage into this little scout here, and come upon this cool shot of a genuine sabre tooth tiger skull:

Nice kitty...

There were three main varieties of these big Pleistocene cats, native to the American continents. They are the rare little Smilidon Gracilis and the big monster Smilidon Populator from South America, which weighed half a ton; and there were our own fearsome North American guys like this one, the Smilidon Fatalis, which ran about 500-600 pounds, heavier than lions and with a shorter tail. None of them are related to modern lions or tigers. The big 10-inch teeth were used not so much for fighting but for ripping the throats of herbivores. They didn't grapple much, says the book, but would wait on a low branch and pounce from there. They'd deliver a killing strike to the jugular and then lay back and wait for the unlucky Ice Age dude to bleed out. The big fangs were sharp but brittle and they didn't like to risk them for settling disputes. Paleontologists figure out things like that.

They say they lived in groups because there are a lot of remains of older ones, over 40, and a solitary geezer cat would not last that long without family around. They weren't just a flash in the pan oddball species either; they were around for 5 million years, according to Richard Hulbert Jr. of the Florida Museum of Natural History.

They made it right up to the last ice age, a mere ten thousand years ago. Early cave paintings were done forty thousand years ago, meaning our ancestors co-existed with sabre tooths for quite a while. A surprise encounter with one would probably cause a caveman to soil his Fruit Of The Looms. I believe I would too.

And the paleontologists who named these guys -- Smilidon Fatalis -- that has to mean Smiling Death, no? A great name for the most awesome predator and largest cat to ever stalk the planet.

This wonderful bony head was lying in a shop in Cosmos Minnesota, a modest but spacious museum where they sell leather, buckskin, hides, Indian works and jewelry, blankets, beads, hats, rugs, jackets and the most elegant old powderhorns you'll ever want to see. A real find out there west of Minneapolis between highways 12 and 212. Not that far from Hutchinson.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

So in the morning I'm back into the big city for a third trip and they may have found the password problems with Seventeen and he seems ready now to deliver the mail and to start talking to Sweet Little Thirteen and sending more pictures. I hope so. So far things are looking good. Well, I don't know good; maybe okay anyway.

© Russ Ringsak 2013

r dot ringsak at gmail dot com

P.S. After a fourth trip to town all is harmonious. At least for now. Now we'll find out how the mail is working.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

It was a good road trip starting back in West Lafayette, Indiana and then to Louis Sullivan's glorious gift to the world, the Auditorium Theater in Chicago; from there to Houston, a personal favorite, where, sitting in front of our hotel, sat this automobile. An early 30's Cadillac roadster, winner of the 1996 Antique Automobile Club of America's First Prize. Eight cylinders and a rumble seat, and the driving lights could be aimed with a lever from the cockpit. One of the coolest cars ever built.

Whatta Caddie

And a couple blocks away there stands one of the coolest unarmed bass players ever built.

A soothing presence when the traffic gets thick.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

From Houston drove to a five week December stand in New York's sweet Town Hall. Took the truck back home after loading in and chilled out until January, during which time a great solid mat of dense frozen snow broke free on the steep roof of the barn. It slid down but not all the way down, and curled underneath the eave and created horizontal icicles. Something few ever get to see, and these are not wind blown; these icicles were hanging straight down until the snow came down and curled back on itself.

You need a large barn with a smooth metal roof, a heavy wet snowfall frozen enough to bond itself into one big comforter, and then just the right early thaw to break it loose. But only loose enough to not hit the ground. It has to stall out about a third of the way down. And then you get the Miracle of the Horizontal Icicle:

Rare and short-lived; they only lasted until noon and then collapsed in a heap.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

We took a week's break over New Year's and then rolled westward for two weekends working that beautiful opera hall in San Francisco. Between shows I rented a car and drove to Reno and pretty much spent five days playing two-dollar no-limit Texas Hold 'Em.

On the first evening in the poker room of the Atlantis hotel casino there occurred a miracle hand. The game is usually seven at the table, each dealt only two cards. Three common cards are laid face up in the center. These are called the Flop, and a round of betting follows. A fourth flop card is called the Turn and y'all bet again or else git out. Then comes the River card and the last betting round.

On this hand the flop came out Ace-five-six, all spades. Bets were placed and most players folded, including this one. A six of diamonds fell on the Turn. More betting. The River was the four of spades and now there were just two betters and a nice hefty pot. The guy at the end of the table made a medium-size bet. I was pretty sure they each had a spade flush and it was just a matter of who held the higher spade in his hand. My man said, "All in," meaning his entire stack. The other guy called it.

They showed their cards: deuce and three of spades here, seven and eight of spades down there. If you haven't fallen asleep on me by now you are realizing that they each had a straight flush, which is five connected cards of the same suit. A monster; the best hand in poker. My table neighbor's was six-high, from the deuce up through the six, and the winner held an eight-high, from the four through the eight; both were filled by that four of spades that came in on the River. The Ace did not figure in the hand because it was at the low end of the deck, beneath the deuce.

Eight cards to a straight flush; rare as a horizontal icicle.

I'm telling this tale only because most casinos have a Bad Beat policy: if you hold a glittering hand like a straight flush and get beat with it the house gives you sweet consolation. Action stopped at the other tables as they watched the arrival in cash of $2500 to my man for losing the hand. The winner got the pot and they gave him a nice $1000 bonus, and, to my astonishment, they gave each of the rest of us at the table $180. None of the dealers or players there had ever before seen an eight-card straight flush in a live game.

The week of Hold'Em netted a profit of $30, which was okay considering some of the hardened vets at the tables there. But without that crazy Bad Beat straight flush, to which I was a paid witness, I would have been down $150. Still not a bad five days.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Myself and Hank the Truck cruised down middle California to Palm Desert, where I stayed in the lap of luxury with my old high school buddy from high school in Grafton, North Dakota; his wife went to bed and I kept him up until 2 AM. I had a lot of questions and my memory's not that great. A terrific time; we laughed a lot.

Left the next day about noon and headed to Tempe, Arizona where our troupe did a show at the Arizona State University's most excellent Gammage Auditorium. Done by another Chicago architect, name of Frank Lloyd Wright.

I visited my old biker pal Jack from Minnesota, who is retired in a fine little stucco one-story house in the southern spread of Phoenix. He has a tall cactus in his gravel yard. A quiet and peaceful place it is, too, except when the police helicopters come; that afternoon they did tighter and tighter circles over the house on the other side of the wall along Jack's back yard. So that was fun. Cop cars bombing around the block and stuff. He says that's not common there but he acted as if they might be after him; he's from Brooklyn and once did a stint at Riker's Island. The presence of police apparatus is not soothing to Jack. He wouldn't even step outside to look at the choppers.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

We returned to the northland and did two shows at the Overture Center for the Arts in Madison Wisconsin; a good place with a good hotel nearby, but a lot of late night work for the crew to get the truck loaded. We came home Sunday and later that week slid into the alley behind the Fitzgerald Theater where the hands took the gear inside for a nice relaxing February stand.

Dropped the trailer at the yard and put Hank in the back yard here at the Broken D ranch, plugged in the engine heater and set to clearing the driveway. A new snowtosser makes it easier, but it lacks a headlight. At nightfall I was clearing the last track in front of the truck and had covered the cord with snow on the previous pass and forgot about it. When I made the turn there came that awful sound of the snowthrower choking and gagging and slowing into a death rattle and I leapt forward to shut the engine down but by then it had that yellow 12-gauge wire wrapped tight around it's spiral blades eleven times at each end. Kind of a duel to the death there. Reminded me of those nature shows from the jungle swamp.

Minnesota version of the snake and crocodile.

I still haven't cleared that cord out but I'll get at it as soon as I finish this report. It's going to snow here again. Soon. They say.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

© Russ Ringsak 2013

r.ringsak at gmail dot com

HELL

   IS

REAL

That's it. No author, no biblical reference, no church; just a big old dose of reality. The "stop and think about it" message. And of course it worked on me. How could you not picture the person so concerned about how we're all acting that they would build such a sign and that they would think we'd change our ways. And of course if we don't shape up and we end up trotting off to hell, well at least we were warned. Not his fault we don't listen.

And it begs all manner of smart-aleck responses, such as "We're Not That Sure About Heck" Or "So Are Taxes," or "Don't Go There Because You're Not Going To Like It And You Can Trust Me On That." You think it might be a guy with a permanently angry wife, or vice versa. And you wonder if you should even comment because the person is obviously a serious person. And they care about you. They especially care about your soul.

And then you think, hey this is what it's all about. Citizens free to say their piece and other equally free citizens to offer lame and cynical humor in response. They might even be right. Especially with a word as large and vague as hell is. A bit later and not far from our hotel in Lafayette a softer message graced a sign on the lawn of a church:

REDISCOVER THE JOY OF BELIEVING

So now you wonder about a connection with the one on the freeway and is this a contradiction or an affirmation? Hell is real and it's a joy to finally believe in it again? So you can try to keep out of it? Or perhaps hell is real and if you catch the joy of believing you don't go there.

It's a college town. Concepts and ideas are right out where you can taste them and talk about them. Obviously hell is real as a synonym for misery, a lost love, finding yourself more overweight than you ever thought you'd get, your favorite team that looked so good in preseason now getting the stuffing kicked out of it. Endless possibles. Different hells for different folks.

This issue doesn't come up all that often, at least not to this reporter. It's been quite a while since anybody asked me about my views on hell. It was the power of the graphic. Had it been colorful or lyrical in presentation one wouldn't have given it a second thought. The giant stark block letters against the unforgiving black have power and its author understands it. It was a terrific graphics job. Not quite enough to bring our company big rig down to a sliding stop to take a picture, but close.

So you think about this and about what a huge and flexible language this is, and then on your way back north you pass a billboard facing south in the exact same white-on-black block letters, this one announcing: JESUS IS REAL. This of course takes a lot of ambiguity out of the first sign but I read that there is controversy as to whether Jesus ever said you'd go to hell for not believing. Or for anything. Personally, I feel lucky just to still be around after all these years; don't mean to be stirring the pot here, but that seems to be what the signs are for, and we're all for freedom of speech. Aren't we?

This was written just before the national election and by publishing time the uproar will be past the climactic moment or it will be in litigation. No doubt there will be enough opined in all directions to render my own take on it superfluous, but I'm pretty sure the result is going to feel like hell in big block letters for somebody.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

There was a pumpkin drop here in this little river town a couple of weeks ago. People have been quietly raising big pumpkins for some time, not just around here but across the entire upper arc of the nation. Lately it's become more noticeable; I think it's the big pickups; guys like to have a reason to haul heavy stuff. A new world's record was just set at the 194th running of the Topsfield Fair in Topsfield, Massachusetts, according to a Huffington Post article posted by Amy Marturana on October 5th, 2012.

It was raised by Ron Wallace of Greene, Rhode Island, and weighed 2009 pounds; not only the heaviest pumpkin in history but also the largest fruit ever grown in the world. Ron won $5,500 for first place and a $10,000 bonus for breaking the 1-ton barrier.

Pumpkins are fruit because of the seed pod; technically they're berries and are related to squash and gourds. Cucumbers and melons and all that viney crowd. The big ones of today's county fairs are all evolved from seeds developed by one William Warnock, who in 1893 grew a pumpkin weighing 365 pounds. Shuffling through the web will tell one how to prepare your soil and how to tell a female from a male and to get in there and manage the fertilization and all that lusty stuff gardeners are hip to.

Check your vines, pick the fastest growing one or two and cut the rest loose, lay some kelp on there, and fish and molasses and calcium; plus compost teas, humic and fulvic acid. And of course you should monitor the ph, as with anything in life; we all know that. At the growing peak the giants can slurp up to 100 gallons of water a day and gain anywhere from 30 to 60 pounds in 24 hours. The secret to bringing on a giant is patience and constant attention. (I only just read this. Myself would be overworked trying to raise a dandelion and two thistle. A friend said the only thing he could ever grow was a plantar wart.)

The All New England Giant Pumpkin Weigh-Off began in 1984 and was won by Wayne Hackney with a 433-pounder. Ninety years after Mr. Warnock's and only 68 pounds heavier. Things took off after that, with a 1337-pounder in 2002 and a 1689-pound winner in 2007.

Enough with setting the backdrop. Here in modest Stillwater it wasn't hard to spot the epicenter of the action, a crane with an 80-foot boom raised nearly vertical in the center of the parking lot near the bridge over the St Croix river.

Our small group was there because the grandkids wanted to see it, generally the best reason to do anything you wouldn't ordinarily do. Our monster gourd here set for sudden public execution weighed, they said, about 1100 pounds. It was unloaded from a fullsized pickup truck onto a folding canvas bag with loops at the top and a bottom floor that would open when the rope was pulled from below.

Volunteers lounging on Death Row

A medium-density crowd was gathered around in a snow-fence safety corral beneath the high boom. The kids were encouraged to stand where the fence opened at the sides of the crane so as to have immediate access to Ground Zero once the bomb was dropped. A woman with a loudspeaker tried to rev the throng of us, without much response. Finally came the countdown from ten and at one the hangman pulled the cord and our big missile did exactly what we anticipated. You felt a heavy thump from the earth and they turned the kiddies loose to scrum in there and grab up seeds and flesh and we all looked at each other and smiled.

Executioner releases the trap

The scavenger rush

Someone tells me the flesh is valued for thoroughbred horses and I'm thinking, "You mean a halfbred quarterhorse wouldn't touch it? Or that it's just too precious?"

They say the small ones are better for lanterns and pies. The big fellas can't hold a good circular shape and aren't good for carving into carriages. There is a website of guys blowing up giants with dynamite, usually a quarter-pound or less. It makes for some messy and amusing blasts, but dynamite carries unpredictable side effects that would discourage the careful persons with whom I generally associate from getting into it. We might go watch, though.

Another sport that harnesses pumpkins for competitive humor is primitive artillery, in the form of catapults and slingshots, and even cannons. A National Geographic site shows a recent meet in Delaware where the longest shot went 1728 feet.

Time to put this story away and go pay attention to the trends and the speculation, and to the battleground states; out where they hurl immense pumpkins over fields marked with horse manure.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

©Russ Ringsak 2012

russ dot ringsak at gmail dot com

This old farmer guy in bib overalls comes walking by kind of slow and he's wearing big puffy basketball shoes, Air Jordans, all bright white with the tongue sticking up, big laces. Kid style. I figured he might be wearing his grandson's style statements and at the same time telling the world he don't farm no more.

But it gradually came to be a common sight in small towns, which is where one mostly sees old guys on the street. Maybe they were just cheaper than anything else. We got used to it. And in the passing of time I realized it was from wearing off the natural cushion down there. My own soles got thin and began complaining up to me about it. Went shopping for my own Jordans and got my own air cushions, but in black. None of that flashy zoom junior-high stuff.

That eased things but not completely and last week three pairs of worn shoes that weren't that cushy any more got tossed. Went and found these gel-bottom sneakers that replace your lost sole cartilage and float you off the pavement. Sole implants.

But they didn't have the black ones in size 12. "All I've got left in that model are these," he said, holding out these quintessential zoom-flash heylookatme wowzers.

I'd seen similar shoes on other guys who I thought would have more sense than to wear anything that ridiculous. And it took about two minutes of walking around the store in them that I became a convert. Threw off my dignity that quick.

So now the feet are happy and I'm digging the slippery look and nobody else seems to notice. Not one person has said, "So, new shoes, huh? Gettin' kinda sporty are ya?" I like looking at'em when I walk by reflective glass.

Geezer Chic

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Wandering through this computer and opening old files hauled in from its ancestors yielded up a page titled Insults; opened it and found these bits, delivered from way back when antagonistic discourse had a good deal more class than it has these days. Some edgy examples:

When a member of Parliament said to Disraeli: "Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease," Disraeli returned: "That depends, sir, whether I embrace your policies or your mistress."

"One could sail a schooner through his argument and never scrape against a fact," said David Houston of Wm Jennings Bryan.

Andrew Lang (1844-1912) said of someone, "He uses statistics like a drunken man uses lamp-posts -- for support rather than illumination." Walter Kerr remarked of someone else, "He has delusions of adequacy."

Winston Churchill said of Neville Chamberlain: " An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last."

Irvin S Cobb is quoted, without naming the victim, "I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial." Forrest Tucker: "He loves nature in spite of what it did to him." Paul Keating: "He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up."

Mark Twain: "Reader, suppose you were an idiot; and suppose you were a member of Congress--; but I repeat myself."

William Inge: "It was said of Mr Gladstone that he could convince most people of most things, and himself of anything."

George Bernard Shaw: "Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few." Shaw once sent a note to Churchill: "I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of new play; bring a friend.... if you have one." The response: "Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second.... if there is one."

William Faulkner on Hemingway: "He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." (Which seems true of nearly all today's writing, Cormac McCarthy being a notable exception). (Not that yours truly is such an expert either.)

Dorothy Parker: "This novel is not to be tossed lightly aside, but to be hurled with great force."

Robert Frost: "A mother takes twenty years to make a man of her boy and another woman makes a fool of him in twenty minutes."

Billy Wilder: "He has Von Gogh's ear for music" And Groucho Marx said, "I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it."

And this zinger of zingers, from Mae West: "His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork."

Just a sweet little girl from Brooklyn

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

We shall now dance naturally and effortlessly on new shoes from Mae West into diamonds. Fred Weir, a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, wrote this last September 17 that, quote, "Trillions of carats lie below a 35-million-year-old, 62-mile-diameter asteroid crater in eastern Siberia known as Popigal Astroblem. The Russians have known about the site since the 1970s." The deposit is apparently large enough to supply the world's needs for 3,000 years.

These are "impact diamonds," super hard, twice the hardness of gemstones, created when a meteor smashes into graphite at high velocity. Perfect for industrial use. They kept it a secret, perhaps to protect their large diamond operations at Mirny in Yakutia, which are already profiting rubles by the bazillion. Scientists at the nearby Novosibirsk Institute of Mineralogy were just now permitted by Moscow to talk to the press.

Their director, Nikolai Pokhilenko, said, "The resources of super-hard diamonds contained in rocks of the Popical crypto-explosion structure are by a factor of ten bigger than the world's all known reserves. We are speaking about trillions of karats. By comparison present-day known reserves in Yakutia are estimated at one billion carats."

A 35 carat diamond called the Beau Sancy and worn by Marie de Medici at her coronation as Queen Consort of Henry IV in France in 1610. It was recently sold at auction in Geneva for $9.7 million by Lily Safra, a billionaire who donated the money to her foundation of 32 charities.

Sensational as that all was, scarcely three weeks later on October 11 Reuters headlined a story by Chris Wickham: "A Diamond Bigger Than Earth?"

It's a planet called '55 Cancri e" orbiting a sun-like star in the constellation of Cancer. It has a radius twice that of the earth's, meaning it's four times our size, but it's so dense its mass is eight times greater. And it's fast. Really fast. A year lasts less than one of our days, 18 hours -- it has to be whipping around there about 500 times faster than our earth travels. We run at 67,000 miles an hour around our sun and this guy is going about 32 million miles an hour.

And it's super hot, 3,900 degrees Fahrenheit, like an acetyline cutting torch. "So, it's like; dude? Why are we talkin' about it, dude?" "Well, it's because the mass of the planet, dude, is like, one third pure diamond. Meaning just the diamond part is bigger than our entire planet, dude."

And it's only forty light years away. Them Russians better not be getting too uppity. (Hard to imagine us running this thing down, but these are remarkable times). This artist's rendering of it must be when it's just coming over the horizon:

Diamond on the rise.

So driving a truck on smooth pavement at about 70 miles an hour seems, well, let's say mundane. But let's also say that there are worse things than mundane. Mudane's not all that bad sometimes. When it comes to the trucking business mundane can be as good as it's gonna get.

This just in -- since finishing this bit, news comes that citizen scientists from the Planet Hunters program have found and confirmed a planet 5000 light years out there called PH1 that has four suns. Four separate suns. It orbits two of them "locked in a tight embrace" while two other suns orbit farther out, looking on like jealous suitors.

This as we watch a fellow called Fearless Felix who flies free-falling to a fine fair flatness from 24 miles up and exceeds the speed of sound by quite a bit -- 834 mph, or Mach 1.24, while millions watch on television. What a time it is in which we live.

©2012 by Russ Ringsak

r dot ringsak at gmail dot com. Drop a line if you feel like it.

What would we do if we did find ourselves 30% MORE FREE!? It seemed at first that only the government could do that and that no matter what they might promise there is no smidge of real hope that they'd do the obvious and just knock taxes down that much. They are an implacable monolith. "You think you own your house?" a friend said, "Don't pay the tax and you'll find out who owns your house."

So that stomped the whole little fantasy. Forget it. Thirty Percent More Free! is an impossibility. Wistful dreaming. But the bottle said that day after day, with that exclamation point, and I'd think maybe there is something to it. How about you do it yourself.

How about the guy who sells some stock and buys a Harley, and he hangs out at the blues bars and meets people like himself and is now running knees in the breeze down the river road instead of watching tv golf on Sunday. The woman sells her antiques, takes flying lessons, becomes a pilot in her free time. That's for sure Thirty Percent More Free! than she used to be, especially if she dumps her boring boyfriend in the process.

So 30% More Free! might be pretty much up to each person, except you still need a cloud of government employees to give their tacit approval by not dumping on your unique vision of freedom. Or it might involve the neighbors. Part of your freedom could be your privilege to sleep until the alarm rings but your suburban neighbor's freedom includes keeping two donkeys as pets and at the crack of dawn every day and sometimes earlier those jackasses get going with that cracking mechanical screeching -- that merciless rasp upon your skull -- and nothing you say at the neighborhood meetings can nudge their freedom to keep their sweet ornamental animals who don't hurt anybody and who don't eat birds like the cats do. So it's still possible to be more free but you'll have to move to another neighborhood. Maybe you do that and your life becomes easier. By, say, thirty percent. (And then of course other stuff happens, stuff you may someday come to regard as the price of freedom.)

Thirty Percent More Free! might include having a goodfornothing grown kid finally leave the nest. It could be surviving surgery. It could be getting fired or hired, or getting yourself thrown out of the house. And by now you're starting to think, "Is this goin' somewhere?" and I'm sort of wondering the same thing myself.

But wait. This maddening machine is able to set us more free. We can access music we haven't heard since high school, and it can teach us how to play it or where to find it. It can open a monster library -- because it's a monster itself -- and allow access to something obscure like, say, the guitar riff in Steve Earle's 1986 song "Guitar Town."

It can show how to play the riff and where you can buy a tremolo pedal to get that throbbing sound on your electric guitar, and it can tell you that the much-admired Mr. Earle has been married seven times, putting him into the company of Larry King, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Artie Shaw, Liz Taylor, Lana Turner and Mickey Rooney. A country boy hits the big time. The machine can answer nearly any seedy little question that might pop into one's freedom-loving mind.

It can get you literature, an education, weather forecasts, a bazillion opinions, maps, an aerial view of your house, a restaurant, takeout food, a vast sea of shopping possibilities. It'll sell your stuff, move your stuff, fix your stuff, give away your stuff.

But there is a fundamental flaw in here, at least for those of us still paying taxes, and that is what if we're not getting anything free now? Doing the math, thirty percent more of that would still be nothing. So getting 30% MORE FREE! will always be only to those who already get stuff free or those who can figure how to get it on their own. Like the man says, "Good luck with that."

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

My oldest granddaughter left her family home this weekend, moved away to college, and none of us feels the least bit more free. We will see her again of course but her daily presence will be missed by all. A lot.

She is sunny and utterly beautiful, an honor student and a terrific athlete, leader of the girl's volleyball team and the golf team. She checked out a number of Big Ten schools, including the one in town, and some smaller ones; ultimately chose DePaul in Chicago. A day's drive away and a diverse institution. The family isn't Catholic but I like the idea of some sort of serious order and implied discipline.

But they have no girl's volleyball team there. It's a women's volleyball team, Pappy, and the time has come for you to grow up and get used to that notion. And I can do this, perhaps... I really have no choice, do I.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The last few weeks of our show's season were so intense I don't think I had time to open the computer. We had Tom Gohman back on board to share the driving duties and he saved our bacon in Wyoming with his mechanic's moxie and a unique ability to smell antifreeze.

It was the most critical part of the tour, with only four days to get from Traverse City in northern Michigan to our large gig at the Hollywood Bowl, because of the short week and a necessary stage gear exchange in Minneapolis. Checking the oil at a refueling stop in Rawlings he got a whiff of that critical and nearly odorless liquid. He ran a finger under a horizontal engine flange and it came out wet: the smallish barely-seen hose that brings coolant from the engine to the air compressor had burst. In the trip from the truck stop to the repair shop it got a lot worse. I'm no mechanic and would never have picked up on that and our show would have been in very large trouble out there in the mountains with a big-time crippled boiled-over diesel engine. The show was saved by the sheer good fortune of having the right man along at precisely the right time.

See those three small bent hoses there? It's way in there behind them.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The good vibe held for the rest of the tour and I was given the chance to sing a Merle Haggard road song with our top notch band at the Big Bowl. Four of us from the staff sat in, including Tony Axtell, the house sound guy, who played bass; our director Dan Rowles played the organ, and Kate Swee, our musical librarian, sang backup with the Steele Sisters, Jevetta and Jearlyn. It makes a person giddy to front a band as good as ours is and then to have out-of-this-world backup singers bringing on that power and instant credibility -- a guy would drive truck thirty years for a chance like that. And later you could meet your embalmer with a smile on your face.

From the cab of Truck #7 to Dressing Room #7 at the Hollywood Bowl -- my mother would be so proud...

© Russ Ringsak 2012

Comments of any nature are always welcome at r dot ringsak at gmail dot com.

We did that and it was published into its niche and I went on and wrote another, this one called Semi True, a series of stories from the driver but not exactly from the road itself. When it was all said and done I owed the publishing house money; not much, but if I had any delusions of literary fortune they were stomped out right there. A little dose of reality, not always a bad thing.

So in 2006 they asked us to do a second edition of the Curiosities book and we weren't all that excited. We figured we could make more money doing field work or cleaning hotel rooms because the royalties would barely cover expenses. But we did it, I suppose because we didn't want someone else to do it.

So now we just finished the third edition. At the halfway point this time we were about to return the advance and scrap the idea but we hung in there and this last weekend before I left for New York it was done, and I threw a small party that went until the early dawn.

In those last weeks I didn't write anything but for the book and was at the same time was trying assemble a blues band for yet another expedition to Montana; this one would be a four-piece rather than the usual six which meant the singing chores would fall on someone who wasn't all that good at it. Meaning I would need vocal coaching.

All of this is nothing more than another pile of lame reasons why it's taken so long to address this column. I should be grateful to still have it. Now I need a subject.

* * * *

How about doing a favorite piece from the new edition?, asked a friend. I dunno, I said, I think that might be crossing some line. But then, how about the story that's already been on national TV? The La-Z-Boy thing? Okay. It's also mentioned here in the November tale so it has to be fair game.

So much was made of the incident that it led the man to have his phone shut off and he has shunned publicity ever since, no doubt bitter about the way it ended. And I don't want to make it worse by using his real name again so we'll call him Mr. Anderson, which in Minnesota is the same as an alias.

We're fairly sure he didn't build such a cool vehicle with the idea of gaining national fame; rigs like this had been done before. His was special in that he put so much work into it that it became art.

It is handsomely covered in dark leather with red and blue trim and has drink holders and controls built into the wide armrests. Three prominent National Hot Rod Association emblems are sewn onto the leather back and sides. A leather pocket for incidentals graces the solid side of the left armrest and a vertical steering column rises in front of the seat cushion.

Headlights are mounted on the front of the arm rests. It has a built in stereo system and there is a sticker on the back that says: "HELL YEAH IT'S FAST." It's powered by an 8-horse Kohler lawnmower engine concealed beneath the wide leather seat cushion, with an engine cooling screen on the back.

[fig1]

It even looks fast. Especially with the headlights on.

But it didn't become famous on its artistic merit. In late summer of 2008 Mr. Anderson was leaving a lounge in Proctor; he said the trip home started out fine until a lady tried to get on the chair with him, which caused him to turn and bump into the door of a parked 2003 Dodge Intrepid.

A year and a half later he pled guilty to a DUI, his second, and the police put the chair up for auction. He admitted to 8 or 9 beers, a goodly number for a man six-three tall and a lean 170 pounds. Word got out and the jackal pack pounced: New York Daily News, the BBC, the UK Daily Telegraph, LeMonde, NPR, Weird News, Fox, The Oakland Daily Tribune, the Columbus Dispatch, The Smoking Gun, MSNBC, US News and a slew of others.

It was put to auction on eBay as a motorized La-Z-Boy and the bidding quickly launched all the way to $43,700 and then the company jumped in and said it wasn't their chair, killing the deal. It was a La-Z-Boy only because the media had reflexively called it so, but no one had checked.

The police put it back on eBay twice more but the international frenzy was over and the selling price limped only to $3700, a bargain, to a local man.

We don't know what Mr. Anderson thought of it all; his phone is still disconnected. If it had been this driver I would have taken some small satisfaction that it cost the authorities $40,000 to have the La-Z-Boy outfit kill their juicy deal.

And while it seems amusing at first, at the same time it was a monstrous penalty for denting a car door; losing what must have been at least a year of sweat, craftsmanship and obvious pride to the righteousness of authority. I know, I know; it's supposed to be serious bidness and drunkenness isn't funny and just think of what could have happened. But good grief. There was only one victim and he was the perpetrator.

* * * *

Another favorite item from the new edition is a story about hand carved barstools in a bar called Jackson's Hole, which is in the nearly abandoned town of Lawler. One of the few other buildings still surviving is this one; it's mentioned here because I like the photo.

A reminder of President Lincoln, somehow.

Lawler never recovered from the Great Hinckley Fire of 1894, which burned over 200,000 acres and killed at least 418 people and perhaps as many as 800. The most famous of these was Thomas P. "Boston" Corbett, the Union soldier who killed John Wilkes Booth because Booth had killed Abraham Lincoln.

* * * *

I said we were again on a Montana track and readers seem to like photos -- possibly more than the text -- I have no problem with that -- and I have this shot I wanted to run last year. This is a closeup portrait of the triceratops that stands in front of the Grand River Museum in Lemmon South Dakota. We will likely be through that way again.

Oh you handsome brute, you.

* * * *

I'm writing now from Bartonsville, Pennsylvania, holed up in long motel that thankfully has suites and is very reasonable, and within a few miles in either direction of shopping and good dining at fair prices.

It's really big Hank that's here, because the New Jersey parking lot where we did stash him suddenly became the construction site of another large building. We are in Town Hall for only two weekends this time so it made no sense to drive home and then back, which is why I'm sitting here in this lonely two-room hideout from whence we shall launch come Saturday evening and swing yet again into Times Square. And then haul the gear off to Nashville.

It's the beginning of an epic fifteen-week crisscrossing of the nation. There are probably stories out there. But for right now, tonight, I'd like to be back in Minneapolis because a blazing guitarist and singer from Austin, Texas is at the Dakota Jazz Club on Nicollet. Forget American Idol; this is the real deal here. She and her band will rock your socks off. Her name is Carolyn Wonderland. Go, gal.

© R.Ringsak, 2012

(aka: r dot ringsak at gmail dot com)

      Thick socks, warm boots, and loud loud music
      It's the only kind of life you'll ever understand.
      Thick socks, warm boots, and loud loud music
      You'll never make a wife to a suit wearin' man.

The Broken D is a ranch without cattle or a horse. It's a ranch only because it has saggy old fencing and horses used to live here.

Trees making fun of the fence.

The last horse was big old Gabe, a sturdy shaggy amiable guy in a pale yellow coat who is now buried up on the top of the back hill. They had to haul a backhoe up there to dig the hole.

I never met Gabe but I wish I would have because he's one of those very few guys about whom nobody has ever said a bad word. He was a gentle giant, half draft and half quarter-horse, and would be the perfect gentleman if you put a four-year-old on his back. Not so fond of hauling yipping hyperactive teenagers, he'd quietly walk to a corner of the corral and stand there and wait, however long it might take, for them to finally get the idea and climb down.

The closest thing to a horse around here now is the Harley named Thanks A Lot leaning on its skinny little foot, like they do, in the big shed; but he doesn't need a fence to keep him home. I've never heard a bad word about him either, nor have I ever spoken one.

Pony waiting for spring.

A ten below zero reading (that's a minus 23 on the Centigrade thermometer and a plus 250 degrees on the Absolute, where there is no minus and a warm summer day runs around 300) is to be expected in January and it was expected here and we've had an easy winter of it, a minor six-inch snowfall a while back but a lot of days in the twenties and thirties. Hardly worth mention, especially when the weather here is not much worse than anywhere else.

Warming a bit out there; looks like 9 below.

And then -- drum roll -- it happened. More specifically, it didn't happen. Next morning, the cold now down to minus 12, the ranchowner turned on the shower and some warm water came out and then it quit. I couldn't help myself and I said "All right!" when she came out of the shower and said we were without running water. "Finally! I've got something to write about!"

She could care less about that but was concerned about going unshowered into the city to work. She went upstairs and dug a little electric heater out of a deep closet where it has lain for about eight years because it's only purpose here is to heat that back yard wellhole when the pipe freezes. And it's the only heater around here that'll fit down the hole with someone carrying it.

So I went out and took the 100-foot yellow extension cord that hangs on the back fence to power the engine heater in the mighty truck and brought it to the well. Took the heavy rusty cover off the round hole in the concrete well cap, went to the shed and brought out the aluminum extension ladder.

The ladder barely fits in that hole and I barely fit through the hatch in a parka. But I get down there into the deep dark of the cement cylinder and set the heater so it's looking right at the pump and tank and pipes and I turn it on and it's instantly giving off warm friendly vibes, pouring out a hot little breeze. Humming happily, apparently glad to be back at work.

I climb out and leave the ladder in there. Go back to the shed and dig out the torn-up old Coleman sleeping bag we keep around for emergency winter insulation. Lean the heavy hatch cover on the top of the ladder sticking out and fold the sleeping bag over it. Go back to the house, change out of the big puffy clothes, sit down and think about a day without running water and think about coffee and that maybe there just might be enough left in the piping above sink level to mix and nuke one cup.

Finally get up and go move the faucet lever and wow holy mackerel here comes running water. Just that quick. Less than 15 minutes. Still time for the Ranch Princess to shower. So now what am I gonna write about?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Well (no pun intended there), there are the pleasures of living half on and half off the grid. This worn old ranch sits about right, just outside the city limits but connected to the community power lines and the city mail delivery; at the same time it's free of the water and sewer hookups. A private trash and recycle outfit shags up the weekly bin at the end of the driveway.

This setup eliminates the hassle of a generator and concerns about trash and taxes piling high from a garbage or sewer strike, or any of that other stuff people in town sometimes have foisted upon them.

But there is access to live music and good restaurants and a great river. No problems with the neighbors other than a too-bright yard light or maybe their wandering cat grabbing up an occasional friendly rabbit. And, not meaning to brag too much here, the best benefit of all: we can park a semi tractor in the back yard.

So ten below Fahrenheit now and then is not that tough to take.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Try as one might these days, it's hard not to touch on politics. But the subject brought on a new guitar. It's the direct result of a little-noticed incident wherein armed federal agents went into the workshops of the Gibson guitar company -- for a second time in two years -- and shut them down for days on the false pretense of looking for illegal exotic woods. It was a thinly disguised act of political harassment, pure and simple. The company, as one might expect, is very careful about where it buys its wood. If you go to the internet and Google something like "Gibson president" you'll easily find the CEO of the business stating their case.

I've been playing Fender guitars for quite a while but this raid made me so mad I sold a Telecaster Elite and immediately bought a new Gibson Les Paul Standard Gold Top. It's a marvelous instrument, the rock and roll standard bearer of the last generation, and I can hardly set the thing down these days. It has a perfect neck and a chambered body, which means it's not as heavy as they used to be -- I've owned one before -- and it sounds crisper. And the pickups are a touch more powerful. And it's utterly beautiful.

I thought I'd name it Sweet Revenge but that would make it a reminder of the ugly event, so I just call it the Colonel, after my dad.

Protester making the best of it.

I'm trying to put together yet another band for yet another August trip out to Montana, and at the same time working to better my chops. The foolish invasion of the feds on an American icon turned out to be an inspiration, but we still won't be doing any tunes touching on the political. We just won't go there. We do it for fun. We're with B.B. King.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I have a new email address:
r dot ringsak at gmail dot com

© R.Ringsak 2012

And liddle lambsey divey, to quote a lilting WWII novelty song called Mairzy Doats. "O mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lambsy divey; A kiddley divey too, wooden shoe?"

This amazing tune came bouncing to us just when we really needed it, in 1944, by then all war-weary from dealing with the maniacs in Europe and the Pacific. (Another right word, that maniac.)

The phrase was carried home from school by a four-year-old daughter of a songwriter. In its original form it was an English nursery rhyme: "Cowzy tweet and sowzy tweet and liddle sharksey doisters. The girl's father was a songwriter named Milton Drake. He teamed up with Al Hoffman and Jerry Livingston to rewrite it and get it played on radio WOR in New York, performed by Al Trace and his Silly Symphonists.

A version by the Merry Macs hit #1 in March of 1944. It's been revived a few times, been in the movies with Stan Laurel, James Garner, Alan Alda and others; been on British television.

We all knew that song, all the kids and parents and grandparents, everybody, and it still runs through the functioning portion of this old man's brain now and then. Like it just did when I sat down here, for example. It comes from a time when the nation did and felt things in unison, if not necessarily in harmony. But we all were aware of the same stuff: the same music, the same sports, the same news from the front. Nowadays, not so much.

Nowadays very few people I know can name all the teams in either the American or National League, or even a single tune on the Top Twenty. Nowadays I don't know if there still is a Top Twenty.

Anyway, phlegm has been on the mind these last few days because I've been a pretty much healthy guy walking around with an intermittent cough. None of the drugstore suppression agents seem to knock it out. To sleep all night and cough all day is better than the other way around but still it's a nuisance. Then I see film of WWII on TV and I think this is not that bad. Walking pneumonia is perhaps just a reminder of all the ghastly things that could be wrong and if the nuisance of a cough is the only thing one has to complain about they are in very good shape indeed.

And "cough" is of course another perfectly right word, sounding like the act itself. So are "ghastly" and "knockout." As are our expletives and vulgarities, of course; we wouldn't put them to their various designated purposes unless we could launch them with vigor.

~ ~ ~ ~

The truck was idle while the show was in St Paul and myself and my trusty researcher have been commissioned to bring forth a third edition of the book Minnesota Curiosities. On a field trip up north to check out a fantastic rock garden on an island in Lake Kabetogama we stopped at the police station in the town of Proctor, near Duluth, to check on the case of a man who was given a DWI last year for hitting a parked car with a motorized reclining lounge chair. The case had attracted national attention on television.

In Proctor we unexpectedly came upon this most remarkable steam locomotive, about as far from a motorized lounge chair as a vehicle can be:

It's an M-3 Yellowstone class, one of the last steam engines to run on the Duluth Messabe & Iron Range line. When this wheel arrangement, the 2-8-8-4, was introduced in 1928 on the Northern Pacific they were the largest locomotives in the world; ALCO rolled out the first one and they celebrated with a catered formal dinner for twelve people inside the firebox. White linen and fine crystal in the belly of the steel beast. This was of course before they lit the hellfire in there.

There were 72 of them built for five railroads: Northern Pacific, Great Northern, Southern Pacific, Baltimore & Ohio and the Duluth Messabe & Iron Range.

In a dramatic feat of engineering, the leading wheels and the forward set of eight drive wheels slide laterally underneath the mighty boiler to allow the machine to negotiate curves, a trick I still find remarkable. Especially since they had to get live steam out there to the huge pistons. And what it must have been like to operate such a machine.

If you'll indulge this boy a brief flurry of large numbers, the M-3s were 129 feet long including the tender, 11 feet wide and 16 feet tall; fully fueled with 22,000 gallons of water and 25 tons of coal they weighed nearly a million and a half pounds; 1,368,675 to be precise. 684 tons. They ran on a boiler pressure of 340 pounds per square inch (!). A standing six-footer would be not quite at eye level with the tops of the driving wheels.

They developed well over 6,000 horsepower and 140,000 foot-pounds of traction. They were used on the Iron Range to pull 144-car trains of ore from the mines up north to the docks in Duluth; from there it would be taken by steamship to the mills in Gary, Indiana, to be made into steel for battleships and tanks.

So in a way they were like Mairzy Doats, in that they helped in the winning of WWII.

Well, that's a stretch. We would have won that war without that tune; silly lyrics without the machinery would not have done the job. And from what I've heard from my direct forebears, our GIs didn't sing all that much while they were actually at work.

~ ~ ~ ~

After the little research cruise I went for a three-day deer hunting trip in South Carolina on a 5,000 acre private tract of former plantation land. It had more than two dozen sturdy tree stands set near clearings and along trails. We were a party of seven, young and old, most of us family on my mother's side, hosted by a good friend who is a member of a hunting club.

I've done a bit of target shooting but am new to hunting herd animals; my natural duty as a biologically useful predator has been covered by ranchers and hunters until lately. I didn't hunt because I was just too lazy.

But we know that herds have little regard for conservation and that without carnivores the land would quickly become barren. A million deer live in the state (of which 2,570 or 3,144 or 33,000 were taken by deer crashes last year, depending on which paper you read); enough to get me off my butt to keep the forest from being eaten and to conserve the automobile population.

My contribution so far has been modest: fired twice in five expeditions, put two critters in the freezer. Probably not the most efficient way to get protein but at least now I feel better about myself. Which of course is what it's really all about.

During most of the hunt one just waits in the stand, moving not much more than the eyeballs. To do this out of idle curiosity would soon get old but having a purpose and an instrument changes that. If you tote a camera or a paint brush or binoculars and a notebook, or a borrowed rifle, you find the forest a more interesting place.

Our host drops me off and I climb the ladder in the last twenty minutes of total darkness and perfume the place in the vapors of deer musk from a small bottle. I hear a faint noise in the first thin scrim of daylight but see nothing moving, as if it were the weak light itself that creaked.

About nine o'clock a cardinal lands on a branch beside me and sits for a time, apparently unaware that a giant meateater lurks two feet away. I feel invisible the rest of the day. At noon I watch a slow phalanx of seven wild turkey hens stroll in from the south, pecking their way up the hundred-yard clearing.

Cardinal's view of your wily reporter.

Maybe thirty minutes later -- it's hard to sense time in the stillness -- a group of jakes emerge from the same woods, feigning indifference to the females out in the field. It's a slow melding, taking well over an hour. They're like teenagers at a smalltown mall, interested but coy. They gradually move in my direction and finally reenter the woods to the immediate right, now pretty much all one flock. The rest of the afternoon passes in utter stillness. Darkness begins moving in, noiseless as when it left.

A deer emerges delicately from the right. I keep the scope on it all the way across the clearing. It stops four times on its careful twilight path and I stay with it, thinking there might be a big buck following, holding off until it's nearly into the woods on the left. The rifle cracks the quiet.

It's the only deer of the day and we take it to a local processing plant for my relatives to retrieve later. It's not huge but it's a few pounds heavier than the ones already registered there. I fly back north the next day.

~ ~ ~ ~

Two weeks later we move the show from the Fitzgerald in St Paul to the World Arena in Colorado Springs. On the way I encounter a dropdeck rig hauling the bed for a mining truck; they run 32 feet wide, 48 feet long, 29 feet tall; outsized and awesome, like the M3 Yellowstones, and weigh about the same.

Bed of an ore truck at a stop in Limon, Colorado

~ ~ ~ ~

From there we went to the big fieldhouse at Murray State University in Kentucky, where we did a bluegrass tribute show to Bill Monroe.

It was between those two that we got the awful news of Tom Keith's passing, something we are still not over. There will be a memorial show this weekend in St Paul, intended to be more celebration than eulogy. Without ever acting like it, he was a big part of our enterprise, and he leaves a legacy of cheerful optimism, something in general short supply these days.

© R.Ringsak 2011

russring at visi dot com

And this must certainly have helped him get through Marine Basic Training, and that training had to add confidence to a guy who already had enough of it to even sign up in the first place.

He would downplay compliments with a slightly crooked smile, almost as if he was surprised himself at how good he was at work in front of large high-tone and discerning audiences, creating bleating herd animals and sudden vocal gunshots; always, exactly and precisely, at the right time. Doors opened and people walked through, and silverware clinked, and pans rattled and wolves howled.

And he was a good smalltown baseball player and never bragged about that either, but in the early years of the show we saw him at work in the Jack's Auto Repair softball outfield enough to know he was a natural.

His modesty about the show-biz talent was pretty much how he was in general. Never once saw him sipping an alcoholic beverage. You could tell him a raunchy joke and he'd laugh but not feel obliged to return one. Seemed almost like a church person sometimes but if he was he never did say so.

I had known him quite a while before I found out he was a Marine, and discovered that only in a roundabout way when he told me about being in Asia. But it made sense, and it seemed to explain how unflappable he always was.

It's a real shock to lose him.

From the Twin Cities we took old Highway 12 westbound to Frieda's in Willmar; the menu is up on the wall over the back counter. Ham & Eggs 2.99, Sausage & Eggs 2.99, Grilled Cheese Sandwich 1.15, Pork Tenderloin Sandwich 2.20; Dinners including potatoes, toast, salad: Chicken or Hamburger, 3.99, Fish 3.50, Shrimp 4.50. Forty-nine items on the list with the most expensive the Frieda's Noon Special at 4.55. The cheapest? Coffee, 25 cents.

Frieda's Menu.

After a good breakfast we continued the westerly trek past the full and orderly granaries of outstate Minnesota:

Elevators West of Willmar.

And the flooding in South Dakota:

Farmland west of Milbank.

Stopped in Aberdeen for fuel and a short beer and later in the afternoon had to detour 29 miles to get to the motel at Mobridge, where Highway 12 crosses the Missouri.

~~~~

Westbound next morning there was a twenty minute wait at the bridge before we could head into the official beginnings of the high plains country; the tough to farm rangeland where buffalo and jackrabbits, wolves and prairie dogs used to be in charge. Most farm fields we saw that weren't irrigated were given back to grasslands and were doing very well in this Summer of More Rain Than We Asked For. Big round bales all over the place, looked like a scattering of billiard balls. It's been a lush few months in that part of the country and they are no doubt wondering how long the bounty can last.

A few years ago we saw a pair of zebras grazing out here, a shocking sight, but haven't seen any lately. Jared Diamond wrote a must-have book called Guns Germs and Steel wherein he said that if a zebra could be ridden the histories of continents might be entirely different. They are apparently tightly strung and foul of temper and are the bane of any zookeeper. When they bite they don't let go. About what you might expect from an animal whose sensitive kidneys are located very high on the back and whose primary predators are lions.

Our favorite old Handyman's Special west of Mobridge.

Ninety miles into the day we were struck by a magnificent roadside scrapmetal sculpture of a cowboy riding a crazy mad dinosaur. This was at the Grand River Museum on the main drag through Lemmon, a museum only slightly less dramatic than the creature in front of it. They offer not only the familiar cowboy and Indian treasures but they have the bones of a number of the area's previous families there as well, who of course were a bunch of enormous pea-brained ancestors to the crazed reptile outside.

The sculptor is a young fellow named John Lopez, who has in a fairly short time created an amazing collection of drop dead beautiful metal works, some in scrapmetal and some in smooth bronze, of dinosaurs, range animals, presidents, Sitting Bull, rodeo riders. His latest is a half-fullsize Tyrannosaurus Rex; he has a slim and sweet softcover book of his work titled "In Fields of Iron" which can be found at www.lopez-ranch.net. The book is $23.00 and the website itself is beautiful. Check it out.

If you buy the book and tell me you don't like it I will be even more astounded than I was to come across a cowboy on a Triceratops on the main drag of Lemmon South Dakota. And I figure if anybody at all could ride a zebra it might be that cowboy.

A resurrected saddle-broke Triceratops in Lemmon, South Dakota.

The dinosaur bones on display inside, and which you are allowed to touch, were collected from local ranches along the western borders of the Dakotas. This place will become a must stop.

The author he heads west from Lemmon.

Highway 12 eases a bit to the north and skins off some of southwest North Dakota, where they are upgrading the old roadbed. A thick rainstorm rolls in and blackens the sky at Bowman. We duck into a big gas station and load the bike onto the trailer, not only keeping the rider dry and in the car but keeping the hog out of what becomes a 20-mile dark quagmire.

Rain on US 12, mud up ahead.

The rain quits suddenly and the highway gets hilly and sunny beautiful and it takes you directly into Miles City, the trailhead of those many cattle drives from the days of the open prairie. And still home to the mostly steadfast original (right down to the famous bullet hole) Montana Bar, everyone's favorite, where it is said that more money changed hands at its screened main table than at any of the banks in town:

The Miles City Icon: Bigger than a bank.

We mount the Interstate there and head west for the Murray Hotel in Livingston, where some friends from New York have flown in for a week. We had thought we'd run from there back east to the Blues Fest in Billings but we gradually turned loose of that concept and ended up sitting around town and taking day trips to places we'd seen before and wanted to see again, like Chico and Wilsall and Big Timber and White Sulphur Springs.

Nothing real stunning like Yellowstone or Beartooth Pass or Glacier National Park or Yaak or even Missoula or Helena. No ride on the Upper Missouri; just an afternoon raft trip on the Yellowstone. Kind of a do-little hang-around go-out-to- dinner thing. Next year we may hit the down-the-road part with a bit more vigor.

Livingston is a good destination and it has a most excellent bookstore, Sax & Fryer, the store a story in itself, run by a local rancher who has seen a lot and done a lot but it takes you years to dig the episodes out. The town is a well known stop for writers and a couple of actors and I'm not one for dropping names. Not so much from virtue but probably because I just don't remember names that well.

Home Sweet Home in Livingston.

And here is why we go to Montana:

Big Belt Mountains from US 89; August 10, 2011.

And of course there could be lesser reasons as well, like perhaps a wee bit of shopping:

White Sulphur Springs.

But lest the reader should get the idea we are continually hammered on these trips allow me to set your mind at ease. This crowd has been there and done that and are now much more about conversation and banter than they are about hangovers and pain pills. A pitcher of beer will sit for some lengthy stretches in the center of a table and the ice will melt in the mixed beverages before anyone reorders. Not a lot of maudlin moaning and groaning about the good ol' days going on either. I'm learning to enjoy the company of grownups.

Of course there is plenty of juke box action out there and they have all the right old maudlin tunes on them. Don't need to bring your own, it's all right there.

©R.Ringsak 2011

russring at visi dot com

I've owned a terrific New York made Vanson jacket for 18 years. The leather is luxuriously supple and it's thick. The thing weighs about eighty pounds and that's with no whiskey, no billy club, no Colt no tequila no hundred silver dollars no phone and no hair dryer. That's just with a pair of earplugs in the pocket.

It's a best friend in the cold and the rain but the heat this year was calling for a lighter midsummer's piece. Lots of jackets out there but they all seem to come from China and I'm not in that market at least not as a volunteer. My computer found Fox Creek Leathers in Independence Virginia and this week they sent a new superfine jacket, high quality and handsome and handmade right here in the USA, and what a joy.

~ ~ ~ ~

Another fellow wrote me about The Dalles Dam across the Columbia River, named after the town of The Dalles which I'd failed to properly capitalize. By coincidence his parents live in The Woodlands, Texas: "The only two cities in America with a definite article in their name," he said. "In Europe there's the The Hague."

An amusing device, tossing stuffy old The Hague in there with the Columbia River and Texas, whether they like it or not. A quick check revealed that he was right about the US but that there is also The Bight in the Bahamas and The Pas in Manitoba.

~ ~ ~ ~

Found myself in another error by writing that you could see the blue waters of the Pacific from Interstate 5. The I-5 is quite some distance from the ocean, like over 80 miles, and the trucker's romantic notion of another ocean to ocean trip doesn't quite pass the map check.

A woman wrote that the crystal blue waters you see lapping there at the Seattle downtown, those waters are called Puget Sound. So I did some belated digging and learned that the Sound is an estuary, one of the two largest in the country, where salt and fresh waters meet and mix and send forth all manner of useful and interesting life forms. And they draw tourists.

The fresh waters don't just casually drift in there but are runoff from the Cascade Mountain Range behind you, on their stubborn outbound course to meet the salty stuff and then head out through the Strait of Juan de Fuca. So that water isn't Pacific water, at least not yet.

It was real blue and it could look like Pacific water in the head of a passing-through driver, but it wasn't certified genuine Pacific. One could say well, ya, but Seattle is a west coast city so that makes it coast to coast. So would that be lame or what?

Letters like this keep one alert. It's common to get a bit oversure of oneself in the Social Security years (elderly smug) and most of one's remaining few friends may be equally as misinformed or just flat disinterested. Discreet nudges from alert young strangers help keep the geezer on the tracks.

~ ~ ~ ~

So here we are now back from the Boston to St Lawrence sea cruise, with our show's freewheeling core still on the Summer Love Tour but soon to land here at the Minnesota State Fair. The Summer Tour doesn't need broadcast equipment and they don't need the farmhouse, meaning they don't need the truck, which couldn't keep up even if they did need it. I have no idea how the cast and crew maintain such a schedule nor would I ask. When they finally show up I just stand there awestruck.

The traveling brings to mind the fellow in a pub in the outlands of Ireland who asks the bartender, "Can you tell me the best way to get to Dublin from here?"
"Are ye drivin' or are ye walkin'?"
"I'm driving."
"Aye. . . . That's the best way."

From the open deck way up there on our cruise ship we got a good look at Boston Harbor on our way out. The bay was churning with folks having fun in boats, running in all directions, some waving, some holding aloft cups. Writing their frothy signatures all around the big bay with their self-erasing graffiti. We were the dignified high-walled castle of the privileged, way up there, as if grandly presiding over some jolly spring festival. They could tag along but there was no way they could join us. We could join their group but only by way of a hundred-foot straight-down drop into the hardwater sea, a thought which causes the average cruise fan to ease back from the rail and look around for perhaps the Chardonnay tray.

Part of the fun of the big ship is the isolation and complete dependence. Once underway you are in with some folks you know and a whole lot of decent strangers you don't and that's it. I never was on line the whole time and my phone never worked. There were the port stops and new streets to walk but Big Momma anchored out in the bay was your only real way back. You could waltz around town a bit but you better get into scurry mode when the large boat starts getting restless. A brief affair with a mildly exotic port and then you're all Hank Snow and Movin' On.

Quebec was of course more than mildly exotic. Two historic downtowns connected by a steep tramway, remarkable buildings all around, an old fort at the top of the hill. Real cannon along the high wall overlooking the water, a bit of harsh reality nudging against all that romantic stone and brick.

Ship, Lowertown, Tram.

Streets alive with motion, sculpture, restaurants, bars, shops; more than you expected.

A hotel bigger than it looks.

In the across-downtown distance stands a huge long wall of grain elevators, a surface so straight they show movies on it. You can watch from blocks away.

New meaning to the term Big Screen

It's a working port. A lot of grain and oil and coal and general freight on the move in the harbor. Our pristine palace brings to mind a formal gown in a logger's chow line. We tourists are another commodity; we probably don't take as long to offload as one of the big tankers but our ship has a larger crew.

Not your everyday street mime.

Street Sculpture

On the last leg down to Montreal the word was out that the previous trip had to cancel that last run and bus the travelers down there. Or up there. Upstream, meaning southwest. The rains had raised the river level to where the stack and various antennae wouldn't clear the underside of the big bridges south of Quebec. So now we had suspense. Sort of. Everyone knew they wouldn't really risk hitting that thing but on the other hand we all also know dumb things happen to people who should know better.

So there was a good crowd up there on the top bow deck as we approached that high steel structure; you could see little cars and trucks zipping along and you see our stack and the radar rack and you tell this was going to be close. Our approach was ponderous but seemed to accelerate the closer we got, and then --- gasp --- point --- look look --- here it comes --- WOW --- !!! A gigantic near miss, made all the closer by the hugeness and the smoothness of the graceful ship and the immovable mathematical trusses carrying all the quietly gliding traffic. What was it like for the drivers up there in the sky? Did they even notice?

Excitement on the Top Deck

Landed in Montreal and then caught a plane to Boston. Our gear was taken quickly back to Quebec and shipped by private carrier to the warehouse of the Minneapolis Opera Company, and I took our rig and slipped back to Minnesota. From there we went by automobile to Montana for a week with friends.

~ ~ ~ ~

After that, the Minnesota State Fair, but first I had to split an aging woodpile and I got covered with a literal bazillion red ants and a lot of other critters that live in the darkness of a festering downed boxelder. They were mad and they knew who was wrecking their palace. It was a real red ant rendezvous. They went over the gauntlets and onto the hands, over the boots and up the legs. Feisty little guys. One even bit me on the eyelid. This was for a bonfire for a Wednesday Men's Crisis Night.

Two days later the hangover was gone but there was a large circular red dome on my right shin. I checked Lyme Disease in Wikipedia and one of the photos showed a dead ringer for my bite. I know people who have had that Lyme disease. The deer tick that carries is it is even smaller than the red ant.

At the hospital the doctor was skeptical. She told me they don't practice medicine from photos in Wikipedia. She talked me out of the antibiotics. The swelling is going down. I don't have a fever.

Good thing, too. It would have been too ironic to travel all those miles and then come home and get sick from a tick in a woodpile. Nobody needs that kind of corny drama.

© R.Ringsak 2011

russring at visi dot com

The letters are giant stone blocks as I recall, stacked on the road just ahead and towering above you. They read:

ASPHALT--
THE WORLD'S
BEST TATTOO
REMOVER

It took a second to figure it out and by then I missed the name of the sponsor. It probably wasn't the Asphalt Promotion Council or the Tattoo Artist Guild. But it did get a smile out of this old biker.

This wasn't the highlight of the road trip from St. Paul to Nashville to Washington DC and then through only two states, Virginia and Tennessee, to get from the Atlantic to the crossing of the Mississippi River and the fifteen flooded miles of Arkansas bottomlands; then across Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico to Flagstaff. And then out to the Pacific at Seattle and back across the Rockies and the prairie to ferry over Lake Michigan and back to Minnesota, and then to Chicago and then to Tanglewood in western Massachusetts, heading to the Atlantic again. And if that wasn't enough, around Nova Scotia and down to Montreal.

But that billboard would be one highlight, after the mighty Mississippi crossing followed by the long desert ride up into that sweet little amphitheater in the high mountain forest with the 12,600-foot snowcap in the backdrop. You can see Humphrey's Peak almost from the minute you hit the Arizona line, as if the surveyors used it for the centerline of Interstate 40, and it never seems to drop from sight as the desert rises to the west, morphing from cactus to scruff to evergreen. And if we all didn't know it before, out there in the woods we found out that Jimmie Dale Gilmore can really sing.

The ride through northern Arizona and southern Utah the Sunday after the show makes you want to come right back and cruise it when you have some time. Northbound down from the dramatic red stone cliffs and peaks you slip through lush greenvalley towns and gradually realize you haven't seen a beer sign in hours, not that one would be useful from a truck but if a guy was touring, say in August, it might be a nice little luxury. Maybe they have 'em there but just don't brag about it. I didn't stop to ask. Hard to imagine the Great American West without something to slake a man's thirst, but maybe I've just seen too many Westerns.

Stopped that night in Baker City, Oregon, wondering if it might have been named after unknown kin on my mother's side; but it was named after its county which is named after Edward Dickinson Baker, the only sitting U.S. Senator to be killed in combat. This happened in October of 1861 in the Battle of Ball's Bluff, when he was a colonel commanding a regiment in the Union Army. It was a regiment he had been authorized to raise by his friend Abraham Lincoln, recruited mostly from Philadelphia and called the California Brigade. The battle, also called the Battle of Leesburg, ended with the Union forces routed back across the Potomac River.

Baker City struck me as a very livable place, although one never feels much inclined to use the big rig for local touring. Local touring sometimes happens when one has become lost or misdirected and it's never fun. So I'd like to go back there sometime in, or on, a smaller machine.

It is a town of 10,000 in a beautiful mountain setting, about big enough to be interesting but not excessively so. It was once the largest city between Salt Lake and Portland and its downtown U.S. Bank has a gold display which features a nugget weighing five pounds. It's also home to the Elkhorn Classic bicycle race, which doesn't interest myself, and the Hell's Canyon Motorcycle Rally, which might.

Northwest on I-84 from there takes you to the Dalles Bridge, paralleling the Dalles Dam, a mile and a half across the Columbia River from Oregon into Washington. The dam is 260 feet tall and seeing it this time was a shock: the spray was as high as the spillway itself and the river was a shore-to-shore foaming rapids. The place has always been vigorous but this time it's difficult to avoid using the word 'awesome.' Even an unmitigated 'mighty' seems short of the mark.

A newsreel taken just upstream in 1957 shows Indians fishing from platforms built into the rock cliffs at the base of Celilo Falls, hauling up giant salmon one after another. This just before the rising reservoir waters completely submerge the waterfalls and the village there, a trading center 15,000 years old and the longest continuously inhabited settlement in North America. At least it was up to that moment in 1957. Lewis and Clark came through in 1805 and called it "a great emporium... where all the neighboring nations assemble." Historians called it the "Wall Street of the West." It's all down there underwater now, falls and town and all, behind that gigantic concrete wall.

You can see the blue Pacific from Interstate 5 on your way through Seattle. Our venue was at the idyllic Chateau Ste Michelle Winery in Woodinville, the leading producer of Reisling in the world, where the yard animals are peacocks and large trout and the vineyards are marked with dramatic rows of neat Lombardy poplars. (Or trees that look like Lombardy poplars to a trucker.) I naturally spent more time at the Matador Restaurant and Tequila Bar in nearby Redmond than at the winery. A self-imposed Atkins diet kept me from enjoying the tequila bar as fully as I might have.

A good little downtown there with a half price book store and a terrific western wear shop. And down the street, the terrific Odd Fellows Grill, where I sat in at an open jam session. I thought it would be a blues thing but it turned out to be run by the grandchildren of the blues, a high power full bore monster rock outfit. Wow. More fun than I could have imagined. Shheeew. For two crazy tunes I fronted an actual heavy metal rock band, hollering like a dangerous happy person. Now I want to start one of my own; call it the SuperLoud-SmashMouth-AllOut-GeezerStomp.

The trip across the Rockies and the Great Plains was the familiar glide through paradise although this year the Absarokas and the Crazies and the Bear Tooths are unusually snow-covered and the long-rolling prairies west of the Missouri are greener than I've ever seen, looking like a travel brochure for a very large Ireland. Yellowstone River seemed wide as the Ohio.

At Manitowoc in Wisconsin Hank backed the trailer into the main truck lobby of the good ship SS Badger for a ride across Lake Michigan to Ludington. She's the last of the coal fired ships on the Great Lakes and there is the predictable plethora of pious puritanical pernicious political pontificates preaching for its permanent proscription. Somehow I can't get worked up about that when Mt. St. Helens recklessly tossed forth an explosion equivalent to 400 million tons of TNT, or 20,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs, and sits with 62 other worldwide active volcanoes constantly coughing up forbidden agents onto the planet. No cap and trade for those guys.

Hank lounging aboard ship.

The engineer took me down to the engine room, where two giant Steeple-Compound Skinner Unaflow Four Cylinder Steam Engines with 4000 horsepower each drive two fourteen-foot four-blade propellers, each weighing 8 tons. 125 revolutions per minute. They push the boat at about 15 knots, or 18 miles an hour, across and back most every unfrozen day, sometimes more. They whip the stern around and back into the pier as neatly as you please, and they expect the same from you when you back your trailer in. We got on last and off first both times. Very enjoyable. Catch it while you can.

Your correspondent in the Belly of the Badger.

The ship's name reminded me of the story about the two buzzards boarding an airliner, each with a smelly stiff raccoon tucked under a wing. The agent at the airport asks, "Will you fellas be checking those raccoons?" The first buzzard says, "No. They're carrion."

Tell that joke to anyone under thirty and they don't get it. Kids don't know the carrion word.

Our show was at the Interlochen Center for the Arts, north of Ludington. Another sweet spot in the woods. A couple of terrific young artists were on the show, a violinist and a cellist; you see that classical stuff live onstage and it sounds a lot better than over the radio. I'll not be sitting in with any of those guys; they're like the opera singers. Put you in your place without even trying to.

More endangered live steam, this up the road from Interlochen in Traverse City, Michigan.

Drove back to Minnesota then down to Ravinia north of Chicago where we were treated to a solo Texas opera singer who is also a sky diver; I didn't ask which one took more nerve but I did thank her for clearing up a truck driver's ears so he could hear high frequencies again.

Again across Wisconsin and glad to be home and then back on the superslab and all the way to Tanglewood in Massachusetts, so two more woodsy amphitheaters. But if any of our gang got ticks this season they never told me about it.

At the breakfast room at the Yankee Inn in Lenox we sat next to a couple who were wearing t-shirts writ with a lighthouse image and the words:

TURKEY POINT LIGHTHOUSE
ELK NECK STATE PARK

Which amused me in a way I don't quite get. Are we missing a couple of 'ats' in there and maybe a plural on the 'elk'?

I wondered if they're breaking new ground with the elk neck. We're accustomed to some animal attributes like White Horse and Bald Eagle but the neck opens it up to names like Chicken Shin, Goat Hock, Duck Tongue, Swine Brow. And one doesn't care about elks necking at the state park or of turkeys pointing at anything, much less a lighthouse. Or even of hanging out at or around lighthouses. Maybe they do. But Elk Neck is more than just fun to say. It's a park in Maryland.

From the Massachusetts woods we went to Boston and parked by the Airport Hilton, flew home for three days, flew back and unloaded the truck at the big container ship port there into the good ship MS Maasdam and set the truck back at the Hilton, a much appreciated convenience. Caught our shuttle to the boat in the morning and headed into the great grey Atlantic waters and then back up the St Lawrence Seaway all the way to Montreal. More about that later.

Hank must have crossed two or three hundred bridges on this trip of 10,000 miles and I never thought until now to run a count. The Mississippi, the Columbia, the Yellowstone, both Reds, the Cuyahoga, the Missouri, Ohio, St Croix, the Black, Kankakee, Sandusky, Alleghany, Hudson, Susquehanna, Housatonic, Potomac, James, New, the Canadian in Oklahoma and the Rio Grande in New Mexico; the Colorado, Snake, Umatilla, Clark Fork, Flathead, Jefferson, Sheyenne, Chippewa. Those and dozens more, plus countless creeks and coulees. And two ferry rides.

Crossing the Hudson on Interstate 90, from the passenger's window.

It's been a remarkable season, not just for us but for the country; all that water and now the heat. I recall dry Dakota winters when dirt came in through every tiny crack in the house; dirt, high winds, 40 below cold and not a flake of snow. Bitter biting long walks leaning into the wind across two railyards and the main street to school.

Might be a good time now to enjoy the damp heat and the rains before the next Dust Bowl comes around. Easy for me to say I suppose, me who now, through simple dumb luck and nothing more, sleeps 70 feet above the flood line.

© R.Ringsak 2011

russring at visi dot com

I pull to a stop in a drive-through parking slot and turn the ignition off. And here he comes; parks beside me on the right. The truck is from California. He shuts it off, jumps down and comes at me around my hood. He's maybe 25, medium build and macho and real mad about being scolded. I open the driver's door. He screams up at me: "IS THERE A SIGN THERE THAT SAYS SEVENTY? DID YOU SEE A SIGN THAT SAYS SEVENTY?"

An odd thing to be hollering about especially when the speed limit is 65. As if it'd be okay if there was a sign but the only sign was painted on the pavement and it said NO PARKING ON RAMP. I look at the guy. I'm thinking he's a kid. An angry child. I see him standing there blinking with that tantrum thing inside about to blow up. "DID YOU SEE A SIGN THERE?" he shouts again, looking up as threatening as he can. As if I should have stopped for him.

I have the high ground and I'm not moving. I maintain an expression of mild tolerance and finally say, "You pulled out right in front of me, man. You never saw me did you."

This seems to confuse the issue for a moment but he wants to stay mad. He says, "I OUGHTA PULL YOU DOWN HERE AND KICK THE SHIT OUT OF YOU!!"

I keep the blankface eye contact, letting the big stupid threat hang there in the air for a while. Then I set my teeth and give him a long slow grin. An ambiguous grin, where the lips go there but the eyes don't. It could be an I'm Hoping You'll Try That grin or it could be a You Have No Idea How Stupid You Look grin.

It confuses him. I keep my eyes locked on him and wait for a time. Then I say, "You were in a no parking zone. All you could see in the mirror was the side of your trailer because you were on the curve. And you pulled out dead in front of me. But we got through it ... And nobody got hurt. ... I was real mad when it happened but I'm not mad now."

He purses his lips, tightens the jaw and does another hard frown. I say: "No harm done. We got through it. So forget it."

He finally looks away. He can't think of anything else to say. He could be thinking it might be hard to pull an old guy out of a truck anyway, especially one who still has the safety harness on but then of course the old guy could maybe be crazy too. He could be. Might even have a shotgun up there. Sawed off shotgun.

That's what I'd like him to think. Either about that or a Doberman or a second driver in the bunk back there. But I don't have to pretend any of that. It's like staring at a dog until he looks away. I can see his little wheels turning in there. He finally looks up and gives me another threatening glower and I'm still grinning and he turns and stomps back to his truck. Drives off.

I'm wondering why he was there at all. He didn't use the restroom and there's a lot of space for dealing with truck problems in that big parking lot; didn't make sense to stop on that narrow approach.

And I'm also thinking about the hotheads who shouldn't be on the highways and especially not in 18-wheelers. There's a high turnover in this trade. Sometimes that's a bad thing and sometimes it's a good thing. I'm hoping that guy, whoever he is, soon becomes a part of it.

And thinking about it later I wouldn't recommend grinning in the face of any ticked-off fool. Unless you have the high ground.

~ ~ ~ ~

Nashville is the holy city of fast and tasty electric guitar; a lot of people find those mutually exclusive, but for fans of that stuff I highly recommend checking out the current occupant of the first guitar spot there at Roberts Western World. A lanky guy in his early 20s by the name of J. D. Simo. He's on YouTube and he's even better in person. For as long as I've been going there Don Kelley has been able to recruit the best of the knock your socks off hot guitar players. Before J. D. it was Guthrie Trapp. Johnny Hiland and Redd Volkaert before them. We ordinary players stand close, slackjawed, with our beer getting warm in the bottle. It's a tradition.

~ ~ ~ ~

The season is sliding by. From there I took Hank the truck to New York City for a four-week stand. Loaded in, flew home, flew back, loaded back out. Truck sits there under the long Town Hall marquee while they pack the gear onstage; takes a couple hours. I get dinner at the diner, catch up on paperwork, walk through the parking ramp to the deli on 44th to buy road food.

I sit up there with the window open and chat with people walking by. This time there was a trucker who had come in from the road years ago; he was from back in the days before power steering and the spring loaded air brakes. Back when it would take both hands on the same side of the steering wheel to back in and going uphill was hard work and downhill was just plain scary.

Lots of photos taken now that half of us are carrying automatic cameras that don't need film. I'm wondering if all those flashes will fade the gorgeous red paint job. Our big cases finally start coming out onto the sidewalk and are rolled up the ramp by tough looking guys with generally easy natures. They make jokes and when it's full right to the back doors they put the locks on and wave the truck off and I picture it getting smaller to them as it disappears into the 43rd Street canyon. And I picture 136 blocks to the north, where in an hour or so the George Washington Bridge will be getting smaller in all four of Hank's mirrors. You simply cannot help but smile when you finally snick it into 13th gear on Interstate 80. Westbound.

~ ~ ~ ~

Next big stop was the fantasy world of the Fox Theater in St Louis. Fitting that a city of such grand dimension near the central joinery of our mighty rivers (right now mighty flooded) would have built and have somehow kept such a marvel. Fitting also that they should have that great ballpark, that giant arch, that big brick brewery with the colossal horses, that fantastic city museum, all those terrific buildings still standing downtown. And then that sweet motorcycle museum out there by the Fox. What a town.

Our next stop Detroit has the stunning twin sister fabulous Fox to the one in St Louis; to get both in the same season could make a roadie become jaded. (That's sort of a joke.) There's a third grand survivor in Atlanta but with an entirely different theme; they are all a treat to visit.

Not meaning to bother the reader with a jaded phrase, but the detail is breathtaking. The first-time visitor walking in cannot help but blurt "Holy xxxx!!" The red granite columns are from Russia, we were told, the only place it's grown in the world. There is a little-noticed elephant above the proscenium, a request of the owner's wife who felt it needed a little something up there.

Holy xxxx.

The Necessary Elephant.

The Stunning Lobby.

This is another city with a real reason to be where it is, at the joinery of two great lakes and two great nations. They are working manfully and womanfully to get themselves back into the big city game. It's laid out organically with main roads spreading from central parks and squares and has that feel of just being necessary. How could you not put a continental city here?

Now they need to keep it up and running; it has a terrific new ballpark and new football stadium smack in the middle, like Collossi, and big green parks and a regular lake, Lake St Claire, and fishing and a bird sanctuary and a plentiful collection of fine vintage buildings. And a good freeway system and a tunnel under the river bringing in all sorts of cool Canadian tourists from the south.
~ ~ ~ ~

Our next show is a home stand at the restored State Theater in downtown Minneapolis and then a week off. After that it's into the Long Haul part of the season, coast to coast to coast bing-bing-bing and then on a ship heading out on the Atlantic Ocean and up the St Lawrence Seaway to Montreal.

~ ~ ~ ~

Last month I bought a new Harley just because it was sitting there at the dealer's and I couldn't help myself and after all that truckin' and shippin' and flyin' is done I intend to take a little knees in the breeze free bird ride out west.

After the close encounters with the nitwit, the theatrical splendor, the urban history and the excitement, I'm ready for some quiet snow-capped grandeur out there at arm's length.

©R.Ringsak 2011

russring at visi dot com

Not saying there should be no hassle to get on a plane. I'm just grateful that for all the hassles of driving a truck it could get a lot worse. It's a good bet that it will get worse. A professor at the U of Minnesota at Morris has made a study of truckers and found the rate of drivers quitting the trade spikes to 60% at the end of the first year. These are young men and women who sign up with a company for a year and leave after the loan for the training course is paid off.

Some quit from the road lonelies, some from being misled, some from finding it's not as easy as it looks and the pay isn't what they expected. And another large many quit from the hassles; forms, electronic logbooks, more forms, nitpicking cops, weigh stations. (I know of case where a driver at a weigh station in the frozen north had to chip a ton of ice from under his trailer; this in spite of the fact that a winter highway can support more weight than a springtime one. And the illegal weight was technically the property of the state anyway; it was their road ice under there. Harassment, pure and simple. Endlessly applied.)

And here's a recent example of it from this very morning: we always load curbside into Town Hall on West 43rd Street. The Big Apple is pretty much devoid of alleyways so the streets are the Apple's alleys. I am there before 7:00, over an hour ahead of time, and snuggled in next to the sidewalk. You unload at the curb to avoid having to double park. A big old garbage truck sits in front of me and a soda pop truck moves in behind. We are as out of the way as we can get.

And as usual we get a ticket for it. They come by every trip, never to say welcome to our fine city and thank you for keeping our economy dynamic by bringing in shows for our union workers to unload and for our upper classes and our bazillion tourists to enjoy but rather to say our armed agents are here again to steal your money and don't go thinking you can talk us out of it because you can't, sweetie.

And I know how sophomoric and naïve that sounds, and don't get me wrong. Whatever hassle New York offers, it's always worth it. But that's the way truckers think. And that's also why it's still easier than flying. It's slower, but you don't have to take your boots off.

~ ~ ~ ~

A real digression there. We return now to the February miracle at Morris, Minnesota, where we had Rhonda Vincent's terrific country band onstage along with two choirs and a real favorite, Jearlyn Steele. What the crowd didn't know was that the taillights and markers had gone out again on our trailer, lights that were working when we got to town and which had been fixed four times by expert mechanics in the last two months.

After we loaded that night we limped eastward on the 4-way flashers, with our stage manager following, to the BP Truckstop at Sauk Center, where highway 28 meets the Interstate. It was well after ten and the two mechanics there only worked until 11:00. They said they'd give it a try.

The trailer carries a heavy steel belly box, 17 feet long and 10 inches high, slung underneath it to hold loading ramps. They traced the problem to a wiring junction in the gap between the trailer floor and the top of the steel box and asked if they could drop it down. The thing weighs over a thousand pounds. The only alternate was to cut a hole in the top to get at the junction. Do that, said I, picturing the jacks and the time it would take to lower it and then weld it back up there.

What makes this a story is that one of them squeezed his entire self all the way into that shallow box and, lying on his back, bonetight, with an air powered hand grinder, cut a six-inch square in the heavy steel overhead. Fire and brimstone showered out as if he was cutting a window into hell itself.

He emerged a burnt and dragged-out gladiator, smiling, victorious. For the fireworks show and the rewiring and the whole two hours of work, solving what the big trailer shops couldn't, they charged us $150. I was incredulous. I tipped them 30 bucks and still felt like a cheapskate.

Fire and Brimstone

~ ~ ~ ~

A considerable blizzard followed the next day and on Monday I needed to leave for San Diego: started with the snowthrower and cleared the whole long driveway, dug our truck free, drove to behind the shopping mall where I left the trailer. A professional snowplow had piled a nice berm all around it, perhaps sending me a message to not go there again. I anticipated that and brought a shovel and dug it free. Hank's fifth wheel was frozen and wouldn't grab the trailer pin. I cleared that with a hammer and lever bar, backed into the trailer hard and it took; another small victory for brute force and ignorance. I had started my departure first thing in the morning and didn't get on the road until 3:30 that afternoon.

And then we went slipping and sliding through a wicked 200 miles into middle Iowa. By the time the ice ended on the freeway I had counted 21 cars and three straight trucks in the ditches. But not a single semi. The CB radio was mostly a long tense afternoon silence broken by brief expressions of fear and caution:

"Pretty slick patch right there at that overpass,"
"Purty slick patch the whole damn state ef ya ast me."
"You got that right driver."

Hank the Truck broke traction a few times, that unsettling little sideways slip that brings the quick adrenalin dump and causes the right foot to lift so suddenly off the accelerator you feel it after it happens. Cruise control isn't quick enough on ice. Raw fear is quicker. You need raw fear on ice.

~ ~ ~ ~

With the tough winter this year I just went straight south on Interstate 35, took a right in Texas and did the westerly 4-lane cruise through Abilene, El Paso, Lordsburg, Tucson, Yuma and on into San Diego. Thought I'd miss more snow that way.

The long dramatic drive on Interstate 8 across the Arizona desert sets you up for the wet fields and orchards of California's El Centro flats and then launches you into the lower Sierra Nevadas. From Ocotillo to El Cajon it's a 30-mile six percent continuous climb to the summit and an equally steep 30-mile descent to the coast, almost a mile up and back down. All dramatic rock canyons, hard-edged peaks, frozen volcanic forms. Sweaty enough in a modern truck but it must have been a heeby-jeeby nightmare before they had air and engine brakes. And, speaking of the old days, here's the inside of that late 1940s Federal semi from the last post. . . .

...and here's Hank, fifty five years younger.

~ ~ ~ ~

San Diego is a sweet town; a big city done right. Easier to do that when the climate is agreeable and you have a big old naval base on site, but they get high marks for taking a good situation and not messing it up.

I took advantage of the 2-hour time difference and slept most of Saturday; after the show headed back the way we came in. This still put the truck into the Sierras in the dark and it wasn't long before this crazy winter brought on sleet. Climbing the quickly freezing freeway became much more interesting than I expected and I was soon down in 10th gear, of 13, and then 9th when the snow hit. I set the drive wheels so that all four pairs were engaged, a good switch when you need it, and fought up the hill. There were few trucks out and fewer cars. Many snowflakes in the headlights.

Towards the summit the flakes got heavier and even closer together and nobody was wanting to pass anybody else, and then on the downhill side we were all crawling. We were a fully engaged little 4-truck caravan sweating down that frozen slope, keeping our distance. Another heeby-jeeby nightmare, and it seemed like hours before it leveled off and dried out. And then easing up to road speed felt sweet as dancing with a pretty girl.

The following night I was rolling east in Texas and looking for a motel. I heard on the CB radio about brush fires up ahead and the freeway being shut down. Coming into a small town I saw a dozens of flashing lights on all sorts of emergency vehicles, mostly fire engines. They seemed to be heading out to another spot to the north but had gained enough control that they let you drive through the fire. An odd feeling to drive with actual flames burning on both sides, right up to the pavement. It went on for a while. Ice one night, next night fire. How cool is that.

~ ~ ~ ~

The weather cleared for the northbound leg up to Minnesota. Had a nice little break and then bombed on down to Nashville, taking I-39 around The Windy and I-57 west of the Indy 500; cruised a day early into Music City on I-24, another sweet interstate highway. Friends flew down there and the place never disappoints; if I lived there I might spend less time down on Broadway than I do as the occasional tourist. But that rowdy scene there is like nothing else in this amazing country, and you just gotta love the Ryman Auditorium and how could you not. At least that's how it seems to an old small town North Dakota boy.

Left there Sunday and laid up for three days in a hotel on the Cuyahoga River in eastern Ohio and then drove to Hoboken New Jersey to an excellent hotel on the Hudson River, where included in the amenities is a large parking lot with a roving security service. It's a good base for getting our show into and out of the Town Hall across the river, and it saves us from running back to Minnesota empty for the 4-week stand. Loaded in Friday, parked the truck in Jersey and took a cab to that airport in the first paragraph of this piece.

~ ~ ~ ~

Back now in Minnesota it's still chilly and the water is high and the strange tilt of this planet is going get us into summer sooner or later and I'm pretty sure of that.

©R.Ringsak 2011

russring at visi dot com

It was time to go by then anyway, but neither of us will go back there no matter how tasty the prime rib. We left wondering how rock and roll could have degenerated into such self indulgent rot, and where did you go Nadine, Barbara Ann, Linda Lou and Mustang Sally? We need, the whole country needs, a little up-tempo harmless humor. And now I'm beginning to understand affection for the Good Old Days.

And it was a surprise because I had dinner the night before at a downtown Italian place that was the very essence of civility and restrained good taste. And there was another place near our hotel I'd highly recommend as well, if I remembered the name. A sweet downtown they have there in Bemidji.

Anyway, I asked Beau about the hired hand from the air base I had met when I went up there to help with the beet harvest. They hired him as a seasonal truck driver and after two years the guy retired from the Air Force and they were happy to make it full time. He's from western Pennsylvania, a tropical mountain paradise compared to our Red River Valley of the North, and has somehow managed to adapt to flat land and cold straight roads. We'll call him Jake.

It's way easy to make mistakes in the farming business, some of which will put permanent damage on one's person and others that inflict pain on outrageously expensive machinery. And given the blueprint of the human creature and our natural propensity for error, unpredictable miseries become inevitabilities. And how could it be otherwise.

But when they happen because of an error by Jake he never considers himself a bad guy. His reaction is always in the nature of "Now how in the heck could something like that happen?" Or "Who'd ever think that thing woulda come apart like that?" He never says, "Man, I really messed that up. I can't believe what a screwup I am." It just never seems to cross his mind.

He may stand in wonderment that such a violent cracking of a gearcase could occur or how those teeth could have been sheared off or how that bearing could get fried like that, but he doesn't take it personal no matter how close he was to it. It's not anybody's fault. It's just another remarkable event. They'll happen.

And as much as it may cost their operation, Beau not only understands it but finds the 'no regrets just questions' thing refreshing. Me too.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

He had been to a fall soccer match that came down to a shootout, this one set up so that there was a line of defenders, maybe four or five, posted forward of the goal. The kicker was about to take his best shot at drilling it through them and into the net. As he backed up and concentrated, about to unleash the missile, a woman on the sidelines, herself a member of the women's team, loudly hollered to the defenders: "COVER YOUR ISH!!!"

This is North Dakota, a manly state where the personal region has been variously referred to in such terms as "wedding tackle" or "the package," or even the British "naughty bits." And now comes this. The Ish. Is this local or are females elsewhere now referring to it as dismissively as this?

It is a remarkable and flexible language we have here. And it was also at a soccer game, which may somewhat explain it. And I should have to add that I never heard the word 'soccer' at any truck stop I ever set foot upon or into. So I don't know that much about it.

The trip up to Bemidji was remarkable only in how long it took, partly because of stopping at Clearwater to get the truck washed and having it take about two hours and then be a lousy job on top of it.

Not a problem, but it set a certain tone. Later that night I was about to turn in and on a whim thought I'd go down the hall and get a munchie and a sody pop and I found myself locked in. Called the desk. They sent a guy up and then another and they passed a torx screwdriver shaft and a Phillips with a very skinny handle under the door into the nap of the carpet, and with that and my Leatherman I was able to remove the door handle and the bolt lever, and the cover plate and the backing plate. My side of the door was then all wood and they still couldn't turn the lock. At 4:30 AM they finally gave up and I went to bed.

At 8:00 AM the front desk called and said she was sending up a couple more guys. They had me put the plates and handles back on. More jiggling. I sat and looked out over the frozen lake with all the fish houses strung in loose arcs out there, thinking that a stranger to Minnesota might take them to be housing for the homeless. I later asked a guy where those people go in the summer and he said he thought they went under the bridge.

By 10:30 they were ready to answer my request for a SWAT team but then a tall soft spoken gangly guy showed (I could see through the little fisheye peephole) and he made the same kinds of jiggling noises they'd all been making for hours and after about ten minutes there was a sudden sliding snap sound and bingo the door opened. Wow.

When they put it back together they just took the whole lockset out and pushed an entire new one in there, the hardware part, and connected the one little wire from the door's card reader and didn't even have to reset the combination or make a new plastic key card. They couldn't have drilled out a cylinder because there wasn't one to drill. They would have had to just saw the door down and they were ready to do that, before the Houdini Einstein Lone Ranger guy showed up.

As one might expect in a small town, I became a sort of folk hero; hotel staff and guys in the parking lot who worked at the place or made deliveries would smile and say Niceta get outa there I bet huh? Our whole entourage knew the story and by the time I got to the auditorium locals there looked at me and gave me understanding smiles.

The hotel gave me a gift basket with great chocolates, cashews, a giant Minnesota coffee mug and a non-expiring card for a free room. I'm thinking if I don't live long enough to use it I'll specify my coffin to be set there for the free night. It's non-expiring, y'know.

~~~~~

I lent my camera to my daughter who just went to Belize for a week with her husband and I forgot to download the memory card. I think I had some photos in there of the snow and cold up there in beautiful Bemidji. So instead of that I'm sending pictures from last year, taken before we started using them here on the website.

Here is a goat sculpture from a park along the Spokane River; it's backed up to a dumpster. You operate the lever and the goat comes alive and eats your trash, and how very cool that is. For both of you.

Trash-eating goat.

And here, also in the city of Spokane, is a view underneath the very dramatic high arched concrete Monroe Bridge, built in 1911:

Meeting under the Monroe Bridge

And here is a gorgeous Federal semi tractor with a sleeper, possibly a 1948 or so, looking as good as anything in the entire truck stop nation. I'm not sure where I took this shot but it was on a return from the west coast somewhere. It's carrying a vintage GMC snubnose on the trailer:

A rare and beautiful Federal, and why a person should carry a camera.

~~~~~

Next week: Memories of Morris in Middle Minnesota.

©R.Ringsak 2011

russring at visi dot com