It doesn't look like much at first but it is astonishing nonetheless. A rampart of earth, grass-covered with trees here and there rises up before you, a gap in the rampart beckoning you in. And you go in, and it's all flat, mown grass inside, with trees. The earthen rampart…
There's something wrong with the Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania. I had taken a wrong turn and was trapped on the wrong highway through the endless forests of Pennsylvania when I passed a brown sign for the memorial. Oh, that's right! I'm near where the plane crashed on 9-11. I'm…
We're in two cars, my daughter's car ahead of me, when they start to hear a noise from the front right wheel area. They walkie-talkie back to us in my FJ. I tell them to pull over at the next exit. The wheel well barrier--what is the word for that…
A quick tour of Badlands National Park is easy, running roughly parallel to I-90 in South Dakota. We started in Wall and headed straight south into the park, then made our way east along the main road, stopping frequently despite our tight schedule.
Well, twenty-nine of them, at least. This post is from a series of articles chronicling a 2020 cross-country trip with my wife and two daughters and a boyfriend, from California to Ohio (to visit family) and Pennsylvania (to drop off my oldest daughter at grad school), and then back. We spent…
You don’t see them at the mall because you only go to certain malls, if you go to malls at all. You don’t see them at work, if you go to work, because you do a certain kind of work. You don’t see them at the restaurants, at least not…
He was all but done for the day when we pulled into the gas station just outside of Spearfish, South Dakota, his "Trump Shop" bus all closed up for the night. Written on the bus were the words "not affiliated with the campaign." Some sort of backdoor PAC-based way to…
When I was twelve I saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind in a theater and I was amazed by the spaceships and by the musical tones and light display at the end. I was amazed as well afterward when I discovered that weird rocky tower where the aliens meet…
When we came down out of the mountains in July of 2004 we had no real idea of where we were. This was before the iPhone and navigation systems in cars. We were traveling across country, moving from the Washington, D.C. area to California, my wife and our two grade-school-age…
One family went all out and each of them, dad, mom, and two kids, wore full on industrial painting masks, black rubber face part with two large filter cartridges, looking like something from Word War I. They wore these as they walked the boardwalks around the geyser basins. You could only see their eyes and the parents' eyes looked out wide open, terrified.