The first time I remember making my mother laugh was in the courthouse square in Denton, Texas, seat of Denton County. Kids make their parents laugh sometimes, unless the parent is completely sour on life, and then woe be to the child. We’d gotten out of church one Sunday noonish when I was maybe six. After church, it was our habit to drive over to the courthouse square to visit a small store for sodas and snacks. A highlight of the day, as you’d think. I remember the long outline of that store, and the rows of candy I explored.
The streets were crowded, maybe more than usual, and it probably meant that we, my mother that is, temporarily couldn’t find for a parking space. “The Baptists must have just gotten out of church,” she said, referring maybe to a specific church, or to the fact that many Baptists tended to be out and about on Sunday, this being Texas. (Quotes are reconstructions, because of course.)
“Do they know we’re Episcopalians?” I said.
That day or any other that I saw it in the mid-1960s, the Denton County Courthouse was a hulking presence, the focus of attention for blocks around, and, for a young kid, a mysterious place. Obviously an important place, but what goes on inside?
Last month, now in my own mid-60s of age and armed with a somewhat better knowledge of civics, I stopped to take a look at 10 or more county courthouses in Texas along the routes of my travels.
Anderson County. Palestine, Texas.
Bastrop County. Bastrop, Texas.
Bell County, Belton, Texas.
Caldwell County. Lockhart, Texas.
Erath County. Stephenville, Texas.
Sometimes I could get in, sometimes the building was closed. With one or two exceptions, I managed to walk all the way around the courthouses. There’s a niche travel blog for you (and I’m not the man to do it): circumambulate all 254 Texas county courthouses. Why? Because they’re there.
Sometimes the right word just comes to you: tatterdemalion. As in, the tatterdemalion historic Oakwood Cemetery in Huntsville, Texas, or at least the older section of it.
I use that word with great affection for tatterdemalion cemeteries – ragged and dilapidated, the ragamuffins of the cemetery world, attracting even less attention than the big-deal Victorian cemeteries in the big cities. These cemeteries might be scruffy, but their repose is deep.
Oakwood does have Sam Houston, so people must come for him.
Oops.
You can park your car on the street, walk a few seconds to Gen. Houston’s stone, pay your respects, and never enter the cemetery proper.
Too bad. The grounds extend along a long strip of land, generally sheltered by such pines as you find in the piney green East Texas, and sport a variety of stones, older and newer, moderately ornate and more modest.
Some smashed slowly by time. The fate of all, eventually.
Off in a corner of the older section – which is the sector near Houston – are simple crosses.
They tell a story. Actually, no. A sign nearby does. It’s worth reading in its entirety.
A related story, about the yellow fever epidemic of 1867.
To summarize, in case the text in the photo is hard to read: a lot of Huntsville residents died that year from yellow fever, though not Gen. Houston, who was already dead. Wonder whether any Huntsville physicians or other men of science died persuaded that miasma did them in.
Houston’s Glenwood Cemetery sprawls out near downtown, adjacent to much of the parkland along Buffalo Bayou. In Nacogdoches, Oak Grove Cemetery is a more modest burial ground. Nacogdoches is a more modest city. The entrance to Oak Grove is about a half block from the Main St., but the grounds are still tucked away in a residential neighborhood along Lanana St.
Decent flora, but not a garden cemetery.
It’s an old cemetery by modern Texas standards – the first burial was the year after independence – so the cemetery punches above its weight in one way: noted early Texans. Such as Harden Edwards.
The state saw fit, during the 1936 Centennial, to put up a new stone for Edwards, an empresario and “Leader of the Freedonian Rebellion,” who must have penned the rousing tune, “Hail, Hail Freedonia,” for future generations to enjoy.
The stone of a great-great granddaughter of Edwards who died in 1963 seems eager to bask in his remote glory. Why not?
He was a signer, fought at San Jacinto, and had a notable career in antebellum Texas and U.S. politics. There’s is a town a county over from Nacogdoches named Rusk, seat of Cherokee County. Also, strangely, a font based on his handwriting was created in our time, “Texas Hero.”
Some regular folks.
I don’t know how ordinary this person was, but perhaps he was gifted with Victorian prolixity. Or maybe his family was.
Brick tombs of the kind I’ve seen elsewhere in the South from roughly the same period, that is, sometime in the 19th century.
Adjacent to the cemetery but not associated with it is the former home of Zion Hill Baptist Church, one of the oldest African-American Baptist congregations in Texas, founded in 1878. The church is on the corner of Lanana and the delightfully named Bois d’arc St., as in lumpy “apples.”
The congregation hasn’t used the structure, designed in 1914 by architect Diedrich Rulfs, for nearly 40 years. It’s a fine little museum these days, restored to its early 20th century glory.
Rulfs was a German who made good in Texas, as so many have, within a very special niche: most of the buildings worth seeing in Nacogdoches are his work.
Busy day, for-pay work to be done. Good day to stay home anyway, since rain has been falling in thick waves. Snow expected on Monday, followed by a winter-like cold snap for a day or two. Bah.
On Friday, on a whim, I used an AI program to animate one of the Big Boy statues I saw last month. A modest ad for the museum.
I created a new You Tube channel for it, It’s AI, But It Ain’t Slop, which is a motto we can call rally around. I’m starting to suspect that much AI animation looks like it does not only because of the technology’s inherent limitations, but also because of unimaginative prompts. Just a hunch.
Anyway, in roughly 48 hours, the thing has gotten more than 1,000 views, along with three likes and a dislike, but no comments. That isn’t many views in the grand scheme of YouTube, and only about a quarter of that total watched all the way through, but I’m tickled all the same. My postings over the years have been desultory, and none has gotten more than a few dozen views, if that. Give the people what they want, I guess, such as talking Big Boys.
This clown in your nightmare. What did he look like again?
Right, Jack from Jack In the Box fame. Old Jack, that is, maybe from the early days of the fast-food chain in the ’50s and ’60s. Has that tired mid-century look because the mid-century was quite a while ago now. On the whole, even later versions of the clown has been retired.
I was fully awake when I encountered Jack, an artifact at Roadside America Museum, Hillsboro, Texas, a wall-to-wall gathering of American roadside advertising, or at least items that were pretty close to the roads – a sign or novelty item or product you might see at a gas station or a diner or a bar or a small grocery store or any such mid-century service business for a nation newly on the road, and with great gusto. Items large and small.
Located on a modest street of Hillsboro, a town between DFW and Waco. Jay and I arrived around mid-day on February 23.
Jack is around, but there are also Big Boys in quantity and variety. If I were that first one, I’d watch out for the criminal element from McDonaldland, standing right behind him trying not to look suspicious. Sure, he’s a burglar, but he might be a pickpocket or even a stickup man, too.
Betty Boop. From a slightly earlier time, but still pulling her weight as a carhop.
Mr. Peanut. Didn’t something happen to him? Died of a busted goober?
Esso. I’m barely old enough to remember the Exxon brand consolidation. (Mad magazine parodied that as “Nixxon: Still the Same Old Gas.”)
Who is this? Why does anthropomorphic hot dog man, though the liberal application of condiments, encourage larger creatures to take a bite out of his head, indeed consume him as completely as unfortunate extras in Jurassic Park movies?
Admittance to Roadside America – no relation to the web site and (former?) book series of that name that I know of – is by making a phone call outside its door. The proprietor, one Carroll Estes, comes to the door, invites you in, and shows you around the place, pointing out things and sometimes recalling the acquisition of this or that, or letting you know how rare or not certain items are. An affable old fellow, grizzled if ever anyone was, probably in his 70s. So the commercial memorabilia all around us was no memorabilia when he was a lad, but part of the lay of the land. I came along in time to see some of those ads or at least characters myself, though they were fading.
He said he was particularly fond of Grapette items. Once he pointed that out, I started seeing them everywhere.
Been a long time since I had a passing thought about Grapette soda. It was available in north Texas in the mid-60s, and I’m sure I had more than a few Grapette bottle caps, once upon a time. I don’t remember its sister sodas, Orangette and Lemonette. According to Wiki at least, Grapette still exists as a house brand in Walmart’s beverage stable, and is popular even yet in Latin America.
I don’t remember O-So Grape.
Originated in Chicago and, like so many, has been revived at premium prices, which seems to go against the spirit of soda water you bought for coins in your misspent youth, but never mind.
There was much more. Mr. Estis has a sizable classic car collection in another part of the building, a much larger structure that had some industrial use at one time. He showed us around. He’d restored many of them himself, but he said he doesn’t do that as much anymore. He had some great ones, too. Wish I’d taken notes. But I was in the moment.
Even in the moment, you don’t notice everything. Especially at a chock-a-block place like Roadside America, where curios compete for your attention like a gaggle of souvenir-wallas in Delhi. It wasn’t until I looked at this picture that I noticed Wile E. Coyote sitting at the diner booth.
Stands to reason that Wile E. would patronize the few diners on the desert roads he haunts. He never managed to make a decent meal of the Roadrunner.
Rain. All the way from Illinois to Texas. We got mighty bouts of it that had died down ’round midnight. As if to remind me, about time I’m home. Huh?
Come to Marfa for the West Texas art city vibe, stay for the concrete structures. Even if they are off in the distance, at least from the parking lot.
How to think of the untitled works by Donald Judd (d. 1994) on the grounds of the Chinati Foundation in Marfa? Brutalism in a brutal environment? Man’s – that is Humanity’s – longing for angular order in world of irregularity? The strange coprolite of giant angular creatures barely known to paleontology?
I could go on like that all day. Yuriko and I arrived at Chinati early in the warm afternoon of February 18. I can’t say we weren’t warned. The foundation’s web site says: “Our collection is installed across 21 buildings and two off-site locations; additionally, three works are site-specific, outdoor installations. Guided tours are the only way to see the majority of Chinati’s collection and grounds. Purchase your tickets in advance; tours often sell out.”
As we told a volunteer behind the desk, we didn’t have time for a tour. What to see on one’s on?
A long line of concrete structures in the West Texas scrub, that’s what. No tour guide, just a wander among the structures. But not inside them, according to instructions that we did follow.
After a little wandering, I came to think it isn’t just the structures, but the shadows too. What is it that the shadow knows? Right, the evil that lurks in the hearts of men.
I could turn on the art-speak spigot to describe Chinati (one of those infinite AI spigots, I figure), but no. I will note the tumbleweeds we saw.
A little less permanent than the Judd works, but only a little.
Never cared much for the term snowbird, with its connotations of getting up every morning to play golf during winter in some arid place, or spending the evenings with members of your cohort in some gated community, maybe drinking but definitely grousing about the state of the world. Still, considering that in the winter of 25/26, I’ve spent two out of the last three months – the hard winter months, up Illinois way – in warmer places, it would be churlish to cast shade on fellow old people who happen to enjoy golf or grousing.
On the other hand, I’m not about to claim snowbird as descriptive for myself. I just happen to be able to take long trips during the cold months (along with my laptop, for work). In December, Florida. In February, Texas.
Back on February 3, I got on a plane and flew to Austin. I flew home from Dallas on March 3. In between, I spent time – and Yuriko joined me for a while – traversing the state of Texas, going so far west at one point that we ended up in New Mexico. By traversing, I mean long drives, in a rental car part of the time, and in my brother Jay’s car as well, a blue Subaru known as the Blubaru.
I drove from Austin east to Houston, mostly on US 290; from Houston to Nacogdoches, mostly on US 59; then to Dallas on various state highways, such as Texas 21 and 19; and from Dallas to San Angelo to Marathon, Texas, on US 67 and on the grandly remote US 385, which will also take you to the desert reaches of the Big Bend.
From Marathon, Texas, across to Carlsbad, NM, our route took us along US 90, then Texas 56, then US 62/180. Later, US 62/180 took us from Carlsbad part way back to Dallas — to Sweetwater, Texas — but mostly we went on the faster but less interesting I-20. Dallas to San Antonio was partly I-35, but also US 281, which takes you around the perma-gridlock that is Austin.
Of all those, the road between Nacogdoches and San Augustine on a day trip, Texas 21 heading east, winding through greenish (for February) rolling hills, was a favorite.
The towns listed above were just the places I spent the night, alone or with Yuriko or with my brothers. In between were such places as Bastrop, these days a day-trip from Austin, with the requisite boutiques and restaurants; Huntsville, home of Sam Houston and memorials to the first president of Texas; San Augustine, rival with Nacogdoches in claiming to be the oldest town in Texas; Stephenville and Ballinger, geographically about as deep in the heart of Texas as you can be; the West Texas art town of Marfa and the way station of Van Horn; a string of oil patch towns such as Hobbs, NM, and Seminole, Lamesa, Snyder, and Sweetwater, back in Texas. Later, traversing north to south and back again, I stopped in Hillsboro and Belton, along the I-35 axis; and Lockhart, which has claimed for itself barbecue capital of the state.
Along the way, oddities were encountered. Otherwise, why drive on smaller roads?
Such as an ice cream shop in Waller, Texas.
Or a highly visible ad for Rockets RV Park in Gaines County, Texas, not far east of the border with New Mexico.
A former Texaco station on an obscure Texas highway (Farm-to-Market 1690).
Had various encounters with the historic El Camino Real, whose various tendrils crossed a large slice of the future state of Texas, once upon a time.
Yuriko and I visited Big Bend National Park, Guadalupe Mountains National Park and Carlsbad Caverns National Park. I saw the National Museum of Funeral History in the city of Houston and the museum devoted to Houston (the man) in Huntsville. Also, Roadside America in Hillsboro, an eccentric collection of American commercial art, complete with a personal tour by the proprietor, and the outdoor art at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, that is, brutalist concrete structures in the brutal desert environment. I became acquainted with the splendid Glenwood Cemetery in Houston and the smaller and more ragged, but no less interesting city cemeteries in Huntsville and Nacogdoches and Palestine. I stopped and looked at about a dozen county courthouses, of which Texas has many.
We ate a lot of meat along the way. As one does in Texas.
Also, Mexican food.
Eat like that and you’d better do some walking, and I did: various places in Austin and Houston and Dallas, in all three national parks, around downtowns and courthouse squares in a number of small towns, and a handful of local parks.
All that was good, but of course best of all, I had time to visit friends and relatives, of whom there are many in Texas: Tom and Nancy in Austin, Kirk and Lisa in Nacogdoches, another Tom and Steve and Ron and Greg and Judith in San Antonio, to list the friends; both brothers, two out of three nephews and their wives and all four of their children, to list relatives, along with the mother of one nephew’s wife (niece-in-law sounds peculiar, but that fits too). Also, I met for the first time two good friends of Tom’s in Austin, and one of Kirk and Lisa’s granddaughters.
I’d set out to do four long drives when I was 64, but this makes five. Guess I’m an overachiever about driving, anyway.
A few days ago, I sent the following email to the curator and historian at the Key West Art & Historical Society, Dr. Cori Convertito:
Dr. Convertito,
I recently visited Key West for another pleasant visit, and came away with a question I haven’t been able to answer, though perhaps I haven’t looked in the right places.
Who is credited with the creation of the Conch Republic flag? I understand that it appeared at the same time as the infamous roadblock and the “secession,” but detail on its creation is lacking. Do you happen to know that?
One reason to ask is that it’s a handsome design, though I’m not sure about the star pattern asterisms — is one or another supposed to be the Southern Cross?
Today she answered:
That’s a perceptive question, and a difficult one to answer definitively. The Conch Republic flag emerged alongside the 1982 ‘secession,’ but attribution is complicated by the fact that several individuals have, over the years, laid claim to the original iteration of the artwork, and reliable contemporary documentation is limited. As a result, it’s hard to credit a single creator with certainty.
What is clearer is the intent behind the design elements. In addition to the conch shell and sun, the star groupings are generally understood to represent two navigational asterisms: the Southern Cross and the Northern Cross (Cygnus). Their inclusion appears deliberate, reinforcing Key West’s maritime identity and its symbolic position between hemispheres.
I hope that helps clarify what is known, and what remains unresolved.
So the short answer is, like with a number of historical questions – even ones as recent as this – no one is sure. Good to know. Thanks, Dr. Convertito.
The Overseas Highway, from mainland Florida to Key West, or vice versa, is epic all around: an epic construction project once upon a time, and an epic drive in our time. Through the Upper Keys, the likes of Key Largo and Islamorada, the ocean isn’t usually visible, obscured behind thick development: commercial and residential buildings and omnipresent marinas. But it isn’t long before you’re skipping from key to key, some larger, some smaller, with water widely visible on both sides of the road.
The most epic section of the crossing, as far as I’m concerned: Seven-Mile Bridge.
On an ordinary highway, seven miles isn’t much of a stretch at highway speeds. Listen to one song or another on the radio and you’re practically done with it. Those same minutes have a different quality over the wide water, glinting in the sun and spotted with boats and occasional small keys in the distance. There’s a sense of the mildly impossible. Of course it’s entirely possible, via a feat of 20th-century civil engineering, as is the 100-plus miles of the whole highway. I don’t believe my civil engineer grandfather ever drove the Overseas Highway, but I’ll bet he read about it with considerable satisfaction.
“The original 7 Mile Bridge, also known as the Knights Key-Pigeon Key-Moser Channel-Pacet Channel Bridge, was constructed in the early 1900s as part of Henry Flagler’s ambitious Overseas Railroad project,” notes the Key West Blog. “This railroad connected mainland Florida to Key West, revolutionizing transportation and trade in the region. However, after a devastating hurricane in 1935, the railroad was destroyed, and the bridge was converted into a highway.”
The history is a little more complicated than that, with the current bridge a 1980s work, leaving part of the original as a pedestrian and (especially) a fishing bridge. I’m no sport fisherman, but I understand tarpon, snook, snapper, grouper, bonefish and barracuda swim these waters.
At Big Pine Key, we stopped for a visit to the National Key Deer Refuge, a place focused on giving key deer a place to live, as it says in the name. For human visitors, there is a trail.
It goes partly around a pond in the refuge. No deer were to be seen.
We did spot a gator, however. Or maybe a croc. Hard to tell at this angle. They both live in southern Florida.
A sign on the trail warns visitors not about reptiles, but a nearby poisonwood tree.
Poisonwood? A native to the Keys. It sounds bad, and it is.
“Metopium Toxiferum [poisonwood] is related to poison oak, poison ivy, and poison sumac,” says the Tree Care Guide. “The tree produces the same irritant, urushiol, which causes an itchy, blistering rash. The oils from Metopium toxiferum cause dermatitis ranging in severity from a light red rash to intense skin blistering. Tea made from Metopium toxiferum leaves and twigs combined with bleach has been used to induce abortions but has also tended to kill the patient.”
Yikes. We took the advice of the sign and didn’t go near it.
Across the road from the refuge parking lot, some undeveloped key landscape. There couldn’t be that much of that, at least on the keys connected by the highway.
In Islamorada, which is spread across five small keys much closer to the mainland than either Key West or Big Pine Key, we stopped to pay our respects at the memorial to those who died in the 1935 hurricane.
Also in Islamorada, we drove past Betsy the Lobster, but sorry to say, didn’t stop for a closer look. What was I thinking?
In Key West last month, we noticed the Conch Republic flag displayed in more than a few places.
More about the not-very-serious Conch Republic micronation, created in 1982, is in this Miami Take article. Curiously, the article doesn’t describe how the flag came to be, just that it was simultaneous with the declaration of the CR, which was a kind of protest against a surprise U.S. Border Patrol roadblock on US 1 at the entrance to the Keys. Still, the design works, and it’s something distinctively Key West.
Saw the very distinctive Sicilian flag in Key West, too, just off Duval, over a joint that promised southern Italian food.
The design is not only distinctive, but ancient. This is a silver drachma from Sicily, ca. 300 BC.
I digress. During one of our Key West walkabouts, we made a point of finding the southern terminus of highway US 1, which is at the intersection of Fleming and Whitehead streets.
A business taking advantage of its unique location. Locational branding, they might say in marketing.
Now that I’ve now seen the southern terminus of US 1, that clearly means I have to see the northern terminus. That happens to be in Fort Kent, Maine, so perhaps a summertime visit. A real epic would be driving the entire 2,369 miles between Key West and Fort Kent on that highway. People drive all of the 2,448-mile Route 66, and it’s not even a real highway anymore. I’ve been gifted, or cursed, with the ability to think up more long trips that I can possibly do.
Half a block away from the beginning/end of US 1 is the Monroe County courthouse.
A nearby sign says: The original wooden courthouse was completed in 1823. The county occupied most of the Southern Florida Peninsula. The county seat in Key West currently covers the Florida Keys, and portions of the Everglades National Park. The present red brick courthouse, built in a traditional county courthouse style, was completed in 1890. It features a 100-foot tall clock tower and is an architectural feature that can be observed from almost any part of Key West.
A traditional county courthouse? In the Northeast, yes. Looks like someone used one of those building-moving transit beams in Rocky Horror to transport an entire New England courthouse down to the Keys.
The courthouse grounds comes with this oddity.
At least, odd to me.
A kapok tree, ceiba pentandra. Odd to more than just me. Enough people that the city put a sign describing kapok trees, next to this example of one. The sign’s a bit worse for wear.
Java cotton is one name for its fiber, which surely evokes distant islands.
More Key West signs.
Is this not a handsome building? And looks solid enough to stand in any mere wind.
Formerly the island’s Custom House, Post Office, Federal Courthouse and 7th District Lighthouse Offices. Built – the early 1890s – when architectural beauty wasn’t considered in conflict with the practice of republican government. These days, it’s the Key West Museum of Art & History.
Sure, the chicken has been crossing the road for a long time now, but how often did you actually see it?
Pretty often in Key West, is the answer.
I’m hard pressed to think of any other North American town with footloose chickens. As in, on the streets and sidewalks. Not out in rural areas, but even there you don’t seem to see that many. Then again, the Conch Republic is only tangentially a North American town. North Caribbean is another way to describe it.
“When people stopped the laborious process of turning live chickens into Sunday dinner many decades ago, some backyard chickens gained their freedom,” notes Florida Rambler. “Other roosters were released when cock-fighting became illegal.”
So, for this rooster, his great- great- however many great-granddaddy was a champion cock, known to betting men from here to Savannah?
They’ve gone on to a career of being local color, these birds, with forays in behaving like pests in people’s yards. They are feral, after all, living in the lushness that is Key West. Was the chicken ever considered for the Conch Republic flag? Probably not; chickens don’t get a lot of respect from people, unless they’re dinner.
Land meets sea in Key West. For encounters with sea creatures, one can hire a boat and some deep-sea fishing gear and make like Hemingway. We went to the Key West Aquarium instead. A sedate sort of place, a legacy of early 20th-century Key West, when tourists started coming in numbers.
I managed to make one of the employees, or volunteers, laugh a bit. A youngish woman, she took our tickets and said that if we wanted to touch any of the sea creatures – there were a few large tanks with rays and the like, touching allowed – use only two fingers.
“So you’ll still have three, right?” I said.
Most of the aquatic life was in smaller tanks. A nice selection, “home to over 250 specimens of fish, sharks and four of the five species of sea turtles that inhabit the waters of the Florida Keys,” the Aquarium web site says. Also, the place is a more manageable size. Not a big-deal world-class mega-aquarium that takes all day to visit. Not that those can’t be impressive. But we had a good hour as childfree adults at Key West Aquarium, and that was about the right length for a visit.
Besides fish, there are fishermen. Depression-era murals of fishermen, that is.
What a pleasant surprise. By the Civil Works Administration, a short-lived predecessor to the WPA. Not the originals, however, which were by an artist named Alfred Crimi (d. 1994). The Living New Deal says they’re more recent replicas.
Come to think of it, Hemingway would have known about the aquarium. Key West isn’t that big a place, and the attraction would have been fairly new when he and Pauline lived mere blocks away. Wonder whether he ever went there.
Of course, we’re used to thinking of the youngish Earnest as a hard drinking, hard fishing sort of guy. Notions that, I believe, Hemingway carefully cultivated. Not only did he create memorable characters for his books, he did for himself as well.
On a whim, I turned to an AI writer available on line, and fed it the following prompt:
Write an account of visiting the Key West Aquarium, in the style of Earnest Hemingway. Three paragraphs is sufficient.
All of 15 seconds later, the machine gave me this.
The aquarium sat low and white against the glare, and the heat lay on the street like a weight. Inside, the air was cooler and smelled of salt and old wood. The tanks were clean and plain, and the fish moved with the calm certainty of things that belong where they are. A tarpon held itself still in the water, strong and watchful, and its eye followed me as if it knew I was only passing through.
I stood by the open pool where they fed the fish, and the water broke suddenly with life. The fish came hard and fast, flashing silver and green, their bodies cutting the surface and falling back again. It was violent in a small way and honest. The men who worked there spoke little, and when they did it was direct, as if there were no reason to waste words on what could be seen.
When I stepped back outside, the sun struck again and the sea wind came down the street. The aquarium stayed behind me, quiet and contained, holding its ordered slice of the ocean. I thought of how the fish swam without doubt, and how good it must be to live so close to what sustains you. Then I walked on, feeling the heat, and the day continued.
I was expecting something from a bad Hemingway writing contest, but no. This is pretty good. Better than that, actually. A little wow moment for me, and the day continued.
