Category Archives: The West

BACK AND FORTH by Peter Nolan Smith CHAPTER 4 – UP HIGH

The afternoon sun hovered over the distant mountains and Sean checked the Inferno Bar’s clock. The hands were stuck on 10:24 and the bartender said, “It’s been broke for years. The regulars like that time. Mid-morning or three hours till closing.” Sean held out his hand to the gap between the sun and the shining […]

BACK AND FORTH by Peter Nolan Smith – CHAPTER 3 – LOOKALIKE

The Torino crossed the flooded Mississippi and passed heavily loaded semi-trailers laboring up a steep bluff. Davenport, Iowa wasn’t a big city, but river town had been even smaller, when a trucker had dropped Jack Kerouac in 1947. The sun had set without the beat writer catching a ride and Keroacc had backtracked to Davenport […]

Mark Frechette ZABRISKIE POINT

“As you get old, you forget. As you get older you are forgotten.” James Steele Some of us never get to be old or even older, especially those doomed by the James Dean’s curse ‘live fast, die, and leave a good-looking corpse’. Few men of the counter culture were as good-looking as Mark Frechette. In […]

Route 66 – Charles Brown

Full moon. A gulfstream slipping into the sky. Clipping a cloud. The silence of Round Hill Road. The mutter of a highway in the distance. Cars going nowhere, but nowhere is a destination for yesteday, today,and tomorrow. Sadly no one listens to Charles Brown.

GOING WEST by Peter Nolan Smith

Several years ago week my young nephew left Boston to drive to California. A good friend was accompanying Franka on his cross-country trip. Knowing the highways of America from coast to coast,I called to offer advice on a route. “We’re first driving to Pittsburgh to see my grandmother.” Zsa Zsa was in a nursing home […]