Category Archives: The West

Going West

July 13, 2013 – 2:14 pm

This week my young nephew left Boston to drive to California. A good friend was accompanying Franka on his cross-country trip. I called to offer advice on a route. “We’re driving to Pittsburgh to see my grandmother.” Zsa Zsa was in a nursing home there. Seeing his face would make her happy. “Are you passing […]

By Peter | Also posted in California, Driving, family, Travel | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

135 IN THE SHADE by Peter Nolan Smith

June 29, 2013 – 4:23 pm

In the last week of August AK and I left Southern California on a cloudless morning. Our long vacation had come to an end. Victor drove us over the Hollywood Hills east out of the Valley. AK and the dancer sat in the front of the Mercedes convertible. I couldn’t hear their conversation with the […]

By Peter | Also posted in 60s, hitchhiking, semi-fiction, Travel | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Tough As Porter Rockwell

October 20, 2012 – 12:33 pm

My father claimed that Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormons, was a distant relative on his father’s side of the family. My aunt backed up his assertion, saying that our line of the family remained in Maine, while the prophet’s clan drifted from the mountains in Vermont to the religiously burned-over lands of Western […]

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LOOKALIKE by Peter Nolan Smith

July 19, 2012 – 10:52 am

A four-lane bridge spanned the flooded Mississippi and the Torino sped past heavily loaded semi-trailers creeping up a steep bluff. Davenport, Iowa wasn’t a big city, but it had been even smaller in 1947, when Jack Kerouac had been dropped in the middle of the prairie by a trucker. The sun had set without his […]

By Peter | Also posted in 70s, Driving, revolution, semi-fiction | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Burning Season

June 27, 2012 – 7:27 pm

Baptists ministers are adept at preaching fire and brimstone. Colorado Springs residents are getting a taste of Hell on Earth at an enormous fire burns out of control along Route 24. Police have evacuated the city and the governor has admitted that the city is at the mercy of the nature. “There is nothing firefighters […]

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