The Driveway

Took care of some last minute details before departing on the Southwest Adventure. One was the installation of the driveway on the land. (Straw) Hats off to Chambers County for doing a cracker-jack job on the culvert installation. Benny Frank and Whitfield of the County crew did a masterful job in feathering the stones and sculpting the ditches. The 15” cement culvert is 32 feet long, plenty of room to maneuver the Airstream in and out. In the first picture, Whitfield is congratulating The Old Goat on his excellent supervision of the job. In the second, note the expertly crafted ditch work that Benny Frank did with the backhoe – the man runs it as well as a concert violinist plays a Stradivarius.



The first step in the Southwest Adventure is complete. I drove about fifteen hours and reached the edge of the wilderness – Missouri – just in time for a hell of a thunderstorm. The winds and rain forced me to take shelter at a nice camp spot. The only damage suffered by the Casita was the loss of one of the ceiling port covers which I replaced this morning. Otherwise, all equipment is working as advertised. I am ready to step (drive) into the abyss of the Great American Desert, the Plains. In anticipation of this event, I read Tim Egan’s book, The Worst Hard Time, a beautifully written story about those who stuck it out and survived the Dust Bowl days. Part of me subscribes to the thesis that the Great Plains should return to a super-nova national park without roads or fences, a place set aside for the buffalo to roam. (There is a interesting little work by a guy named Pomper entitled “The Buffalo Commons” that outlines this notion more thoroughly. The expanse is not intended by Nature to be farm land. One of the amazing story lines that Egan traces in his work is how the mind can be fooled into thinking that man can tame Nature. It was the accepted notion in the 19th and early 20th centuries that if you plowed the prairie, the mere act would create an energy in the environment and cause rain. The famous, “rain follows the plow” bumper sticker. Real estate speculators and greedy investors, thus, sold thousands and thousands of ordinary people on moving to the Plains based on a lie. It is not terribly different than what we are now experiencing where speculators sold too many Americans on home ownership when, clearly, they could not afford the mortgages. Old story, different time, same culprit – greed.