Category Archives: The West

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

December 11, 2017 – 2:39 pm

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 […]

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Mark Frechette ZABRISKIE POINT

June 20, 2017 – 4:17 pm

“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 […]

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Route 66 – Charles Brown

December 12, 2016 – 10:22 pm

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.

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GOING WEST by Peter Nolan Smith

September 23, 2015 – 11:16 am

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 […]

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Bonneville Salt Flats from BACK AND FORTH a hitchhiking novel from Peter Nolan Smith

September 20, 2014 – 11:19 am

The dawn sun burned misty shadows off the distant mountains and its stark brightness seared through my eyelids. I rose from my sleeping bag to drink in the austere surroundings. A white flatness stretched around me forever and a hissing wind pelleted my face with ancient brine. This was the Bonneville Salt Flats. A quick […]

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