Category Archives: The West

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 […]

By Peter | Also posted in weather | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Isn’t That John Waters

June 8, 2012 – 5:46 pm

BACK AND FORTH my novel about hitchhiking cross-country is on the verge of completion. Two more segments will about my writing THE END on the last page. I’ve been trying to finish those two stories for most of April and May, but like a Texan two-laner the books keeps stretching toward an ever-distant horizon. Throughout […]

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