Time flies!

The van’s gonna be thirty years old soon. My ’89 Ford Aerostar extended cargo-van was born at the St. Louis Assembly Plant in Hazelwood, Missouri. The plant opened in 1948 during the golden age of American manufacturing. Rocinante started it’s career as a working truck for a painting contractor. On a hot day you can still smell the paint. The painter was a gambler and the van was used to settle a gambling debt but the new owner was a drunk and banged it up a little bit. The next owner used it to take an auto body course and fixed it up pretty nice taking out the dents and putting on a fresh coat of paint. I named the van ‘Rocinante’ after Don Quixote’s horse. Rocinante is not only my van, but also my double: a little rusty, past its prime, and engaged in a task beyond its abilities.

Once upon a time in the west a man took a ride in a van. Now everything Kaimee said to me about saving the world started making sense. I stopped by a Trading Post on the way out of town and asked the clerk, “Do you know anything about a guy going around playing the harmonica? He’s someone you’d remember. Instead of talking, he plays. And when he better play, he talks.”

The clerk laughed and said, “You oughta be in the movies. Check out Newspaper Rock on the way to Monument Valley. Maybe Harmonica left a message for ya there.”

cLiK for story

We owe a lot of our ghost towns to the Gold Rush, when communities sprang up around lucrative mines and were abandoned, almost overnight, as soon as everything stopped being so lucrative. Others are casualties of the death of Route 66, or even still inhabited — but only by the final three or four people who refused to leave. cLiK for story