Survival Of The Stupidest

Charles Darwin was blessed to have circumnavigated the globe in the HMS Beagle.

His observations during the five-year voyage of the Southern Seas provided the young self-funded naturalist the time to develop with the theory of Natural Selection or Evolution as well as realized that throughout time Earth had experienced profound geological changes. No one in the western world was ready to accept his thoughts on Evolution and with good reason.

There is no such thing as survival of the fittest.

We are stupid creatures, but we can take a beating and learn nothing from it as evinced by the following photos of ladders.

Safety first.

Or "Let's get the job done."

"Aint' nothing better than drinking a beer after a job well-done."

ps. Darwin and the Bible don't know shit.

The stupid shall inherit the Earth, because they are stupid lucky.

Faster Than Light Beauty

I wish for a time machine to take me back to London.

1968.

Francoise Hardy on a motorbike.

I would have had a lot of competition and even though I would have only been 16, a good time would have been had by all.

Je l'adore.

In 1968 through eternity fast than speed itself.

To hear Francoise Hardy's version of the Kinks' WHO'LL BE THE NEXT IN LINE, please go to this URL;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S31Fe6BrFy8

Light Stops On A Dime

According to Wikipedia the f-number (sometimes called focal ratio, f-ratio, f-stop, or relative aperture[1]) of an optical system is the ratio of the lens's focal length to the diameter of the entrance pupil.[2] It is a dimensionless number that is a quantitative measure of lens speed, and an important concept in photography.

The constriction of light through an aperture has nothing to do with its constant speed, however German scientists at the University of Darmstadt have claimed to have frozen light for a single minute to test its quantum coherence properties (i.e. its information state) in hopes of someday breaking the speed limit of light.

This phenomena naturally occurs in diamonds, in which light slows to half-speed.

Another reason why diamonds are a women's best friend.

They stop time for their beauty.

The Germans under their group leader George Heinze brought the speed of its light to zero, proving they are no constants in this universe.

Only variables of constancy, then again anyone who has lived with a woman knows that oh too well.

The Vanishing of Belief

My aunt Gloria loved to tell the story about my baptism. The christening was on a hot June day in 1952. Her husband was my godfather. He wore Marine officer whites and a smile. Uncle Jack was glad to be back from Korea. The priest recited the rites and my aunt said as soon as he mentioned Satan that I started bawling like I was possessed by the Devil.

"You didn't stop crying until you were out of the church."

My aunt was a good Catholic as was my mother. They sent their children to Our Lady of the Foothills to educate us in the Ways of the Church and I had entertained an avocation for the priesthood until my best friend drowned in Lake Sebago. Chaney was a good boy. No god should have let him die, however my friend had perished without any divine assistance and I rejected the existence of god from that day on.

I was 8.

I refrained from telling my mother about this apostasy. She would have been devastated by my atheism and I acceded to her wishes that I serve as an altar boy at our local church.

"Who knows? Maybe one day you'll be a priest like your uncle." The priesthood was a favored destination for second sons.

"Maybe one day."

But there was no chance that I would regain my faith. My soul was lost to heaven and hell. My godless spirituality was a secret to friends and family for years, since most Americans couldn't get their head around the idea of life without religion. Non-believers were considered heretics to be avoided by the faithful until President Obama recognized non-believers in this inauguration speech.

We were on the map and neither the Vatican nor the Baptist ministry could deny our presence in the modern world. Our numbers are estimated to be about 15% of the US population and our ranks are growing so fast that the Vatican has proposed a meeting in Paris between believers and non-believers, although I can't see any reason for dialogue with our persecutors.

They can go their way and I will go mine.

A man at peace with the cosmos.

We are not alone.

We are together.

Humans and the stars.

For I was only crying at the Baptism because I was rejecting not only Satan and all his deeds, but god and his too.

Moonshine, Masturbation, and Eclipses By Peter Nolan Smith

Children are cruel by nature. Young boys and girls instinctively bully the weak and ridicule the infirm. There was nothing funnier than a cheap trick at the cost of a poor unfortunate in keeping with the ageless adage, "Comedy is when a beggar falls down the stairs. Tragedy is when a duchess does."

In the early 60s our teachers and parents offered the blind/deaf/mute idol Helen Keller as an icon of individual triumph. Anne Bancroft won the Academy Award for her portrayal of the teacher who brings light to a young Alabaman girl without the power to speak, hear, or see in THE MIRACLE WORKER .

It didn't take long for Helen Keller jokes to hit the grade school circuit.

How did Helen Keller's parents punish her?

They moved the furniture.

Her triple affliction gave healthy children comfort that they were normal, however our parents and teachers swiftly instilled a new fear in callous youth unafraid of the Devil.

At age ten my sins were small; mostly disobeying my parents and telling lies. The priest in the confessional announced my penance in a hushed voice, "Ten Hail Marys and two Our Fathers."

These prayers cleansed the black spots from my soul, however my innocence was soon challenged by a deadly scourge signaled by waking in the middle of the night with pajamas soaked by a sticky substance. This oddity was a terrible embarrassment for a 12 year-old.

Bed-wetting was for babies.

I hid my shameful affliction by washing my PJs the next morning.

My father was dumbfounded by my obsession with clean bedwear.

"You're pissing in his bed," my older brother kidded me about a regression to infantilism.

"No, I'm not." I threatened him with a beating. I was taller by two inches.

"I've seen the wet spot."

I didn't know how to handle my shame, until my best friend Chuckie Manzi solved the mystery by opening the Boy Scout Handbook to a small section entitled NOCTURNAL EMISSIONS.

"It's when your balls are too loaded with semen and you shot a load without even knowing it."

"That's not what they say in the Handbook." I showed him the text.

"At times the glands discharge part of their secretions through the sex organ during sleep. This process is called a nocturnal emission or a “wet dream”. It is perfectly natural and healthy and a sign that nature has taken care of the situation in its own manner.

"There you have it, even the Boy Scouts say it's normal."

Normal was important to us. No one wanted to be weird.

I read more from the Handbook, which stated that there are boys who do not let nature have its own way with them but cause emissions themselves. This may do no physical harm, but may cause them to worry.

Any real boy knows that anything that causes him to worry should be avoided or overcome. If anything like this worries you, this is not unusual – just about all boys have the same problem. Seek the correct answer to any question which bothers you about your development from boy to man. But be sure to get your information from reliable sources – your parents, your physician, your spiritual adviser.

"I'm not talking to the priest or my parents about this."

Chuckie shook his head.

"Keep your confession to the normal and never tell the priest about that."

"Why not?"

"Because some of them are not right."

By 'not right' Chuckie meant that they liked to touch boys. None of our parish priests were that way, but I limited my confession to swearing and disobeying my parents, even after I osmotically learned how to effect nocturnal emissions.

No boys told the priests about touching themselves after dark, for masturbation was a mortal sin threatening the immortal soul.

For the Church sex was strictly for procreation. Pleasure in the act disrupted the natural order of life and the priests warned their young male parishioners that wasting the holy seed of life endangered the sense of sight.

"You could go blind or suffer from effeminacy."

The man across the street from my parents' house was queer. Arthur flew jets for Eastern Airlines. His boyfriend, Joe, coached football. Chuckie and I suspected them of masturbating each other.

"It's what queers do, isn't it?"

"How should I know."

That spring the mystery of men with men was solved by the discovery of rotting stroke books in the woods of the Blue Hills. Queers did everything married couples did in bed and more according to the moldy paperbacks titled 'JOCKS ON FIRE' or 'COCK-MAD COACHES'. I whacked off to pages 75-78 of THE ITCH about seven hundred times without losing my eyesight, although my sight worsened throughout the end of grammar school.

My seat was moved to the front of the class. I got good grades. Bullies didn't like smart kids with glasses. The beatings were painful, but at least I hadn't had my eyes plucked from their sockets like Tyrone Power in PRINCE OF FOXES. Orson Welles played Cesare Borgia.

Blind teenagers were sent to a special school for the blind, deaf, and dumb. The nuns taught them how to live in the normal world. People said those school were more special for other reasons and none of them good.

In high school the brothers were hip to drugs. The vice-principal held an assembly to inform us of the danger of looking into the sun. The guest speaker was an acid head who had stared into the sun during a total eclipse.

"All I can see is the sun. Nothing but the sun."

I used my savings to buy prescribed sunglasses. Eclipses were rarely announced on teenage TV. Being an ex-Boy Scout I had been trained to 'be prepared', plus Ray-Bans were the height of style in the 1960s.

Girls thought that they were cool. The bullies stopped hurting me. They liked the girls who liked my glasses. The nuns tried to stop me from wearing them in classes. My optometrist said I had sensitive eyes.

Doctor Shaw wasn't scared of the nuns. He was Jewish.

The last threat to my eyes was moonshine.

Two year ago I bought a gallon from a Mississippian hanging around Frank's Lounge in Fort Greene. I tried a few sips of Homer's concoction and the corn mash burned a light in my stomach. A match to a spoon filled with the illegal alcohol ignited a blue blaze. This meant the 'shine was clean.

A yellow fire was cause for caution, for rotgut moonshine can blind or kill the unsuspecting, mostly if the manufacturer isn't too tidy with his contraptions such as a car radiator, which offers a deadly concoction of lead and anti-freeze.

A high-minded distiller will 86 the 'foreshot' of the batch i.e. the first offering from the still. After that it's white-line fever and I see the light.

And I still suffer from nocturnal emissions.

It's only natural.

ROADS OF THE FLYOVER Part 3 by Peter Nolan Smith

Threatening clouds huddled over the Iowa cornfields. Monstrous flashes strobed through the thunderheads. The still air was charged with electricity.

"Have you ever seen a tornado?" Brock asked with his video recorder out the window.

"Only in WIZARD OF OZ." Twisters killed people and I stepped on the gas. Brock studied the map. We hadn't seen a single human being for an hour.

We're heading north, right?" The Scotsman couldn't drive, but as a covert agent he knew the points of the compass.

"Yes." I was headed away from the storm front.

"You know where?"

"Roughly."

The unpaved rural road paralleled US 169. No one in New York or London had ever traveled this route through Iowa.

"When you think that family left that house?" asked Brock, as we passed a one-story farmhouse haunting an overgrown yard.

"Back in the 90s." The paint was peeling off its wood like potato chips.

"Stop."

Brock was the boss and I punched the brakes to batslide to a halt on the dirt road.

I got out of the rented Ford and shut of the engine.

The storm lurked farther to the south. The mutter of distant thunder invaded the still spring fields. I didn't feel safe.

Brock set up his camera and explained more about his documentary on a dying Irish sculptor.

"Barry once said to a journalist, “I enjoy the third dimension and I appreciate material in time and space. I find it exciting to the eyes.”

"Then he'll love this." The strengthening wind bent the trees. The four elements were gathering force.

"Barry will love this."

The Irish sculptor was losing control of his body back on Ibiza.

"Let's go." I didn't like the look of the sky.

Thirty miles down the road we stopped at the Blackcat Fireworks store.

The sky was clearing. We had outrun the storm.

Brock tried my cellphone.

There was no service.

"I love a little pyrotechnics." He entered the store and spent $100 on rockets and M80s.

Four days ago Brock had been in Afghanistan and he was homesick for the sounds of war.

Twenty minutes later we braked on a empty road. Iowa had thousands of them. We pulled out the fireworks. I lit the fuses and Brock watched the explosions.

"Not even close to the real thing," he said, as the report of the last M80 faded into the treeline.

"Much louder?"

"Much." He didn't want to talk anymore about it and we got back in the car.

Our next destination was Des Moines, which was Iowa's capitol.

We arrived after 5.

The city was devoid of people.

"Is America dead?" Brock said, as if a plague had killed my countrymen.

"After work people flee the cities for the suburbs."

Des Moines has suburbs?

"

They were the great social experiment of the 60s." I had grown up in a pink split-level ranch house south of Boston. It had a two-car garage. "Cars gave Americans freedom to go where they wanted."

"Away from blacks?"

"Yes." Iowa was 95% white. My hometown had a population of 25,000. Only three families were black. "Segregation is the American Way."

I drove to the Flanagan hare at the city's Art Center. I stayed in the car, as Brock focused his camera on the statue. He interviewed homeless people for their impression of the hare. No one else's was left in the city. I called Thailand.

My son Fenway was better.

His mother was angry at me.

"Why you go trip? Why you not see son?"

I said nothing, because a man is always wrong in the eyes of his woman and I missed Fenway

We spent the night on the outskirts of Des Moines. Brock and I ate ribs at the restaurant was next to the motel. The TV over the bar showed fast cars. This was Nascar Country. At the end of the meal I ordered a doggie bag. Neither of us could finish our ribs.

"Why did Barry sculpt hares?" I discerned no difference between hares and rabbits.

"One day he bought a dead rabbit from a butcher in England and remembered a jumping hare. To him the hare represented freedom. All kinds of freedom."

"Freedom is a rarity in America these days. All kinds of freedom."

"Better than Afghanistan."

"I'm sure."

"What about your hippie friend? Doesn't he live in Iowa?"

"Thanks for reminding me. No one was freer than Rockford back in the day."

I loved being a hippie almost as much as being young.

Before I went to sleep, I called my friend Rockford in Iowa City.

The old hippie was looking forward to seeing us.

"I have a surprise for you."

"What?" I hated surprises.

"You'll see when you get here."

The next morning we left Des Moines. Silos towered over the old highway.

"This is farmland." Iowa was the center of America.

"Corn and wheat."

"Tortillas and bread."

"And prisons. My friend Rockford spent two years at the state penitentiary. It's across the Mississippi from Illinois."

"I doubt he had a room with a view. What he get done for?" Brock was very open-minded for a spy.

"The police raided his farmhouse for pot." Rockford had been growing weed on his Back Forty. Someone had snitched him out on a plea bargain. Snitches were a problem everywhere. "Growing pot is a felony, but the police also found some cocaine and the judge hit Rockford with a three-year bid."

"Better here than Bagram prison in Kabul."

"Bad?." I had seen pictures. The government claimed the abuse was an isolated case, but the US military and CIA had tortured thousands.

"Very bad."

"Rockford doesn't talk about it.

"Most people don't. Are we're meeting him tonight?"

"But of course. Rockford and I go back to an acid trip on Moonlight Beach in 1974. "LSD? Do tell."

I told the story of speaking with seals, as we followed the train tracks out of Des Moines. Brock laughed upon hearing about my attempt to speak French with the seal.

"What's for lunch?"

It was getting near noon.

"There's this old Pietist colony in Amana." Iowa had plenty of religious sects. We had passed through several Memmonite communities and seen Amish in horse-drawn buggies.

"Pietists?"

"An old German sect rejected Lutheranism back in the 1700s." I had no idea about their tents, but hazarded a guess. "The Lutherans were too zealous. They fought wars over their beliefs. The Pietists fled Germany and then America. Iowa is a good state for freedom of religion. They were skilled craftsmen and now make refrigerators."

"I knew Amana sounded familiar." Brock had lived in America for a decade as a playwright. The Arts were a good cover for covert agents. "Their food has to be better than McDonalds."

"We'll soon find out." I turned off the highway.

Only a few tourists were visiting the Heritage site. It was still too early in the season. I ordered chicken pot pie and Brock chose a ham steak. The waitress served us water. There was no beer on the menu.

Brock filmed our meals.

"Barry likes to see everything."

"How much longer you think he has."

He had been a young man as had Brock and I had once been back in the 70s.

"He might last to the end of the summer." Brock intended on visiting the artist in Ibiza after our return to New York and aimed the camera in my direction.

"Hmmm good." I knew how to act for Brock.

Nice and natural.

At the end of our meal Rockford called from his farm to make a rendezvous at a sports bar in Iowa City.

"What do you think he has for us?"

"I can only guess."

Something told me it was something good.

Rockford and his son met us at a bar on the outskirts of town. I hadn't seen John since he was a baby. He was a teenager now.

I gave John a Ferrari jacket from my defunct internet site. He loved it being red. His friends picked him up. They were going to a movie.

"What?" I hoped it wasn't a blood and guts slasher film.

"Star Trek."

"Cool." I had been a Trekkie from the beginning and said "Live long and prosper."

We ordered another round and spoke with the bartender. Jake was back from a 3rd tour in Iraq.

"It sucked and my commanding officer wants to go again."

"Bastard."

"You got that right."

Three right-wingers were drinking Bud-Lite at the bar and I overheard the chubby one said, "This country was founded on conservative values."

I slammed down my PBR.

"This country was founded on Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, so shut the fuck up about your conservative values." I liked Obama as president. These three said nothing and drank their Bud-Lites.

Brock shook his head. He liked sleath instead of brawn.

"Was he like this when he was younger?" asked Brock.

"Our friend has always had a good temper, but with good cause." Rockford stared with eight ball eyes at the threesome and suggested we move to the Deadwood, which was Iowa City's best dive bar.

"Sounds good to me>"

Brock and I had more front teeth than any of the regulars at the Deadwood. The Iowa U co-eds danced to punk. They accepted our offers of tequila. After a few minutes Rockford broke out a small bottle packed with powder."

"Here's my surprise. Bolivian Pink 1975.

"No way." The Cali cartel had destroyed cocaine in the 80s with the help of the CIA an the Mexican gangs were even worse.

"I've been keeping it for a special occasion and nothing more special than an old friend visiting me." Rockford offered me the first blast. I did it at the bar.

1975 had been a good year.

"Was he a hippie back then?" Brock's 'he' was me.

I hated being third-person.

"Not even close, but he was good people." Rockford knew my soul.

I got another blast.

2009 was even better, because we were alive and alive was all there was everywhere in the world.

At closing the coeds asked, "Are you going?"

"Going where?" I was hoping a cheap hotel.

"To River City."

"What's in River City?'

"It's the future birthplace of James T. Kirk."

A minute later we were in a taxi heading south. Brock, Rockford, and I were in no condition to drive.

We arrived at the small town to discover that there wasn't a statue, but a plaque.

I cried just the same and had the taxi driver take us back to the hotel. I was ready to call it a night, but Rockford wasn't in the mood for sleep and poured out the rest of the Bolivian Pink. Brock and laid our heads on the pillow.

"This is a night to remember. The night you came to Iowa City and my ice let me out of the town.

I slept until dawn.

I sat up in bed and looked out the window.

Prairie grass ran up to the hotel.

"Hope I didn't keep you up." His voice was a growl native to the Hawkeye State.

"Not at all."

"I guess I'll be going. My wife will be real happy to see me, but I have a good excuse."

I was certain that my name belonged to that excuse.

"It was nice to meet you." Brock stirred from his bed.

"I wish you could stay longer."

"Me too." Brock was no angel, but a museum in Minneapolis was expecting him tomorrow.

Rockford said good-bye and drove back to his farm. We skipped the motel's complimentary breakfast. Our stomach were in no condition for food. We drank black coffee on I-380 northbound.

It wasn't a pretty road, but it was fast.

I pushed the Ford to 90.

We had to make some time.

And time was easy to make on the highway especially with James T. Kirk at my back.

He liked fast too.

Warp speed fast.

ROADS OF THE FLYOVER Chapter 1 by Peter Nolan Smith

The Old crew met at Miguel Abreau's Gallery on Orchard Street to honor Brock Dundee's documentary about Afghanistan for the UK MoD. The Scot had flown in helicopters to battle sites and crossed the mountains on foot with the assassins of the SAS. At dinner Dannatt joked that his old friend was a spy.

"Spy?" Brock gave the art critic a steely squint.

Dundee was a Scot same as everyone employed at MI6, including James Bond, although according to my sources Brock worked for no one.

For the rest of the night Dannatt's jokes were at everyone's expense other than the happy Scot. Dannatt knew his place in the world. He was not a Celt.

Brock was in an expansive mood. He had money in his pocket. His wife Joanna was selling her paintings and his kids were healthy.

"It's nice to be someplace you can drink a beer without having to worry about a bullet chaser." Afghanistan wasn't a joke and Brock asked, "You?"

I haven't seen my kids in months." They were on the other side of the world like their mother. "I'm working on 47th Street."

"How's that going?" Brock was familiar with my gig in the diamond district.

I was the shabbath goy.

"I've had better years."

That bad?"

"Sometimes worse, but I'm working on a million-dollar ruby sale." I had met the client in January. She loved the 6-carat pigeon-blood red ruby from Burma. Her husband was fighting for a better price.

"And?"

"My boss thinks it's a dead deal."

And is it?"

Manny had little faith in miracles, but miracles were my speciality.

"I'll surprise everyone."

"I know." Brock was familiar with my strengths as well as my weaknesses.

"At least I'm taking care of my kids."

Supporting four children were a struggle, but one which I fought with honor.

"How'd you like to take a trip?"

"Where?" I hoping to hear Thailand.

"Chicago-St. Louis-Kansas City-Iowa City-Minneapolis-Chicago." Brock was serious. "I'm shooting a film about Barry Flanagan.

"The Irish sculptor? Doesn't he do rabbits?"

"Not rabbits, hares," Brock explained further that the sculptor was very sick. His project was to film Barry's sculptures around the USA and show them to the artist in Ibiza.

"Before he dies."

"Of what?"

"Motor neuron disease."

"Shit." The great Yankee first baseball had died of a similar disease.

"Not a good way to go."

"Is there any?"

I shook my head and asked the Scot, "Why do you need me?"

"Because I can't drive." Brock shrugged with a wry grin.

"No?" Every spy in the world could drive a car.

Especially James Bond.

"Never have, so I'll pay you $1500 plus expenses to be my getaway driver."

"Count me in." I loved road trips.

Two weeks later I met Brock at his midtown hotel. He had been drinking most of the morning.

"I left Kabul two days ago."

It was a hard town and even more so because it had been a paradise for the hippies with its hashish and tribal life.

This times were gone and gone for good for a long time.

"Well, you're back now." I could smell the Khyber Pass on him. I paid the bar bill. The bartender said, "You be careful. The airlines might not let him on the plane."

"He'll be fine."

I was Irish. We believed in good luck.

Brock slept throughout the taxi ride to JFK.

We hit the Sushi Bar at the Jet Blue Terminal for raw tuna and cold saki.

"I could use a little pick-me-up."

I felt that I was the minder for Kingsley Amis. Afghanistan had obviously been worse this trip and I kept pace with Brock.

I had a reputation for drink too.

An hour later Jet Blue called our flight. Brock and I boarded the overcrowded 737. I opted for the window seat. Brock lifted his bag into the overhead compartment. The chubby steward closed the door on my friend's fingers.

"Ouch."

Brock winced in pain.

The steward regarded Brock and declared with religious disdain, "You're drunk and you're not flying to Chicago on this plane."

He marched us to the front of the plane. The pilot and co-pilot stood at the door. We were not 9/11 terrorists and I explained to the pilot that Brock had returned from Afghanistan.

"Back in the 90s he had traveled with the Mujahideen. He's not Army."

"Oh." The pilot caught my drift.

In 1842 only one British soldier escaped the fall of Kabul.

The army had numbered 15,000.

I couldn't say what Brock had been doing over there, but I believed that he had been making a film. I knew his protectress the honorable Alice. We were all good friends.

The pilot bought the story, because it was true.

"We'll put you on a flight for tomorrow morning."

I thanked him and ordered Brock not to say a word.

Stranded at JFK we booked into the Ramada Plaza. The hotel had fallen on hard times, but the bar was filled with Deadheads migrating from the legendary band's New York stand to the next gig in the South. We hung out with two guys from California. They were both named Steve. They didn't care that Jerry Garcia was dead.

"The Dead will never be dead."

We drank to the souls of Jerry Garcia and Pigpen.

The bartender cued up DARK STAR and ST. STEPHEN.

It was a good night to stranded at the Ramada

Te next morning Brock and I caught the early flight. The flight attendants showed us to our seats.

Two hours later we hired the rented car at O'Hare. I drove on the Interstate. I-70 took us directly to St. Louis. The truck traffic on the Interstate was a horror.

"You mind, if you take back roads?"

"That's why you're here. To drive. This film is as much about the trip as it is the sculpture. Barry's dying. He wants to see the world."

"Then I'll show him the Fly-Over."

A million square miles of corn, wheat, and soy on flat plains.

"Fly-Over?" Brock was unfamiliar with the term.

"It's what people from LA and New York call the land under them on Trans-continental flights.

I got off the highway to enter a world forgotten by all.

"Two hundred years ago no one traveled on roads. The rivers took them south to New Orleans. The Mississippi, the Illinois, the Missouri and many others."

"America," Brock said the word, as if it were holy.

We drove south without seeing any red lights.

Joliet was on the Des Plaines River. We passed the Correctional Institute, which seemed to be the only thriving business in town.

"They filmed THE BLUES BROTHERS here." Brock was a film buff.

"The opening scene."

"The classics."

After crossing the river at West Jackson, we passed under I-80 on the way to Peoria. There was little traffic along the river road.

The Illinois River valley was wide.

Once hundreds of ships plied the river's muddy current.

Today Peoria was a ghost town of abandoned factories.

Its steel was turning to rust.

The Caterpillar factory was working a single shift.

Someone somewhere still had money for gas and I stepped on the accelerator to get us out of town.

The farmlands were desolate through Illinois.

We arrived in St. Louis.

There wasn't much left of the city on the Mississippi.

Brock said, "St. Louis is a zombie movie backdrop."

We opted against staying at the downtown hotel and drove to a suburban motel not far from the Cahokia Indian Mounds.

Over ten thousand people had lived here in the 1400s.

It had been bigger than London.

I had slept atop the ancient monuments in 1972 and had seen a single ghost.

It had been a ghost town.

That night Brock and I shared a room. The Flanagan family was paying us a per diem. We went down to the bar for happy hour.

On my third margharita my cell rang.

My wife Mam was calling from Sriracha in Thailand. My son Fenway was sick. I had to wire money. The only Western Union was in East St. Louis. I beelined into a dark neighborhood of abandoned buildings and empty lots and wired $150 express.

On the way back to motel a highway cop stopped me on the highway. The trooper said that I washed been speeding and I explained my story about sending my sick son money via Western Union. The receipt helped. He believed me and let me go. I was a lucky drunk.

In the morning we topped the rental car with gas and drove to the Canokia Indian Mounds.

"These were the largest structures in North America until the 1900s." Canokia's population had been greater than any 13th Century city in Europe. "I once camped on the top of that mound."

"Alone?"

"No, I was with a Texas insect professor. His van had been packed with spiders. Sleeping under the stars seemed safer." It had been quiet that night.

Today I-70 generated a constant grind of traffic.

Brock and I climbed the hundred-foot high earthen pyramid. The Mississippi shone in the distance. Tall trees blotted out most of the present.

"It could almost be any time, if you shut your ears." Brock filmed our surroundings.

The highway was closer than I remembered from 1972.

Five miles down the road a rival mound had ben constructed from garbage.

No one was allowed to climb on garbage dump and we rode over the Mississippi into St. Louis.

"It looks different in the day." Brock focused on the Arch.

"St. Louis was once the fourth largest city in the USA."

"And now?"

"58th." I had read that information online at the motel.

In 1996 Barry Flanagan had erected the Nijinsky Hare next to the new St. Louis Hockey Arena. I recounted Bobby Orr's goal against the Blues to Brock. I doubted the Checkerdome's replacement had a photo of that iconic goal.

"What do you think of the Hare?" Brock broke out his camera. He was shooting commando-style without a permit.

"The Hare is good for all." I told myself that I had to read something about these statues.

Brock interviewed workers and commuters coming off the trolley.

Everyone liked the Hare.

After leaving the Gateway City we meandered up the Mississippi. The river was lapping over the banks. Floods were a serious business along the Father of All Waters.

This was Mark Twain land.

"Do you have any friends out in the Fly-Over?" Brock was speaking to me. I was the only person in the car.

"In Kansas City and Iowa."

"Are you going to see them?"

"I guess." I hadn't seen Ray and Rockford in years. "They'll give you another view of America."

"Barry will like that."

And me too.

I turned west at Louisiana and crossed back the river into Missouri on the Champ Clark Bridge. The five-span truss bridge ran high over the Mississippi for over 2000 feet.

"Good-bye, Illinois," said Brock, filming our passage.

"And hello Missouri." It was a second time in the Show Me State today.

We were on our way to Kansas City and according to Wilbert Harrison, "They had a lot of pretty girls there."

And one of Barry's hares too.