This is from the Summer 1988 edition of Chuck Woodbury’s newspaper, “Out West: The Newspaper That Roams”—the only “on the road” newspaper.
God, when he designed the creatures of Earth, designed birds with automobiles in mind. The feathery things are adept at dodging vehicles in nearly all situations.
They seem to know the right moment to avoid smashing into your windshield, but still fly close enough to scare the hell out of the driver. It’s just my opinion, but I think birds rather enjoy this version of the “chicken” game.
Chipmunks, too, were engineered with automobiles in mind, but with unfortunate results. When a chipmunk spots an approaching car, it immediately streaks with bullet speed across the road to safety. Then instinctively it fulfills a subliminal suicide wish by turning 180 degrees and rushing back onto the highway — just in time to be squished by a Goodyear radial.
Buzzards, crows and ravens, of course, are thankful for such behavior, for the fatally flattened rodents provide many a tasty lunch, sometimes cooked to beak-watering perfection by the hot asphalt.
Deer, too, have poor highway survival skills. They are a very pretty animal, but they were designed to do one of two things when they spot the headlights of an approaching automobile:
- If they are on the road, they freeze.
- If they are near the road, they freeze, but only for an instant, then run onto the road just in time to collide with the grill of your car.
While this is not good for the deer population, it is terrific for auto body repair shops.
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A Lovelock, Nev., business is named the Ruffles ‘n Rednecks Beauty Shop. Personally, I won’t be stopping by. Also in town, the Up-To-Date Laundry, Ayoob’s (clothing store) and Two Stiffs Mini Market.
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When you travel a lot, you sometimes forget what day it is. Most of the time it doesn’t matter. But sometimes it does. Like today. I plopped three quarters in a news rack for the Sunday Denver Post. Unfortunately, I forgot it was Saturday, not Sunday, so I ended up paying 75 cents for a 25-cent newspaper.
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At Beach Boulevard Burgers in Mesquite, Nev., restrooms are for buoys and gulls.
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A few things you want to avoid on the road. First: You should never follow a gravel truck. This is a great way to ruin your windshield. Second: You should never drive with an 18-wheeler truck ahead of you and one behind you. If the one in front stops fast, and you stop fast, but the truck behind you stops slow, you’re in trouble. Third: You should never follow behind a pickup truck or station wagon with kids riding facing backwards. When you get close, the kids will either stare at you or make faces, neither of which is pleasant.
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Ever since I defined a small town as “any place without a McDonald’s,” people have asked me for more definitions. Well, here are a few off the top of my head:
In a small town:
• Residents know their neighbors.
• The movie theatre has one screen.
• The market doesn’t have a quick-check line.
• Main Street is still the main street.
• The bank has human tellers, not machines.
• Gas stations still do repair work, and gas costs the same whether you pay with cash or credit card.
• People know their auto mechanic.
• Restaurant bathrooms don’t play Muzak.
• The Western Auto store is a big-time business.
• There are no elevators.
• The library can’t afford a photocopy machine.
• The mail only goes out once a day, and everybody knows what time.
• There are no lines at the post office.
• The biggest celebrity is the quarterback of the high school football team.
• Everybody knows the mayor.
• The police chief has a pot-belly.
• The best place to get news is at the cafe.
• The surnames in the phone book are the same ones on the cemetery headstones.
• Eight out of 10 waitresses chew gum.
• Push-button telephones aren’t available yet.
• Hamburgers are still called hamburgers at the drive-in.
• People use CBs, not cellular phones.
• Kids still go to public schools.
• The best car is a pickup truck.
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I worry about things breaking down. When I am on the road, I worry most about the engine in my motorhome quitting. Of course, I also worry about my cameras, the photo enlarger, my computer, and the motorhome’s shower, water pump and other mechanical conveniences.
A hundred years ago, people didn’t worry much about things breaking down — except for maybe their horse getting sick or their gun jamming before a shootout. They didn’t worry about their stereo, television, VCR or microwave falling apart. And lucky for them, they never had to do battle with a Monkey Ward salesman trying to sell them an extended warranty on a color TV.
Speaking of things breaking down, in retirement-oriented Sun City, Ariz., a prostate operation is so common among male residents that it’s referred to as a “Sun City Tonsillectomy.”
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“We should all leave our earthly existence with something to show for our years. It was with this thought in mind that I pointed my motorhome toward tiny Congress, Ariz. I only stayed 15 minutes, but that was long enough. Now, when someone asks me what I have accomplished in my lifetime, I can answer with all honesty that I spent some time in Congress.”
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Driving a two-lane across the Arizona desert today, I looked to the sky and saw the contrail of a western-bound 747. How high was the plane? Maybe 40,000 feet?
Around me was only sagebrush and a weathered billboard for a distant Dairy Queen. But up there, only seven-miles away, a silver cylinder of civilization sped toward California.
Aboard were people, suitcases, toilets, and even a service elevator to go from one deck to the other. And the whole package was heading west faster than a speeding bullet.
I wondered who was inside. A stewardess serving a martini to a businessman? A UCLA student reading her economics lesson? A little boy making his third trip to the bathroom?
Maybe a talkative fat guy with bad breath was offending the young woman in the next seat.
Maybe “Back To The Future” was playing on a movie screen.
Maybe a steward or stewardess was taking the elevator at that very moment. It didn’t seem right that up there in the sky someone was riding an elevator while I was on the ground below, dodging jack rabbits and Gila monsters.
I watched the plane for a few minutes, then it disappeared from my sight; in an hour, I figured, it would be landing in Los Angeles.
Me, I’d be a few miles up the road, sipping a Coke, smelling the sagebrush, and maybe even singing “I’m an Okie from Muskogee,” with Merle Haggard if it came on the radio.
Out in L.A., a traffic reporter would be climbing in his Cessna 172 for the evening traffic
It’s a different West from 40,000 feet all right—especially at night when it looks like a huge black sea with tiny islands of light. You can guess the cities, but you seldom know if you’re right. Grand Junction, Casper, or even Las Vegas seem so small from 40,000 feet.
The outposts—Ely, Nev., Winslow, Ariz., Thermopolis, Wyo., Baker, Calif.—are even harder to identify. At night, a town of 1,000 looks like 100 from seven miles up.
Finding highways is like playing a “connect the numbers” game, except you connect headlights—the tiniest pinpoints of light in the vast blackness. Draw an imaginary line between the lights and you’ve got the road.
When you fly coast to coast, with nothing much to do, you can look outside your window and marvel at the unpopulated West. You can marvel that in a world of gridlocked freeways, smoggy air and cellular telephones, there are still places with one-room schools, general stores and people who believe any town with a stoplight is too damn big.
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I passed by some children playing in a field today, and I flashed on a scene from my past. I was five, and lived in a neighborhood with five other little boys my age. Every day, we built forts in vacant lots and played hide and seek in our backyards. But on this day ,we decided to do something different: we decided to take off our clothes and sit in a walnut tree. The tree had no leaves, but that didn’t matter to five little boys with five little minds set on perching bare-ass naked in a tree begging to be perched upon.
So there we sat, pink and happy, watching the world pass by as we discussed girls we didn’t like, our kindergarten teacher, and our respective inventories of marbles. A few yards away, motorists drove by on their way to work or to Fred’s Market. Surely some of them must have spotted us.
That was the only time we ever sat in that tree, and the only time we ever took off our clothes together. Thinking back now, I laugh at how odd we must have looked to those who saw us.
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A great smell is when you open a coffee can and the pressurized air escapes, sending the coffee aroma right up into your nose. The smell is better than the coffee itself.
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I stopped at a theatre today to see the movie “Big” — the heartwarming tale of a 12-year-old boy who wishes to become an adult, then miraculously gets his wish. The movie reminded me of how much children yearn to become adults, then as adults yearn to be kids again.
Still, given the hypothetical opportunity to go back in time, nearly all adults would decline. It’s a feeling that most of us understand but could never put adequately into words.
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Speaking of words, last issue, I put a new question on the back page subscription coupon asking new subscribers where they learned about Out West. Most responses were: from a friend or relative, from a sample received in the mail, or from an issue purchased in a bookstore or campground. One man wrote that he found his copy in a garbage can — an honest reply, but not the kind a publisher’s ego is built on.
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Sign of the times: Next to a store-bought “Beware of Dog” sign in Pahrump, Nev., was a hand-drawn one: “He has AIDS.” I laughed at first, then got upset when I thought about how sad the sign would be to someone with the disease who read it. A few days later, I saw a similar sign in Mesquite, Nevada.
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I woke up this morning to the soothing rhythm of hoofbeats as a man rode by on a horse. I closed my eyes and savored the sound. This, I thought, is what civilization sounded like long ago, when there were no engines accelerating, no horns honking, no tires squealing, no DC-10s powering overhead on their way to 35,000 feet.
It was a pleasant, relaxing sound, but it only lasted a few minutes. A car drove up, and suddenly it was 1988 once again.
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I’ve always preferred land to sea, not being one to dream of sailing a yacht around the world. It seems to me that ocean, once you’ve seen a few straight days of it, might get boring. And there are no Squirrel Cafes, Yum Yum Donut Shops, or Sure Sleep Motels along the way, which would compound my boredom.
Today, however, camped in Red Rock State Park just east of Gallup, New Mexico, I feel as if I am upon the sea. The wind is howling outside, and my little motorhome is reeling as surely as if it were riding the top of a giant swell in the north Atlantic.
At the moment, I am not worried about tipping over. But in a few hours, in bed, when I’m suddenly awakened by a burst of wind, I will be certain in my half-sleep daze that I will soon be upside down and life as I know it will cease to exist.
So my hope now is that the wind will go blow somewhere else and leave me alone.
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Met a fellow today in the desert, in his mid-60s, I’d guess. “Got a girlfriend from Germany,” he told me. “She’s 50 but has a body of a 35-year-old.” He flashed a devilish grin. “Want to see her picture?” Curious, I nodded. So he grabbed his wallet, fiddled around a bit, then held up a color photo—of a woman wearing no clothes. “She’s proud of her body,” he said to wide-eyed me as he passed the photo to another equally wide-eyed guy nearby.
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There are times I want to break my clock. It just keeps ticking and ticking, always reminding me of passing time. The problem is that time keeps going faster and faster. It’s unfair. It should be the other way around: time should go slower as we get older, so we can enjoy ourselves more in our spare time.
Kids want to grow up fast, but time to them drags. It’s an eternity between Monday and Friday. For retired people, there is only Monday and Friday—no Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. It’s Monday, then it’s Friday—that’s the way it is.
When you’re a kid, Christmas comes once a long year. When you’re older, it seems like Santa’s always at the mall. And birthdays—they’re an eternity when still counted on fingers. When you’re older, you finish one cake and it’s time for another.
My days (when I’m not traveling) seem like this to me: get out of bed, take a shower, eat oat bran, drink coffee for a while, write for a while, watch the evening news, go to bed, get up again and take another shower. To be honest, sometimes I feel like I’m always in the shower.
I figure about the only way to make time slow down is to spend a lot of time in a dentist’s chair.
Speaking of time, I’ve done some rough calculations based on my years on this earth. I figure I’ve spent:
• 1.5 months getting ready for bed.
• 4 months getting out of bed.
• 3.5 years at a typewriter or computer
• 1.2 years in a bathroom (shower time included)
• 4 days in pit-toilets (no showers available, of course)
• 1 month brushing my teeth.
• 10.7 million seconds exhaling.
• 2.5 months combing my hair.
• 7 days clipping my toenails.
• 4.7 years driving a car (based on 8 hr. days).
• 4 months at stop lights.
• 2 days watching Vanna White turn letters.
• 4 hours watching Pat Sajak say “Oh, Vanna.”
• O seconds reading Vanna White’s book.
• 1 day at bank automatic teller machines (recent development).
• 1.3 years watching TV news.
• 1.8 years watching TV sit-coms.
• 5 months complaining about something.
Altogether, I estimate I’ve:
• Eaten the equivalent of two cows just in hamburgers and cheeseburgers alone.
• Used enough shampoo to supply a typical girls’ volleyball team for two years.
• Devoured enough French fries to fill a Holiday Inn hot tub.
• Used enough toothpaste that if squirted in one continuous line would go from one Rose Bowl goal line to the other and back again—twice!
• Driven the equivalent of a round trip to the moon plus 8.5 lunar orbits.
• Eaten enough bananas that if laid end to end, would form a curving line from one end of the Disneyland parking lot to the other.
• Thrown away enough trash to fill a dump about the size of Gila Bend’s.
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Watched a 20-minute film today at the visitors center at Death Valley National Monument. A young couple brought in two young boys, one of which screamed nonstop while the other roamed the aisles. The parents did nothing to stop the disruptive behavior. Sometimes you wonder how people can be so insensitive.
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Syndicated columnist Diane White doesn’t think much of Disney World. She can’t understand why John and Debbie Dennis and their family have visited there 17 times. The Dennises were profiled in USA Today.
“The thought is staggering,” White wrote in her column. “How many times can a person sit through the Country Bear Jamboree, the Hall of Presidents, the Pirates of the Caribbean before feeling lobotomized?”
Some folks, she said, might “see something slightly creepy, even Orwellian about the whole Disney bill of goods.”
Orwellian? We’re talking about an amusement park, not Philadelphia.
Disney World and Disneyland are popular places because they are wholesome places—where we have fun and do not feel guilty about it.
We can stroll down a main street without fear of being mugged. Drunks don’t walk up to us with their hands out. Prostitutes don’t stand on corners. Punk kids don’t drive by yelling obscenities as their tuned-up radios play something that sounds like music, but couldn’t be. Walt Disney built a place where we can escape. Most Americans work a tough 40-hour week. Then at home, they mow lawns, wash dishes, repair leaky faucets, make up beds, feed dogs, burp kids, and cook meals every few hours. Occasionally, they get a break. Sometimes they go to Disneyland (or World).
They walk in the front gate and what do they see? A Main Street just like the one grandma and grandpa remember. Try to find a main street these days, and you’ll find a shopping mall—with predictable stores and a hundred 16-year-olds cruising the aisles, flexing their hormones.
Disney spent enough money on his rides to make them terrific—not rip-offs like at county fairs. And in his parks, there are horses with carriages, double-decker buses, and street vendors that sell pretzels, not rock cocaine. And there’s Mickey and Donald, and Goofy – cartoon characters that make us smile.
Says White, “By that time, you’ve seen so many dancing, singing, chattering, chirping audioanimatronic figures you begin to wonder if some of your fellow tourists aren’t computerized replicas of human beings.”
Diane White, give us a break!
Before Chuck Woodbury started RVtravel.com, he spent many years in his RV on the road publishing his newspaper, “Out West: The Newspaper That Roams.” It was beloved by many.
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