I had been on the road since before dawn, rolling east on county blacktop that uncoiled through the hills like a length of knotted rope. Mile after mile, Josie’s two‑liter heart kept its brittle tempo—thrum‑thrum‑thrum—while my own thoughts wandered farther than the tires ever would. Out there a man has time to weigh himself against the horizon and come away small, a dust mote hitchhiking on the breath of America. When the green shield that read Siloam Springs—Next Right flashed by, I felt the sudden, inexplicable tug a traveler knows: slow down, turn in, see what waits.

Siloam Springs sits exactly where Arkansas ends and possibility begins, half river‐town, half college borough, with one foot planted in yesterday’s red clay and the other testing the quicksand of tomorrow. Fewer than two thousand souls in 1893; a handful more than seventeen thousand now. Numbers swell and contract like lungs, yet Main Street keeps its brick corset laced tight. I nosed Josie into the historic district just as morning slipped, unnoticed, into noon.

The town felt poised—like a stage set moments before the curtain lifts. Barricades angled across the cross‑streets; children scurried with fistfuls of miniature flags; an old collie, gray about the muzzle, tugged at its leash as if it too sensed the imminence of spectacle. I eased the van to the curb beside an apothecary storefront whose beveled glass still bore the gold‑leaf letters of yesteryear. Josie’s engine clicked down into silence. The parade, they said, would begin any minute.

I stepped out beneath a sky the color of boiled tin. November light, pale as skimmed milk, washed over brick façades and left the mortar lines glowing. The wind smelled of wood‑smoke and distant sycamore leaves moldering in the gullies east of town. Down the block a volunteer in an orange vest directed traffic with the serene authority that only belongs to small‑town officials and old barn cats. I asked him what was happening.

“Veterans Day, mister. We parade every year—rain, shine, or politics.” He grinned, tipped a sweat‑darkened ball cap, and waved the next pickup into a church lot.

There is a particular kind of darkness that clings to the soul. Not the honest darkness of night that whispers promises of dawn. This is a murky twilight where shadows take on weight and hope becomes a stranger. In Antlers, Oklahoma, a woman named Cate Gubanov knows this darkness all too well. At 32, she has lived and breathed it, allowed it to seep into her very bones until the taste of clean air and the warmth of unblemished sunlight are but distant memories.

They say every journey into the abyss starts somewhere else, in a different life where choices stand like open doors rather than sealed-off windows. Cate's story isn't unique in its beginnings—hard times breeding harder choices, each step down that shadowed road seeming as inevitable as the pull of gravity. The needle, the pipe, the pill—they all ride shotgun in her life and never relinquish their hold.

Cate's story isn't unique in its beginnings—hard times breeding harder choices, each step down that shadowed road seeming as inevitable as the pull of gravity.

But then Cate's path takes a turn that some might call miraculous, others perhaps a stubborn defiance of fate. Eight years prior, she accomplishes what many lost in the darkness swear cannot be done: she claws her way out. It isn't an abrupt escape—there is no grand epiphany, no sudden flood of celestial light. Instead, it is a slow, arduous crawl. Every nerve in her body screams betrayal. Every thought is consumed by an insatiable craving. Yet she presses on, stacking one minute on top of another until they form hours, days, weeks.

The map names it Antlers, but the Choctaw old‑timers still mouth softer words that slide off the tongue like water over limestone—Hokina Pishka, place of the young deer. You crest the last rise of Oklahoma State Highway 375 and there it lies—a crease of brick storefronts, two feed silos tilting into the blue, and beyond them a sweep of pine‑dark hills that look close enough to touch yet somehow older than Genesis. Population twenty‑five hundred on paper, fewer when the rodeo’s in Hugo, more when the Dogwood blossoms call cousins home. The green highway sign doesn’t bother with decimals; it simply nods and lets you roll on in.

I arrived on a Tuesday that smelled of wood‑smoke and wet cedar, Josie’s air‑cooled engine humming forty‑five in a fifty‑five zone, and quite content to do so. November had just flipped the calendar—corn already cut, winter wheat not yet sprouted—and the whole county felt paused between breaths. That pause is Antlers’ natural tempo. Even the red-and-white Chesapeake pump at the lone Conoco clicks slower here, like it despairs of rushing anyone.

Rails, Antlers, and Ancestry

Legend says a Katy Railroad section boss christened the depot by tacking shed antlers to every post he could nail, a frontier feng‑shui meant to ward off bad luck. The name stuck the way burrs stick to denim, and by 1890 a town grew around the rack‑ribbed station: drummers hawking patent medicines, Choctaw farmers hauling cotton bales, Scots‑Irish loggers felling short‑leaf for the sawmill’s hungry maw. The rails are gone now—torn up for scrap during Reagan’s years—but under the summer moon you can still see the ghost line, twin silver strands of dew slicing through Johnson‑grass like some phantom highway to elsewhere.

Pushmataha County holds pain the way clay holds water. The Choctaw were marched here on the Trail of Tears; their descendants stayed because leaving again felt like betraying the bones underfoot. Stories survive in porch‑talk and quilt patterns: how Pushmataha, the great chief, argued peace with Andrew Jackson yet carried a rifle tattooed with notches of necessity; how the tribe rebuilt council houses from river rock because timber rotted too fast in this fevered climate. Walk Main Street and you’ll catch Choctaw vowels braided into English talk—soft, round, deliberate, like creek water over smooth stones.

The Pulse of a Two‑Block Main

Main itself is barely two blocks long, angled to the railroad that birthed it. On the north end squats Smith’s Gun & Pawn, shelves stacked with dove loads and second‑hand dreams. Farther down,  MJay’s Diner leans into the corner, windows fogged with sausage steam. MJay’s serves catfish on Fridays, chicken‑fried on Sundays, and gospel every morning from a tinny AM radio by the griddle. Locals claim her coffee can strip rust off a tractor muffler; I drank three cups and felt sins fall away.

A Passage Through Shadows

The map on the passenger seat quivered with each gust that slithered through the open window—thin autumn wind, smelling faintly of wheat stubble and diesel. I steered Josie west, toward a bruised horizon, the dashboard clock fixed on an early evening November hour that felt neither here nor there. Twilight was sliding in; day kept its promise to leave. Somewhere behind me, a hospice nurse was measuring morphine in teaspoons, and my sister was counting heartbeats that stuttered more than they beat. My mom had been granted “days, perhaps a week,” the sort of forecast that lands like a dull axe: you know the blow is coming, yet the mind refuses to picture the blade.

I drove on anyway.

She told me to.

“Keep going, Brock,” she’d rasped into the phone, each syllable ferried across a sea of static and shallow breaths. “Finish what you started. Don’t circle back to watch me fade away.”

There was a fierceness in that whisper. She had always been a woman who met the world at full draw—no warning shots, no half-measures. If life squared up for a fight, she tightened the strap on her purse and joined the melee, swinging words like iron. More warrior than nurturer, yes, but it was a brand of love as raw and trustworthy as barbed-wire fence: you leaned on it, you bled, and you never questioned its strength.

The sign above the doorway sputtered and blinked—SUNSHINE COIN LAUNDRY—flickering neon lights that buzzed like weary cicadas. Sunshine had nothing to do with the place and precious little to do with the morning outside.

I pushed through the aluminum‑framed glass door with a hip check—it stuck in the humidity—and felt the warm, lint-thick air wrap itself around me like a damp quilt. A bell gave a half‑hearted ding, then surrendered to the heavier music of whirring drums, rattling quarters, and the slow cough of fluorescent tubes straining against their age.

1

On the road you measure life in miles and engine noise, but every so often a man has to reckon with the smaller arithmetic of socks and T-shirts. My reckoning came on a raw Sunday somewhere between the Missouri River and memory, after three weeks of gravel lots, greasy diners, and restless sleep inside Josie’s Assuan‑brown shell. I could smell myself before I stepped from the driver’s seat; the clothes in my duffle had begun to stage a rebellion.

Inside, twenty‑odd washers sat like squat soldiers in two tired rows, enamel chipped, coin slots greasy from ghostly fingers. Above them a hand‑lettered sign read NO DYING CLOTHES IN MACHINES—the absent “e” a warning and a prophecy. Someone had underlined it three times in red marker, the color bleeding with each pass, as though the writer feared the message might fade the same way customers did, load after load, swirl after swirl, until only a faint outline of themselves remained.

A little heat still clung to the night, yet the ceiling vents expelled nothing but a sigh. Far back, near the vending machines that promised “SOAP • SOFTENER • HOPE” for $1.25 in quarters, two gray plastic chairs had surrendered to gravity. I chose the least cracked one and let my bag slump beside me.

Tom Lesovsky: 950 Acres of Community

“Some people think I’m a good speaker,” Tom Lesovsky told me, chuckling as if he didn’t quite buy the compliment himself. “I think it’s just because I’m loud and everybody can hear me.”
— Tom Lesovsky, kitchen‑table interview, Cuba Kansas

The kitchen where Tom and Peg Lesovsky pour coffee is square and utilitarian—formica counters, a stove that has outlived four presidents, and a window over the sink that frames a slice of Republic County prairie. Tom pulls up a chair, braces weathered elbows on worn pine, and begins to talk. The cadence of his voice rises and falls like wheat in wind, and soon the room itself seems to settle, listening.

Sixth‑Generation Roots

“I didn’t get very far,” Tom says, nodding toward the yard beyond the window. He means it literally. The 950 acres that unfurl from his doorstep have carried a Lesovsky name for more than a century—Grandfather, Father, Son, and now, for a final season, Tom himself. He tried college once: “A semester and ten days … last day you could get any tuition back.” After that he came home for good, married Peg from nearby Concordia, and folded himself into the layered history of Cuba Kansas.

Sixth‑generation farmers talk in seasons, not quarters, and Tom’s sentences are stitched with weather and soil: ridge‑till corn, double‑crop beans, the stubborn resilience of wheat that survives a Czech‑country winter. There is little romance in his tone—only stewardship, the plain duty of handing the land forward. 

The land pulls you in before the town ever reveals itself. Highway 36 drifts east–west like a slow-moving river, its asphalt edges blurred by wheat that grows shoulder high and sings when the wind tumbles through it. One moment you’re alone with the horizon, and the next—blink—you’ve crossed an invisible threshold, and Cuba is spread out before you, modest as a handshake, stubborn as a prayer.

Population 140. Give or take a birth or two. The weather-curled sign says so with a wink, and you believe it, because Cuba doesn’t bother with exact numbers. She counts by memory, not census. The folks here tally stories, not surnames.

Cuba never bothered to shout its own name. It breathed, steady and slow, like wheat before the wind, satisfied to let the outside world thunder past on Highway 36. Then one October afternoon photographer Jim Richardson rolled in behind the wheel of a battered F-150, two 35mm camera bodies on the seat.

Richardson wasn’t chasing spectacle; he was courting hush. And hush obliged him. In the rusty glow of late fall he crouched down in the middle of a gravel road to catch Betty Klaumann leading a small flock of young geese across the street to a patch of grass where they could snack on grasshoppers. No headline could do that justice; only silver halide and prairie light could carry such truth.

When National Geographic laid his photographs across slick pages, readers in Tokyo, Toronto, and Topeka paused mid-commute, arrested by scenes that felt older than asphalt. CBS lugged a crew out for weekend television, microphones fluttering like meadowlarks beneath the co-op’s corrugated roof. For three breathless weeks the town’s name rode the jet stream of American chatter.

Rain like you’ve never heard unless you’ve worked tin-roof poultry barns in spring. Fat, grape-shot drops hammer Josie’s sheet‑metal until the panels vibrate in sympathy with my ribcage. One mile back I could see the wall cloud roll across the Kansas plain, darker than a banker’s ledger, pulsing with heat lightning. I bargained—just ten more miles, girl, we’ll outrun it—but the storm was quicker and meaner than my optimism. We dove off US‑54 at Exit 257, skidded across standing water, and nosed into a Love’s Travel Stop lit the yellow of old bruises.

Now Josie idles beside Bay 27, the farthest corner of the truck lot, hiding her sun‑faded Assuan Brown from the sodium glare. Outside, eighteen‑wheelers rumble in the dark like dinosaurs bedding down. Inside, the van rocks under wind gusts, each sway reminding me that homes built on wheels answer to weather before will.

1 Weather as Warden

I’ve been sick for days—lungs full of yard gravel, voice a cracked fiddle. Earlier I convinced myself another fifty miles would burn the fever out with sheer velocity. The storm convinced me otherwise. There’s a humility in conceding to forces larger than horsepower. Tonight sky and body conspired to pull the emergency brake.

A Love’s at midnight is its own small republic: chrome‑stack Peterbilts idling for heat, fluorescent vestibule buzzing like a beehive, the hot‑case burritos revolving under heat lamps, a clerk half my age ringing diesel and cigarettes with astronaut detachment. I paid for Diet Coke and cough drops with fingers that shook from chills, then retreated to Josie’s tin chapel to wait out judgement.

Thunder cracks open overhead—white flash, instantaneous boom that rattles washer fluid in the bottle. For three breaths everything glows magnesium bright, then drops into ink. That flicker‑dark rhythm becomes the metronome of my musings.

1 Leaving Marshall with Too Much Weather in My Head

I had pulled out of Clarksburg under a pewter dawn. The storm that had baptized the town two nights earlier had marched east, but its echo still rattled somewhere behind my eyes. Josie idled rough, her four cylinders coughing like a chorus that had sung too hard at Wednesday prayer meeting. I chalked it up to damp spark plugs and the cheap gasoline I’d swallowed near Sedalia.

Thirty miles later, on the long straight knife of Missouri Route 20—one of the original 1922 highways—a different cough—my own—answered Josie’s sputter. It began as a tickle at the top of the chest, little more than a clearing of the throat. By Higginsville it had settled into a gravel rattle, each hack snapping muscle across my ribs, stealing tiny bites of oxygen. The road unwound ahead, but inside the van a second road curved downward—steeper by the minute—into the fever alley.

I kept driving because that is what men of a certain stubborn stripe do when trouble taps the window: we nod, adjust the mirror, and apply light throttle.

2 The Double Betrayal—Machine and Flesh

Past Knob Noster the van began her own rebellion. Press the accelerator and she’d surge, then—just when confidence returned—drop power in the span of a heartbeat. Not a stall, more like a stutter. A mule buck. RPMs dipped, came back, dipped again. My chest answered with its own stutter: two coughs, then three. Van and driver in mismatched duet, each accusing the other of sabotage.

Near Rocheport I pulled onto the shoulder. The Katy Trail cut the bluff above, its sycamores already shedding copper leaves onto the asphalt. I lifted the engine hatch. Nothing obvious: no loose wires, no vacuum hose off the plenum, fuel lines dry. But the air-cooled engine radiated heat hotter than normal—as though Josie, like me, nursed a fever.

The road into Clarksburg, Missouri, is hardly wide enough for two combines to pass without trading paint. It rises and falls over a quilt of corn stubble and winter‑wheat green, then drops you—almost apologetically—onto a single paved block of town. From the highway it looks like a place where nothing happens, where Tuesday is identical to Monday except that the postmaster wears her blue cardigan instead of the gray. Yet here, behind a white farmhouse trimmed with last year’s paint, Michaela Cate has carved a refuge out of stubbornness and galvanized pipe—a rescue for the creatures most folks step around like potholes.

1    An Accidental Beginning

Michaela did not set out to become the county’s conscience. She was thirty‑two, working the front desk at the Co‑op in nearby California, Missouri, answering phones about fertilizer spread rates and bulk diesel. The days were ordinary as oatmeal until the afternoon she swung into the Food 4 Less lot for a sack of potatoes and spotted a dog nosing through a Styrofoam clamshell. Ribs like barrel hoops, tail thumping a rhythm of last‑chance hope. She whistled. The dog ambled over—no collar, plenty of copper‑colored mites in its ears—and leaned his full hunger against her shins. With that simple press of weight, the story bent. Michaela opened the passenger door. The dog climbed in like he’d been waiting on the invite all his life. She named him Spud, after the errand she never finished.

Spud became the fifth dog in a house already fitted for four. She scrounged a spare crate from an uncle, wedged it beside the water heater, and told herself it was temporary.

In a town where a new recipe at the bar & grill qualifies as news, one woman taking on strays quickly became lore. Folks started leaving dogs the way others leave church casseroles—quietly, on the porch, with a note and a whispered apology: Can’t keep him; husband sick;  keeps chasing calves; sorry. Dogs arrived in the hush before dawn, nails clicking across the wooden steps, noses pressed to the screen door, waiting for the smell of scrambled eggs.

2    The Math of Mercy

Twenty‑seven. That’s the count so far—twenty‑seven dogs re‑homed, vetted, vaccinated, healed of mange, heartworm, or the wound of simply being unwanted. Twenty‑seven is also twenty‑seven rabies tags paid out of Michaela’s paycheck, ninety‑four bags of kibble, and untold gallons of bleach erased across kennel floors. She works full‑time at the Co‑op, part‑time evenings tallying books for the hardware store, and somehow still logs Thursday afternoons balancing the food‑bank ledger because, she says, “Hungry’s hungry, whether it walks on two legs or four.”

Clarksburg is the sort of speck that travelers miss while adjusting the radio dial. You glide along Missouri Route 87, thinking about the next gas fill-up or the distant gray of an afternoon rainline, and—blink—Clarksburg is already receding in the side-view mirror, a brief punctuation between soybean fields and the slow, green breathing of the Ozark edge.

But if you lift your foot from the accelerator—if you let curiosity do the steering and follow the low, unhurried cadence of a side street—you’ll find a village cinched tight to the prairie, small enough for gossip to cross town faster than the school bell, yet wide enough, somehow, to hold a century and change of stories. Two hundred and fifty people. More dogs than stop signs.

I rolled in on a windblown Tuesday that smelled of warming silage. Josie’s oil-stained clock said ten-fifteen; a digital time/temp LED in an ancient storefront blinked in agreement, as if to say, Yes, stranger, you’re exactly on time for nothing in particular.

The town sprang up around the turn of the century, named after
a merchant whose legacy has faded into the whispers of time.

A town the size of a memory

Clarksburg clings to the gentle swell of central Missouri the way a seed head clings to wool—light, unassuming, but not about to let go. Its main road, once a stagecoach trace, now carries grain trucks down to the river ports. Two rows of buildings face one another like weather-beaten boxers, still standing after twelve hard rounds with drought, depression, war, and Walmart.

Gloria Evans doesn’t stride into a room. She slides, as unobtrusive as dawn edging past night, making no more fuss than a robin settling on a fence post. Yet somehow—by some alchemy of presence and intention—every room she enters seems to brighten around the edges. It is not the flash of showmanship, but the slow bloom of a coal banked all night and coaxed back to flame: modest, deliberate, inevitable.

At eighty-two, Gloria measures barely five-foot-five in her orthopedic shoes, but the townsfolk of Marshall, Missouri, speak of her the way homesteaders once spoke of well water or prevailing winds—an elemental fact woven into daily survival. She has served as a Foster Grandparent for seventeen years, logging more volunteer hours than any other senior in Saline County. The program was a federal initiative born in the War on Poverty days that pairs senior citizens with children who need extra attention and care. The program provides a small stipend to low-income seniors who serve between fifteen and forty hours per week, though you'd never catch Grandma Gloria counting the hours or thinking about the money.

The children at Spainhower Primary call her Grandma as naturally as they call the teacher Mrs. or the history teacher Coach. So do the teachers, the janitors, and the post office clerk who sells Gloria Forever stamps in sheets of a hundred because “Grandma” still writes thank-you letters in curling script.

If you drive the square on a Saturday around noon, you might glimpse her through the plate-glass of a diner—silver bun tight, reading glasses perched, tiny bites of raisin-cream pie disappearing between notes scribbled in a spiral memo pad. She is likely listing vocabulary words for phonics lessons, or inventories of glue sticks, or birthdays of every child in Mrs. Oakley’s kindergarten class. She does not bother the waitress for refills; those working have long ago learned to top the mug before Gloria looks up. Small economies like that keep the machinery of Marshall turning.

1 Roots Reaching Back to Dust and Flood

Gloria was born in 1942, on a tenant farm ten miles southeast of town where the Lamine River loops like an old man’s knuckle. Her mother, sewed feed-sack dresses, sold baked pies at church socials, and managed to tuck away coins in a Mason jar for each child’s “going-on” fund—going on to college, or war, or marriage. From her mother, Gloria learned the geometry of generosity: pie divided by eight still nourishes; light divided by windows still shines.

1 · October on the Odometer

I left South Carolina in the bright crackle of early October 2024 with only one instruction drifting from the porch where Brenda waved me off: “Be home by Christmas.” I promised, thumb to the brim like a half-baked cowboy, then pointed Josie toward the Blue Ridge escarpment.

The Hope & Generosity Tour had no sponsors beyond a prayer and a promise of help from the folks at GoWesty should I get jammed up on the side of the road in NoWheresville and a grease-stained envelope of road money. The route was a loose noose: Carolina crests into Ohio for the Bob Evans Farm Festival, west across Indiana soybean, Illinois prairie, then angling south-west through Missouri before dropping into Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and at last closing the loop back to the Atlantic pine barrens before December twenty-fifth. A harvest season ride, three months long, cut from the cloth of wanderlust and stitched with Brenda’s Christmas deadline.

By the middle of that first month, I had already rolled north over fog-caught Appalachians, watched maples kindle like match heads, and drifted across the Ohio River into a drizzle that smelled of sausage grease and funnel-cake oil. I shook hands with a hundred strangers, scribbled half as many stories, then pivoted west, driving days defined by corn stubble and radio static. Indiana blurred, Illinois flattened, and somewhere beyond the Kaskaskia the land began to breathe deeper—the long, slow diaphragm of the Missouri prairie rising to meet a sky big enough to lose your name in.

That same sky was busy assembling trouble.

2 · Barometers and Borderlines

On a late October morning, the barometer in my head dropped two notches somewhere west of Sedalia. The air thickened, the horizon hazed. High cirrus stretched above like pulled taffy, and the wind veered south, damp and urgent. Longtime plainsfolk can feel such shifts in their knee joints; I felt it in the Vanagon’s steering, a subtle wander as gusts toyed with her squared shoulders.

Josie is likely older than half the trees planted along the two-lane backroads she patrols. Forty-plus years of wind, ice, and heat have scrubbed her Assuan Brown paint to the faint color of river mud after a drought; her Samos Beige roof leans toward bone-white, like an aging mare’s muzzle. She is slow out of the gate on cold mornings, coughs a little gray when the throttle sticks, and purrs only when she’s certain you’re paying attention. I have learned to love all of it—the quivering dash vents, the small cauliflower rust blooming at side panel, the woolly rattle of the rear suspension—because you cannot love a creature halfway and hope it stays with you on hard roads.

People ask if it’s practical to pilot a 1982 Vanagon on a journey measured in thousands of two-lane miles. I shrug. Practicality and romance rarely keep the same address. Anyway, Josie is no machine in the sterile sense of pistons obeying commands. She is a traveling companion with opinions, mood swings, and the occasional need to shout for help in whatever language old machinery speaks. Learn that tongue, and she will carry you farther than common sense allows.

1 · The First Sign

It happened on a sun-soaked Wednesday somewhere in the soft belly of southern Ohio, fallow fields fanned out like brown quilts under an October sky. No storm in sight. No hint of weather of any kind. I came up to a crossroads, pressed the clutch, slipped the van into neutral, and rolled to a lazy stop behind a John Deere pulling a hay rake. In that moment of standstill I heard the unmistakable swack-swack of windshield wipers. Rubber blades hissed across dry glass, leaving ghost arcs of dust. Twice. Three times.

I stared at the wiper stalk, untouched. Switched off. Swack-swack. They stopped mid-stroke, paused, then resumed as if to say, We’re not done, pal. The farmer’s tractor pulled away; I eased back onto the blacktop with Josie’s eyebrows still flapping. Bump, rattle, another bump—swack-swack-swack—this time a marathon of motion, wipers thrashing at invisible rain for the next thirteen miles. They ignored the kill switch. They ignored my curses. They would have ignored a court order.

Machines as old as Josie do this. They don’t malfunction; they perform omens.

1 · Finding the Door

Away from the countryside, where the hum of the city’s machinery fades and the air grows thick with the smell of damp soil and hay, I’d found myself on a brief sojourn to the hamlet of Gallipolis, Ohio. I rolled Josie down a broken street—Monday morning, gray light, the Vanagon’s engine coughing out the night’s chill—and smelled damp wood smoke and river mud. For three days I’d idled in this French-named town waiting on a back-ordered prescription, walking the levee, counting barges shoving coal north. I was restless, coffee-starved, and half-mad for conversation that wasn’t my own echo.

A place called "Poppy's Coffee, Tea, and Remedies" sat just off the road, tucked into a row of local establishments located downtown. Its hand-painted, modest sign beamed out an inviting vibe to all wanderers, wayfarers, and souls who’ve lost their way.

I killed the ignition, patted Josie’s dash, and stepped into drizzle. As I opened the door, a small faded note in the corner of the plate glass window caught my eye: Food Pantry Inside for Children & Homeless—Come In and Just Ask. I filed the notice in the mental junk drawer where curiosities rattle until they demand inspection.

The door creaked like a hymnbook hinge. Inside, low Edison bulbs glowed orange over plank floors scarred by decades of boot heels, offering up a cozy, homey atmosphere. One whole wall boasts handwritten greetings and well-wishes—pilgrims from Memphis, Mumbai, Marietta—layer upon layer like graffiti in a boxcar church. Steam curled from an espresso wand; the shop smelled of cinnamon, fresh baked bread and wet wool.

Before I could find a corner table, a mountain of a man loomed beside me, wiping hands on a burlap towel. “Mornin’. I’m Greg Hill—folks call me Poppy. What can I brew ya?”

Gallipolis, Ohio, clings to the inside crook of the Ohio River the way an old hound curls against a cook-stove in February—too weary to roam, too stubborn to quit the warmth. From the West Virginia shore you can see her riverfront of red-brick warehouses and weather-grayed wharves crouched behind a modern floodwall, as though still bracing for the 1937 waters that once lapped at second-story windows. The town was laid out in 1790 by the French 500—aristocrats and craftsmen fleeing Paris guillotines who traded silk salons for the hickory forest of a brand-new Northwest Territory. They named their refuge “Gallipolis,” stitching together Gallia—Latin for France—and polis—Greek for city—an optimistic graft that promised Versailles on the frontier but produced, instead, a handful of cabins and an unfenced cemetery.

Two hundred and thirty-odd years later, the population hovers around 3,300 souls, give or take the heartbeat of babies born at Holzer Hospital or elders carried up to Mound Hill Cemetery. Between the river’s brown reach and the first Appalachian ridges, the town’s streets run quiet, brick-paved in places, potholed in others, shouldering the weight of time like a store clerk balancing boxes too long. Gallipolis has never reached for skyline or sprawl. It was built for endurance, not spectacle.

I did not arrive seeking any of that. I arrived because of a pill bottle.

2 · The Pill and the Bait-and-Switch

Bob Evans’s Farm Festival, twenty miles upriver in Rio Grande, had left me dust-coated, sausage-greased, and one day away from finishing the only prescription that keeps a particular demon at bay—unimportant which demon; suffice to say it rides the bloodstream like a stowaway. The festival’s crowds dispersed on a Sunday, and Monday morning found me staring at the red cross of the CVS Pharmacy on State Route 160, believing my out-of-state script would be little more than a handshake and a co-pay.

“Sure, we can fill it,” the technician said, sliding glasses down her nose. “But we’ll have to order it—earliest truck gets here Wednesday.”

1 · Last Days in the Driveway 

You’d be surprised how loud a town can get once you decide to leave it. Lawn-mower engines nagging through Saturday mornings, delivery trucks hissing compressed air at intersections, your own phone coughing up one more “urgent” e-mail—all of it conspires to make staying put sound reasonable. But the very noise that pleads I stay is the noise that finally sends me packing.

So I stood in the driveway, mid-April sun not yet mean, sleeves pushed to the elbow, two knuckles raw where the socket slipped, and listened to the neighborhood’s hum as if it were background music I’d soon forget. Josie, my forty-two-year-old Volkswagen Vanagon, lay half-gutted before me: air filter out, fan belt off, oil dripping on to what used to be the shipping container of a refrigerator, now flattened and protecting the garage floor.  

The engine smelled of hot metal and ancient promises. Most Vanagon owners name their rigs for luck, but Josie earned hers the hard way—that first breakdown in Wyoming where we slept in separate tow yards while a thunderstorm rattled chain link like jail doors. She forgave me, eventually. I forgave her, mostly. We’ve been married to the road ever since.

Preparing her for a tour through small-town America felt less like maintenance and more like pregame pep talk. I crawled under, twisting the torque wrench until the motor mounts squeaked the language of steel fatigue. She groaned, I groaned back. That’s how we say I love you.

2 · Lists You Can’t Order from Amazon

While the oil drained, I opened the notebook I keep in my back pocket and added yet another line to the packing index:

1 · Crossing into Gallia County

Josie wheezed up the last rise on State Route 588 just as morning cracked open behind us, spilling light across the hollows. Below, the Bob Evans homestead sprawled in orderly rectangles of groomed pasture and whitewashed rail fence. A half-century ago, the story goes, a farm boy named Robert Evans lured truck drivers off U.S. Route 35 with the smell of sage-heavy sausage and a promise of bottomless coffee. By 1971 he’d hatched the notion of a harvest homecoming—one weekend every October when neighbors, traders, and the merely curious might gather “down on the farm” to eat, barter, and remind one another why God invented autumn. That seed became the Bob Evans Farm Festival, now past its fiftieth birthday and drawing, the brochures brag, something like thirty-thousand visitors over three days. (Celebrating 50 Years of Tradition Down on the Farm ... - Bob Evans)

I’d come chasing that origin myth. A man who folds generosity into sausage links seemed tailor-made for the Hope & Generosity Tour. I pictured county-fair grit: 4-H kids wrestling Holsteins into the show ring, pie contests judged by church ladies with stern palates, fiddlers trading licks from the flatbed of a grain truck. Instead, as Josie rattled onto the parking plateau, what reached my ears first was pop music piped from a PA and the electronic jangle of a credit-card reader approving someone’s purchase of kettle corn.

I pictured county-fair grit: 4-H kids wrestling Holsteins into the show ring, pie contests judged by church ladies with stern palates, fiddlers trading licks from the flatbed of a grain truck.

2 · Midway of Merchandise

The festival grounds unfurled like a county fair clipped of its livestock: a midway of tents, each flapping against autumn wind. Under canvas I found rows of merch—“hand-poured” candles, laser-engraved cutting boards, tie-dye hoodies that would have puzzled Bob in his bib overalls. Craft vendors are tradition here, the program insists—more than one hundred of them at peak, hawking everything from gourd birdhouses to welded-horseshoe yard art. (53rd Annual Farm Festival - Bob Evans) But commerce felt less accent than engine. Card swipe, receipt print, shuffle on.

Food stalls clustered like piglets round the mother-sow of profit. Funnel cakes. Corn dogs. Frozen lemonade. And of course sausage sandwiches—$8.50 a link, slathered in onions. They smelled divine; they always have. Still, I missed the older country-fair alchemy where a church youth group flipped burgers to fund mission trips, or the Lions Club sold ham-n-bean dinners from a steam table dented by decades of use.

In 2006 I zig-zagged the continent, racking up 15,000 honest miles in a little Ford Escape Hybrid that wheezed like a kettle but kept the faith. Hundreds of small towns blurred past the windshield, each one carrying the same hard-scrabble tune: boarded storefronts, auctioned farms, hope stretched thin as baler twine. I’ve gone back since—one-week, two-week rambles—and the chorus hasn’t changed much. Out there, a clean thousand bucks can still tip the scale for a family riding the edge. Take this very real hypothetical for example:

Ben Davidson. Farmer, son of a farmer, grandson of the same stubborn stock. Dawn to dusk he talks to the soil, prays for rain, curses drought, then starts over. Simple pleasures; harsh arithmetic. Every dollar earns blisters.

One morning an envelope lands on his porch—official, unexpected, crisp. A check for $1,000. Ben balks, turns it over, holds it to the light. Evening settles; ideas sprout like spring beans. That tired tractor—clunky, coughing—needs a rebuilt engine. He’s been saving for years, a dollar here, seventy-five cents there. This windfall pushes him over the top. New heart for the old beast. Fields breathe easier, and so does Ben.

In America only 46.1 percent of farmers clear a positive income from the dirt; the rest—53.9 percent—scrape below poverty lines, moonlighting off-farm to keep the lights on.

The ripples travel fast. In America only 46.1 percent of farmers clear a positive income from the dirt; the rest—53.9 percent—scrape below poverty lines, moonlighting off-farm to keep the lights on. With reliable horsepower Ben quits his second job. He plows straighter, plants tighter, harvests heavier. Extra yield patches the barn roof, upgrades feed, salts away a few bucks for tomorrow.

It's 0-dark-thirty—one of those predawn pockets of time that journalists and farmhands know by heart. The world outside the garage is a hush of star-spangled black, but inside I can feel the morning's pulse beginning to run. My right knee bounces like a piston, 120 beats per minute, give or take the stutter of nerves. Pure anticipation, cut with a ...