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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

In the heart of Missouri, where the soil is rich and the lives of the people are steeped in simplicity and tradition, lives a woman whose calling was not to the fields, but to the souls that till them. Pam Sebastian, or “Pastor Pam,” as she is known, serves two churches in two towns that dot the map like seeds scattered by the hand of God. One a simple, modest house of worship, the other a glorious testament to time and history built by hands that knew the ache of labor. They are places where faith was not a matter of show, but of survival… Well, that was true then—back in 2005—when I met Pam during my time with the Missouri Photo Workshop. Today she is more a “circuit rider”-type pastor. She rotates among three different churches. She no longer has a formal office and works out of her home. What...