I was in South Carolina to haul a 1968 22-foot Airstream back to
California behind my Ford 350 one-ton truck. Interstate 40 would have been a
logical route west, but out of respect for the late Patton, the bulldog
martyr to cop violence, I headed north from Knoxville, Tenn., into Kentucky.
Rolling out of Lexington, Ky., toward St. Louis at dusk, I could see
graceful horses nibbling at the snow-covered pastures as the sunset turned
the western sky red.
All the way across the Great Plains I listened to radio reports
of the cold about to roll down out of Canada. There's nothing between you
and the North Pole out there on the prairie. "Not even a tree to hide
behind," as one 19th-century pioneer homemaker plaintively wrote home to her
European mother as she and her family cowered in their sod cabin amidst the
terrible blizzards of 1886 and 1887 that finished off the cattle boom and
sent Teddy Roosevelt scuttling east from his ranch on the Little Missouri.
The snow and ice finally caught up with me 100 miles east of
Denver, where I sat in the lobby of a Comfort Inn listening to a Cherokee