Dave's Fiction Warehouse

L ast Friday I was driving up I-95 to see my daughter and her girls in Virginia. Somewhere south of Savannah a gleaming red Mercedes coupe with New York plates swept by on my left. It was car to remember, even more so because there was an enormous cream-colored cat lounging the back window, calmly observing all the other northbound motorists. It seemed very relaxed for a cat doing around 90 on a freeway crowded with maniacs. My own experience with cats in cars is that they need to be confined and lightly sedated.  Then a few miles down the road I saw a man leaning on the guardrail by the southbound lanes, his hands cuffed behind him. He wore a green sweater and tan pants. He seemed to be appreciating the empty blue sky above the trees. The cop standing with him was smiling for some reason. The door to his cruiser was open but the flashers weren’t on. I thought: there’s a story I will never know. Just like the cat.  Normally you don’t see anything on I-95, beyond the grills of ...

Finally home after a 3,600-mile road trip, with a new resolve to post here more frequently, finally finish that damned novel, and mow the lawn, which has gone primitive during my two-week absence. That last will have to wait, since it's raining now. You can mow a lawn when it's wet, or you can mow it when it's a foot high, but you can't do both. So, to the blog. I renewed ties with a lot of friends and family and was lucky enough to catch my home state of Montana at its best: dry sunny days and cool nights scented with hay or lupine or alpine fir, depending on where I happened to be. The only bad weather to be seen was in Wyoming. No problem, since I was just passing through. Back here in Wichita, where summer is not the gentlest season, I'm thankful to have missed the past couple weeks of 100-plus heat and the woolen humidity so common in the Midwest. September can't come soon enough. Above is a picture of yours truly at the stick of a Dimona motor glider, soa...

No disrespect for Wichita, Kansas, but there are better places to be at the end of July. Surely the best of them would be here on the west shore of Flathead Lake, watching the placid water under a dome of pale blue sky, the mountains a somewhat darker blue in the distance. The morning air is as smooth as a silken pillow, cool as the underside of it. This is why those lucky enough to own a piece of the Flathead shore are mostly millionaires now. When I was a kid, we'd come to the lake all the time in summer, splashing around a place we called Sandy Beach in Somers. It's where I taught myself to swim. Now Sandy Beach is someone's private paradise and my rare visits to the lake depend on the hospitality of friends. That's fine. If you lived here, you'd probably take it for granted. Or you might begin suspect ulterior motives when friends and family started dropping by in the summer months. Some things it's better not to own: this view, these friends, this fine mor...

Today I drove through Kansas and Colorado and much of Wyoming. Nothing like a road trip, even with gas north of $4 and the knowledge that each dollar I spend is not being replenished by a regular paycheck. Hey, this is why we save our money in the good times: so that in the bad times we can still brave through a thunderstorm outside Douglas, Wyo., sheets of hail horizontal across the pavement and visibility limited to the erratic taillights on that 18-wheeler just ahead. Brief weather tantrums like that can kill you if you're driving I-95 from Philly to New York, or I-76 from Philly to Harrisburg. Back East, there are just too many drivers on the road, and they all become aware of peril at precisely the same moment, so that even minor problems reach critical mass in nanoseconds. One minute you're shouting your exact location into your iPhone and the next you're skidding sideways into a dozen jerks in Volvo SUVs who braked abruptly to ogle somebody changing a flat. Western ...

Greetings from the Silver Spur Travelodge in Dodge City, Kansas, which commands a nice view of the O'Reilly Auto Parts store across the street. We traveled here yesterday because it is the Memorial Day weekend, and as Americans it is unthinkable that we should remain in our relatively comfortable home during the high holy day for road trips. We have come here because we felt like being someplace we'd never been before. In the case of Dodge City, apparently we are the only ones to have felt this way. We expected a line going out the door at the Teachers Hall of Fame, but in fact it was eerily empty, save for a shadowy figure behind the counter. We decided to catch it another day. Dodge City looks nothing like the town I grew to love on Gunsmoke , although the city has made a game effort in one fenced-off city block that is lined with false-fronted buildings, all facing one direction. This is the city's frontier past, relocated and reimagined and rebuilt to the standards of t...