the mosquitoes were like real terrible, so he gave up

“Her name was something like Stacie McDougald, and she. had run away two days earlier with another girl who returned home by bus after the first night. Stacie then hitched a ride with a boy who brought her down the back road.

‘He never said anything, but when he stopped by the lake I got scared and ran. He looked for me in the woods and stuff, but the mosquitoes were like real terrible, so he gave up.’

She had hidden in the trees all night, eaten a couple of Ho-Ho’s, and finally put her head in the knapsack to escape the very. mosquitoes that had saved her.

‘Sorry my clothes are so gross.’ She took a vial from her jacket. ‘Only three left.’ Vacantly she stared at the vial, shook out a pill, and swallowed it with a swig of Pepsi.

‘What’s the pill?’

‘Gotta take them. I’m hyperactive. They’re Ludes.’

The vial had no label. ‘Prescribed?’

‘Oh, sort of. Like they used to be. I took Ritalin when I was little.’

‘Have you eaten anything besides the kiddie junk and Quaaludes?’

‘If I eat too much I get gross and fat.’

East of Hayward we drove into resort country where billboards and small, tacky motels lined the highway. The pavement rose and dropped, up and down, and the van rode like a cockboat. The girl fell asleep. At Park Falls, I stopped for gas. She woke up and disappeared into the restroom with her backpack. She came out wearing clean clothes, her long blonde hair wet and tied behind. Except for the insect bites, her face was smooth and bland and of an unnatural pallor like the underside of an arm. I suggested she telephone her grandmother, but she refused. At Fifield we went east toward Minocqua. The Chequamegon Forest was trees and sandy soil blooming with trillium. ‘Can you tell me why you took off?’

— William Least Heat Moon, Blue Highways

When everyone else was drinking from puddles and living in darkness

“Mother didn’t want to be a midwife. Midwifery had been Dad’s idea, one of his schemes for self-reliance. There was nothing he hated more than our being dependent on the Government. Dad said one day we would be completely off the grid. As soon as he could get the money together, he planned to build a pipeline to bring water down from the mountain, and after that he’d install solar panels all over the farm. That way we’d have water and electricity in the End of Days, when everyone else was drinking from puddles and living in darkness. Mother was an herbalist so she could tend our health, and if she learned to. midwife she would be able to deliver the grandchildren when they came along.”

- Tara Westover, Educated, 2018

our continental dream

“We arrived in St. Louis at noon. I took a walk down by the Mississippi River and watched the logs that came floating from Montana in the north - grand Odyssean logs of our continental dream. Old steamboats with their scrollwork more scrolled and withered by weathers sat in the mud inhabited by rats. Great clouds of afternoon overtopped the Mississippi Valley. The bus roared through Indiana cornfields that night; the moon illuminated through Indiana cornfields that night; it was almost Halloween. I made the acquaintance of a girl and we necked all the way to Indianapolis. She was nearsighted. When we got off to eat I had to lead her by the hand to the lunch counter. She bought my meals; my sandwiches were all gone.”

- Jack Kerouac, On the Road, 1955

(Red Country Reading List)