(I wrote this as a Christmas gift for Melissa. It was inspired by moment when we were packing our things in California and my darling wife held a rolling pin aloft just before stowing it and said “you know where I’d like to shove this” and I knew exactly what she had in mind and where she wanted to put it. I thought I might add more chapters but if I don’t get inspired, this little ditty stands on its own).
…

“… And I turned 21 in prison doing life without parole…”

It was their song, Merle Haggard’s classic account of an angelic mother and her demonic son who rewarded her goodness with shame and scandal. Neighbors of a shabby studio apartment on the seedy edge of Hickory, North Carolina, knew every syllable by heart. The guy in 228-J played it at 10:13 every Thursday night for the past 13 years, four months and 21 days.

“… no one could turn me right but Mama tried…” she heard through the apartment’s thin door. A wave of warmth pushed back the Christmas Eve chill.

She was the Rolling Pin Killer, and she was on the lam. She was right where the authorities would look for her first, the filthy warren of her soulmate, a failed newspaperman who devoted his every waking hour to securing her release from the Joliet Prison for Women.

She couldn’t remember ever being this excited as she began to rap upon the door, but remembered to pause till 15 seconds after the last guitar chord faded. The time he threw the landlord’s puppy through a plate-glass window for interrupting their song became the stuff of legend once the tabloids got ahold of it.

It took two sets of hard knocks before she heard him picking his way through his personal junkyard on the way to the door. She stepped aside as a plume of dust poured from the opening apartment door. He didn’t get out much.

“Honey, it’s me!” she cried, jumping toward the doorway and crashing into his sunken chest.

Can’t be a dream, he thought. I haven’t slept in five days. CNN was running updates on her cunning jailbreak every 12 minutes. He’d watched it all. They knew about as much as he did, but unlike him they had 24 hours of airtime to fill.

“Wow, she’s really bulked up inside,” he thought as her muscled arms nearly squeezed his breath away. Reflexively, he threw a hand between their lips, knowing her reunion kiss would drain his last ounce of sanity.

“Aggie, what are you doing here?” he demanded with his first strong breath. “For God’s sake, the Supreme Court is hearing your case on Tuesday.”

Agnes Butterfly was the name on her birth certificate, but everybody knew her as Aggie. Her conviction in the diabolical slayings of 17 corporate executives (each one felled by a fatally impacted bowel) had transfixed the nation.

Two trials and four appeals could not sway the U.S. justice system from its insistence that she was the Rolling Pin Killer. As far as he was concerned, though, the case was all circumstantial and ripe for appeals. After all, the one person she did vow to violate with a rolling pin was very much alive.

He updated his blog, AggieWasFramed.com, 17 times a day with fresh allegations of judicial missteps and police wrongdoing. He threw all the revenue from the site’s 17 million hits a day into Aggie’s defense fund, but $314.42 a week didn’t buy much legal advice.

But in classic Hollywood style, a determined gaggle of law students took on her case and smothered the justice system with every imaginable legal ploy, and many previously unimagined. It all paid off six weeks ago, when the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to take on her case. What on earth, could have pushed her to this, he wondered as his breathing returned.

“It’s Mom,” Aggie blurted. “She knows everything and we have to stop her.”

(To be continued if I get inspired… suggestions for further chapters welcome.)

Six weeks ago today we arrived in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

I suppose I should have a lot more to say about the place, but I’ve spent most of the past 42 days right here, tapping into my keyboard. Went on a few hikes, dutifully recounted on my hiking blog. We moved out of Melissa’s mom’s living room after a month. We like having our own four walls, even if it means having a landlord.

So what do I think of North Carolina? Liking it so far, mainly because it appears to be turning into California. It already has mountains on one end and an ocean on the other (while the mountains are smaller, the beaches are more welcoming than the bone-chilling shores of Northern California — fair trade-off, I’d say). It has a burgeoning high-tech sector and a growing population that’s getting more diverse every day.

Truth is, there’s nothing I could say about this place right now that wouldn’t come across as a caricature — either of me, the stranger in the new place, or the place itself, whose strangeness lies entirely in the eyes of the beholder. I still feel like a guest in somebody else’s state, so hatin’ on the hosts is not high on my to-do list.

Melissa and I have had 14 address changes in the past 20 years — from Tampa, to Peoria, to San Jose, to Winston-Salem. Seems like we’re always someplace new, so I’ve learned to distrust first impressions. We have all the Taco Bells and Outback Steakhouses and Targets and Office Maxes that everybody else has. The terrain here is rolling, green and generally pleasing to the eye. Are there hellholes? Sure. Is there crime, bigotry and unnecessary unpleasantness afoot? Yeah. Our suburban sprawl looks just like your suburban sprawl.

Nothing has influenced my conclusion that there is very little true diversity within our species. Biologically we’re almost identical. People in this part of the United States have digestive tracts optimized for hunting and gathering on the plains of Africa, just like folks in every other nook and cranny of our planet.

So right now my life doesn’t feel all that much different. I’m getting freelance work that requires me to move words around on a computer screen, just like my old job. I am thankful that I’m no longer obliged to chronicle the daily depravity we have come to think of as “news.” I think I earned a vacation after 20 years.

I figure no matter what zip code you live in, you’ve only got one true address: the corpus carrying your brain and bodily organs. It contains all the tools you need to survive no matter where you live, so long as you have access to water, shelter and warmth. We’ve got all that stuff.

My Aunt Bev, firstborn of the five children of Thomas Mangan (my grandad), died a week ago today. I spent a few days with family last week remembering what made her such a remarkable woman. My dad recalls how now and again he’d be reading a letter to the editor of the local paper “giving the politicians hell,” and then he’d see his sister had written it.

Bev should’ve been a journalist — she loved to write, loved to spout on politics, and had a human touch that would’ve invited people to tell her their stories. Well, at least one of us Mangans got into the news biz.

Speaking of stories, my Uncle Mike recounted a gem: Back in the late 1950s, he hitchhiked all over the West; I think he knew every pothole in Route 66. One time he caught a ride to Sacramento and got dropped off on Interstate 5 in a boiling stretch of the Central Valley.

After a good bake in the sun, he finally got a ride from a guy heading southbound. On the way south toward L.A. the guy asked Mike where he was from.

“Peoria, Illinois.”

“Really? I spent some time there myself. What’s your name?”

“Mike Mangan.”

“You know a Bev Mangan? I used to date her.”

“Sure I know her, she’s my sister.”

(This is my all-time favorite “small world” story).

Anyway, about a decade ago I interviewed Bev for a web project called SevenQuestions. These are her Q’s and A’s.

ONE

What happened to you as a a teen-ager in the 1940s that convinces you teens haven’t changed much in the past 50 years?

The biggest thing that hasn’t changed much is that every teen wants to be popular in school, no matter how far back you go. We would all like to be the cheerleaders, the jocks, prettiest or handsomest or popular with the other sex in the “in”crowd.

The biggest difference is in the ’40s, nobody shot you for it.

TWO

Another Tom Mangan — your father (my grandfather) — was a traveling salesman always strapped for a buck. What was something he did to economize that makes you laugh when you think about it today?

In 1937, I was seven years old and an only child. My Dad was making about $15 a week selling refrigerators. The only economy he practiced that I can remember is that whenever we ran up too many bills at one address, we would move so that the bill collectors would have to search for us, slowing them down a bit.

We always lived in apartments and many times just moved next door or around the corner. I must have driven the school record keepers crazy!

THREE

What you were doing when you heard Roosevelt had died?

It was a pretty day in April 1945. I had just gotten home from school in my freshman year and was talking to some friends. A man came by shouting “Extra, Extra” selling papers from the Journal. We bought one and read the news.

Everybody was devastated. I remembered the last newsreel in which I had seen him, he looked ill. I took the paper to my parents. My father cried.

FOUR

Tell a story from your first days as a new mother with Randy, your oldest son, that made you wonder if you were cut out for the mommy business.

As Ran is now 47 years old, it has been a while.

As a lot of new mothers find out after all the embarrassing stuff is over at the hospital, they are frazzled and nervous and now must take this little package home and take care of it. Their nervous reaction is passed right on to the baby and the result is “nervous tummy” which translates into lots of screaming, which can go on for days.

I for one would have gladly returned him, but there are no exchanges! Oh, the first day I knew, about 24 hours after we brought him in the door!

FIVE

What did you think of television when you saw it the first time?

It was at a neighbor’s home and I remember wondering how on earth they got those pictures to travel through the air.

I knew it would be a long time before we had one. A little later on, my husband’s uncle got one and we would go to their house after work on Wednesdays to watch “Dragnet” and have a few beers.

SIX

Who killed JFK?

I believe Oswald was a patsy, but he was there. However, he was not alone.; the mafia, the U.S. government (CIA) and the hatred of so many important people had a lot to do with it.

It was a major conspiracy. The movie “JFK” with Kevin Costner comes closest to the truth.

SEVEN

Describe something you learned late in life that you wish to heck you’d known all along.

For all the young people contemplating matrimony, remember this. What you see is what you get. Don’t go into marriage expecting the things you don’t like about him or her to change. They won’t.

So the part where we move back in with the folks has been tried. Nice while it lasted, but we needed our names on a lease somewhere to remind us of the proper place for folks of our advanced years.

For those wondering about the difference in rent between the Bay Area and the middle of North Carolina, it’s about like this: twice the space for half the money. Groceries, however, are no cheaper.

I’m hoping to find more time for updates here … we’ll see.

“Let me guess, you’re looking for the wedding,” says the guy through my opened car window.

“No, I’m just looking for Hanging Rock State Park.”

Seems there’s a bridge out on the road to Hanging Rock, a state park highly recommended by local hikers. The guy standing by the road has been redirecting folks all morning. They’re all going to a wedding. Except me.

Well, that’s what I thought anyway.

So I take the detour, find my way to the park, get myself parked and all my gear strapped on, and set out in search of the nearest point of interest, Upper Cascades Falls. I figure the light might be good first thing in the morning and what the heck, it’s only .3 mile from the parking lot.

Then I wander down this wide gravel road, round a bend and see a large gathering of folks dressed oddly office-casual for a state park on Labor Day weekend. Of course by now I’ve completely forgotten about the guy on the road and all the folks looking for the nuptials.

So I blunder right up to the rail, look down at what everybody else is looking down at, and the first thing I hear is a male voice down there saying “now, let us pray.” On one side, a woman clad in white. On the other, a guy clad in black. Nearby, a bearded guy with a guitar.

My rule is, when the man says pray, you pray. In my case, I pray that these good folks don’t toss me down the ravine for crashing their wedding. Last I knew the preacher, bride and groom were breaking bread and getting ready for a Communion. I sorta slinked away.

As I’m making my way back up the trail, two women in heels are picking their way down the gravel trail, asking me how much further to the waterfall. “Don’t worry, it’s just around the bend,” I reassure them. They’re wishing somebody had told them to wear hiking boots.

The waterfall was lovely, by the way.

(More on the hike at Two-Heel Drive, if you’re curious).

We’re at Melissa’s mom’s place, getting ready to sleep for a week after driving for a week.

The drive through the Great Smoky Mountains was quite nice — there’s a ghostly charm unique to the southern Appalachians. I hoped to spot evidence of the Appalachian Trail but found out I missed the turn-off on the Tennessee side of the border.

For now my main focus is kicking back after a long drive. I’ll post some pics for now and perhaps write a longer post on the experience of driving west to east later this week (if I get inspired.)

Approaching the Smokies east of Knoxville.

Wider shot of the same area.

Second of a pair of short tunnels under the range.

Found these wildflowers at a rest stop on the Carolina side of the border,

Almost there. Looks a lot like Tennessee, though the right of way isn’t groomed quite as well in North Carolina.

Rest time.

Another pleasant day of driving before we cross one last mountain range. Walking in the mountains is the essence of life itself, but driving in them is a drag after the spectacular-vista glow wears off.

I was driving into the morning sun across Arkansas so the photographic opportunities were scant. A shame because passing through the low hills of the southern Ozark Mountains as the fog burns off is a visual treat.

The countryside of Arkansas and Tennessee is downright charming, though the I-40 drive can get a little hairy if you hit Memphis or Nashville at rush hour. We timed it about perfect, hitting both before the traffic went nuts.

Let’s see the pics:

Something very green grows in an Arkansas farm field. The section from Fort Smith to Little Rock is all rolling hills, but the land flattens out east of Little Rock.

Crossing the Mississippi into Memphis, cradle of Rock ‘n’ Roll (and, to its eternal regret, the city where Martin Luther King was assassinated.) My aunt Vivian says she was born 60 miles north of here.

Not bad for somebody trying to drive and shoot and avoid causing a 17-car pileup.

Memphis has a shiny pyramid. I can’t say why.

Off to Nashville. Later I wished I’d remembered to look for a “Highway 61” sign, the famous route down into Mississippi.

Wonderful country along this way. Must’ve been a hundred signs pointing to stuff I wanted to check out — state parks, battlefields, Loretta Lynn’s dude ranch. A guy with a canoe could paddle his life away on all the rivers I-40 crosses.

A lame shot of Nashville’s excellent skyline. Could’ve gotten a better shot but figured I had pressed my luck too far with all the driving and picture-taking.

Tomorrow: Across the Smoky Mountains and on to point of this expedition.

Context for today’s travels: A great-grandmother (or perhaps great-great; Mom, can you clear this up?) of mine was a full-blooded Cherokee whose people came to the Midwest on the Trail of Tears, a forced march from the area we now call — how’s this for irony — North Carolina.

I thought of her again and again traveling through the Indian Nations of Oklahoma, where billboard after billboard advertised a “Cherokee”-themed emporium of American Indian kitsch. What I thought of was one of my people dragged from their homes and ordered at musketpoint to relocate in a foreign land where they knew none of the local flora, fauna and hunting spots, where they had no survival traditions, where they were utterly dependent the U.S. government.

Back in the Bay Area it is of course quite fashionable to receive knowing glances from fellow intellectuals when you observe that the United States was built on twin foundations of forced labor and forced relocation. Interestingly, it’s deeply unfashionable to say such things in the company of the descendants of those who were doing the forced relocating.

All I’m saying: My one-sixteenth (or one-thirtysecondth) of Cherokee blood boiled all across Oklahoma. Of course things were cooled by the fifteen-sixteenths (or thirty-one thirtysecondths) of regular white-guy blood — though come to think of it, my Irish ancestors came to this land on Coffin Ships after the monstrous British injustice inflicted by the Great Potato Famine.

Such is the magic of America: Repression be damned, I came out just fine.

OK, history lesson over, let’s see some pics. They’re not super sexy because the drive was mostly flat, with farmland on both sides. A nice thunderstorm and tornado would’ve gotten the ol’ blood flowing, but it would’ve made the drive suck pretty badly, so I’m not whining too much.

This is just over the Texas border in the Panhandle east of Amarillo. You’re expected to be made of stern stuff when you drive across the Panhandle: only two rest areas with toilets the whole way; the other stops are “parking areas” or “picnic areas.” Hey, Texas has a lot of ground to cover.

This cross east of Amarillo is billed as the biggest of its kind in the Western Hemisphere.

The terrain greens up almost as soon as you cross the Oklahoma border. You’d scarcely guess there was a Dust Bowl here.

This immense wind farm was hard to miss. Appropriate when you consider how much oil was discovered in Oklahoma.

That whole Wind Whipping over the Plains of Oklahoma makes it hard to keep inspiring messages on sign boards outside gift shops attempting to cash in on our rich American Indian heritage.

Oklahoma City has a nice skyline — I-40 runs right next to it.

Posted in honor of Merle Haggard, who I suspect never stepped foot in Muskogee, Oklahoma, before penning his famous hit song about a town where even squares can have a ball. (Imagine being one of the Cool Kids of Muskogee — they probably still haven’t lived down the shame).

One other observation for those considering west-to-east traverses on Interstate 40: The terrain flattens from the Texas Panhandle all the way to the Arkansas border, which makes for unremarkable terrain but very easy driving. After two days of mountains and deserts, it’s a nice break.

Next stop: 100 miles east of Nashville by way of Memphis. Lands of our rock ‘n’ roll heritage; can’t wait.

Summary: A sweet 580 miles.

From Kingman, I-40 climbs up into the Arizona high country past the Arizona Divide and brushes the edge of Flagstaff, which has an impressive mountain range next door. Countless must-visit sites — Sedona, Grand Canyon, Meteor Crater — had to wait for another vacation.

It’s long and mostly flat for a couple hundred miles till the New Mexico border, where the terrain shifts rapidly and starts looking much like the Escalante region of southern Utah: Layered red cliffs with flats on top.

The drive from Flagstaff to Albuquerque is one of the best in the United States, hands down. Not quite as spectacular as California 1 (the Coast Highway) or I-70 through the Front Range of the Rockies at Denver, but in the same neighborhood, vistawise.

Oh, and we stopped for gas in Winslow, Arizona, and saw no girls in flatbed Fords or lame singer-songwriter types with longing looks on their faces. The guys in the mini-mart definitely had a Native American look about them (though the next-to-the-highway attempts to capitalize in the area’s Navajo/Hopi heritage were embarrassing. Somehow I suspect they did not camp out in shelters favored by the Cheyenne of the Northern Plains.)

But anyway, let’s see some pictures.

The Arizona high country west of Flagstaff is simply amazing. Looks nothing like the saguaro-dotted Arizona desert of the public imagination.

The terrain change at the Arizona-New Mexico border is as enchanting as the state’s motto promises. This big stone wall along the highway was just one example.

Highway sign near the Continental Divide. The sky got cooler as the day progressed.

Oh yeah, it rained a couple times.

Swell rock formation.

Easy to see why so many artists flocked to New Mexico. High desert sky is priceless.

Could not resist: yes, this is a right turn at Albuquerque (somehow I think the right turn options were narrower when Bugs Bunny introduced this gem into our culture.)

Well, that’s enough for today. It was painful to drive through two hikers’ paradises in the same day without getting out to do some walking on dirt; nice thing is, those mountains aren’t going anywhere.

Next stop: East of Fort Smith, Arkansas.