FoxCraft

Driving Across Flyover Country

Traveling from the western end of South Dakota to the eastern end of Nebraska requires a long day's drive across a lot of prairie. After a few hours, it's the kind of trip that can make you start to reconsider the price of airline tickets.

I've made a lot of trips across this land, most of them driving, but a few in a small plane as well. It's fascinating to see the subtle beauty of the land from the air, whether it's the open spaces of West River ranch land or the patchwork fields of East River farm land. That beauty is easy to miss if you're traveling in a jet at 30,000-something feet. I suppose it's understandable that this part of the world is so easily dismissed as "flyover country."

A lot of people were flying over it too. Driving south in the late afternoon, we watched a sky filled with contrails, clear evidence of the amount of east-west traffic. At one point we saw two jets going east and two others going west on what looked almost like collision courses. They sped past each other, two of them crossing each other's trails to temporarily mark the spot with an X. A short time later, a single nonconformist bisected their fading paths from north to south.

As the sun set, a third of the vast prairie sky glowed with orange, violet, and turquoise, giving us an evolving light show for half an hour. More contrails stitched rows of white and deep purple across the layers of high, streaky clouds.

None of the travelers in the jets tracking so temporarily through the sky could have seen us so far below. They wouldn't have noticed, either, the new motel being built in the tiny town of Dallas that a recent article at SmartMoney.com dismissed as a place "two hours from the nearest major airport" where you can't even "get a decent bite to eat." They wouldn't have seen that the new motel was right beside a thriving steakhouse. Nor would they have seen the giant towers of the grain elevator that makes Dallas so important to the local farm economy.

They wouldn't have seen the birds, either. A long-dead cottonwood tree beside a stock dam provided the perfect perch for a bald eagle to pose in a stately manner befitting its status as our national symbol. A lake bed filled with dried grass and milo stubble must have been a prime hunting ground, because half a dozen hawks and golden eagles were circling it.

A rooster pheasant erupted out of the grass as we drove by. He must have seen the predators in their lunchtime holding pattern, because he dived back into the cover even faster than he had started out. He wasn't going to become someone's meal this day. He knew the dangers of living in flyover country.

Just Follow the Cookie

Well, it's certainly a relief to have that figured out. My path is now clear. The choices are laid out before me in an orderly fashion. The rest of my life is going to be a piece of cake—chocolate, presumably.

More accurately, it's going to be a fortune cookie.

Ordinarily, I don't pay a lot of attention to fortune cookies. They're fodder for a moment's amusement, a moment's thought, or an entertaining after-dinner conversation. Once in a while, though, a fortune comes along that makes more of an impact.

Like the one that stated enigmatically, "You will receive all the wealth that you deserve." That's been several years ago, and the millions have yet to start rolling in. Apparently the fortune isn't coming true. Oh, wait a minute. Maybe it is.

My most memorable fortune came years ago, when my boss had ordered lunch for all of us from the Chinese restaurant down the street. The slip of paper in my cookie informed me, "You will soon receive a promotion."

The next week, after a disagreement with that same boss over how to handle an employee problem, I got fired. Somewhere in my old files, I probably still have my copy of the "resignation" letter she asked me to write—with the fortune cookie taped to it.

Actually, losing that job did turn out to be a promotion, just in a different way. I've been self-employed ever since. And if my current boss ever tries to fire me, I'll show her. I'll just quit.

The fortune that is going to change my life, though, came with my cashew chicken the other day. It read, "When the moment comes, take the last one from the left."

Wow. Imagine the time and effort this could save. Just look how much it simplifies every decision. Which sweater to choose off the clearance rack. Which book to take off the library shelf. Which guy to accept out of the hordes of eager two-steppers lined up to ask me to dance. Which brownie to take off the plate. (If you take the last one from the left, then the next one in line becomes the new last one on the left, so you take that one, too, and then the next one in line—you see where this could go?)

There is still a bit of room for creativity, as well. For example, take the salad bar at one restaurant we go to. If you approach it from one direction, the last item on the left is the ham and bean soup. From the other side, it's the bread pudding. If you sidle up to it at an angle, though, and stand in just the right spot with your back half turned, the last item on the left—at least the last one you can see—is the chocolate mousse.

Perspective is so important.

It feels as if a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. From now on, no more worrying about making decisions. No more time-consuming consideration of pros and cons. No more thinking. Just follow the fortune cookie. The last one from the left, and bingo. It's the right—er, correct—choice.

Now, all I have to worry about is knowing "when the moment comes."

Machine Gun Kelly Goes to the Library

I was about 9 or 10 years old. My school (not my class, the whole school—all five of us, and that included the teacher) were on a field trip. One of our stops was the Tripp County Library.

The library was on the second or third floor of the county courthouse. In my memory, getting to the library meant going past the sheriff's office and the jail, though I may be wrong about the jail part.

Anyway, the courthouse was and is a traditional three-story stone building occupying its own city block, with lawn on either side. On this particular visit, the teacher parked at one end of the block. Eager to show off my scrawny fourth-grade muscles, I offered to carry the box of library books. After a few steps, I realized the box was heavier than I had expected. Pride wouldn't let me change my mind about carrying it, so my next best choice was to take the shortest possible route to the front door. Instead of following the sidewalk, I made a wobbly beeline diagonally across the grass.

As I approached the grand front entrance of the courthouse, I noticed two things. One was a girl about my own age, standing on the steps. The second was a sign that read "Keep Off The Grass."

I staggered up the steps with my box of books, and the girl informed me, "You're not supposed to walk on the grass."

Too embarrassed to admit I hadn't seen any sign until it was too late, I told her, "I know."

"So how come you did?"

"Because it was shorter."

She looked shocked. I went on past her, trying to look as if such deliberate disregard for the rules was second nature to me. Between the box of books getting heavier by the moment, and my uncomfortable awareness of the proximity of the library to the sheriff's office, achieving an air of nonchalance wasn't easy.

Fortunately, by then the rest of the group had caught up with me. I gladly relinquished my burden—at least the physical part of it—to let one of the older kids carry the books. All the way up the flights of marble steps, though, I worried about what that other girl must think of me. In her eyes, I was sure, I must seem like a reckless lawbreaker who had, willfully and with malice aforethought, walked across the grass in defiance of the forces of law and order.

Yet letting her believe in my evil nature seemed better, if only slightly, than the other available choice—admitting I hadn't see the sign and I had made a mistake. Better to be thought crooked than clueless.

Perfectionism? Yes, I've heard of it. Why would you ask?

"Beam It Out of Here, Scotty"

You'd never guess it from looking at my office or the guest room (it's really time to invite some overnight guests so I have some incentive to get the leftover Christmas wrap and other clutter out of there), but we've been getting rid of stuff. It's time for some end-of-year sorting and clearing out. Okay, make that end-of-years, plural, starting with, oh, about 1992.

We've found the occasional almost-forgotten treasure and a certain amount of just plain junk. Most of the stuff, though, falls into that troublesome category of things that are obsolete or unused, but that are still too good to throw out. We have no need for them whatsoever, but theoretically at least, we might—someday. Or someone might. We just don't know when, how, or why we might ever use them.

Of course, that theoretical potential is exactly why they've been sitting around all this time gathering dust.

Why doesn't somebody hurry up and invent a recycling/transmogrifying machine? It would operate somewhat like the transporters from Star Trek. The machine would disassemble something down to its very atoms, but instead of putting it back together the way it was, it would reassemble those atoms into something new.

You'd put your old stuff—an IBM Selectric typewriter from 1979, say—into the machine, program the right settings, and press "start." After some whirring and beeping and a few flashing lights, out the other end would come a new laptop, a couple of e-readers, and a set of stainless steel tableware for eight. Oh, and that nine-sixteenths wrench that's missing from the socket set.

Just think of the possibilities. Outgrown jeans and old tee-shirts could be transformed into this year's fashion, or maybe a new pair of Carhartts coveralls. An old bicycle could become a new skateboard. Unwanted Christmas gifts could be transformed into just the thing you'd have bought for yourself. The lighted plastic "pig driveway markers" I got in a white elephant exchange could become a new pair of dress shoes that didn't pinch my toes. Fruitcake or gingersnaps could be transformed into dark chocolate.

Now, that would be regifting.

Of course, there are still a few technical details to iron out before such a machine could ever be perfected. And if it were ever to be made workable on a practical scale, it would completely disrupt the world's economic systems. We certainly wouldn't want to do that, given how perfectly everything seems to be working right now.

So it may be a while before the "Atomic Recyler" is on the market. In the meantime, does anyone out there want a perfectly good Selectric typewriter?

Dreaming of a Redneck Christmas

The man next to me was snoring. Thank goodness it wasn't that awful kind of snore that builds to a crescendo, then pauses for a few moments to prolong the suspense until, about the time the weary listener has resolved that tomorrow—no, make that today, it's 2:37 a.m.—is definitely the day to call the sleep apnea clinic, the hapless sleeper gives a strangled snort, gasps for breath, and starts in on the next measure.

This was a regular, rhythmic snore that wasn't really very loud. It probably wouldn't have kept me awake had I been in my own bed.

Of course, in my own bed I could also have easily poked him in the ribs with a loving elbow and asked him sweetly to roll over. That wasn't an option here. For one thing, I wasn't quite sure who the guy was.

Besides, we weren't in the same room. My lower bunk with its hard mattress was on one side of a thin wall and his was on the other. So much for sleeping like a baby at the annual family Christmas gathering. (Actually, I was sleeping like a baby—the one next door was awake several times during the night, too.)

Sleeping arrangements aside, here is the important question for this year's party: Did this qualify as a redneck Christmas?

Possibly. Here are the contributing factors:

1. We were at a hunting lodge in the South (well, South Dakota). It was decorated in Modern Taxidermy with mounted deer heads (the one with only one antler looked embarrassed), elk heads, turkeys, bobcats, and pheasants. One of the gifts in the joke gift exchange was a set of mounted antlers—from a deer personally shot by the giver, Great-Grandma (who was merely Grandma back when she shot it).

2. Grandma wouldn't have been up for any deer hunting this year though. A fall on the slippery back step a couple days earlier had left her stiff, sore, and with stitches in her arm. She joked that she hadn't exactly been run over by a reindeer; she just felt like it.

3. The entertainment included the usual board games and even a little bit of televised football, but the featured activity on Saturday afternoon was target shooting, with coaching from Great-Grandpa. Shooters included most of the granddaughters as well as the grandsons and sons-in-law. The great-grandkids are still too small to manage a shotgun, but they helped by picking up empties and unbroken targets. Next year, maybe.

4. The feature story of the weekend was the encounter some of us had with a dead skunk when we went for a walk. Someone suggested taking our picture with it, like the picture taken with the dead porcupine a few years ago (don't ask—that's a different story). As we approached, however, the "dead" skunk lifted its head and looked at us. An unhealthy-looking skunk out in broad daylight is not a good sign. We scrambled to a safe distance, my sister used her cell phone to call her husband the veterinarian, and he came and shot the critter. He also saw that it was caught by one leg in a trap. That immediately changed our perception of the skunk. Shooting it, instead of a necessity to get rid of a potential threat, became a necessity to put the poor thing out of its misery. (We skipped the picture.)

Arguments against this qualifying as a Redneck Christmas:

1. None of the in-laws were related except by marriage.

2. Too many teeth.

3. Too many e-readers.

4. Too many college degrees.

But I'll let you decide. Redneck Christmas, or just another ordinary family get-together?

And while you're making up your mind, have a Merry Christmas!