Kansas is full of beautiful flowing wheat fields. Pretty as heck but the wind blows a lot. A mere 435 miles and we made it from from Abilene, Kansas to near Colorado Springs, Colorado. Don has 40 acres on this flat, fairly treeless grassy plain at 6,019 feet about 40 miles east of Colorado Springs. Wonderful reunion with Don, as I haven’t seen him for about 7 or 8 years when he flew out to Gold Beach to help us work on an issue. He hates to fly so I don’t expect he’ll fly out there anymore. He doesn’t appear to have aged at all. It’s nice to have a real home to stay in for a few days, rather than a motel room, with real home meals and a big breakfast rather than the little free breakfasts that most of the motels give you. The town here is called Rush, and it consists of a cafe, post office, tiny school, and a garage that is usually closed. No gas station. Rush is mainly composed of ranches and homesteads like this. You can see just about to the horizon in all directions. Don’s always got something new going. He has a big fake rock in front of his house that’s made out of styrofoam and stucco. With his artist touch he made it look like a real granite rock. He tried selling them but the materials to make the fake rocks cost so much he couldn’t make enough money per rock. The rock pictured cost about $200 and weighs about 50 pounds. The real thing would probably weigh a ton and half. It’s 90 plus degrees right now, but Don and his wife, Nancy, don’t mind that so much. It’s the long winters with near zero temperatures and cold wind coming across the high plains from as far as you can see that bothers them. They’re thinking about moving to a more temperate climate. They live in a 2600-foot new doublewide trailer with attached garage. Beautiful house whose appraisal dropped from $230,000 four years ago to $170,000 today. Such is the state of the real estate market out here. Their water is delicious; it should be bottled. It’s almost as good as my spring water back home in Oregon. Our next stop from here is 29 Palms in the Mojave Desert of Southern California, where my daughter, Annie, lives with her Marine Corps husband, Erik Tuttle. Don has a connection to 29 Palms stemming from 1945 when it was strictly a Naval Air Station. His Dad was a civilian who used to build ground targets for Avenger dive bombers to blow up. Don said once his father sent an assistant out to check on a target, then told a pilot he knew to buzz him as a joke. The pilot dove on this poor hapless assistant while he was attending the target, then pulled up of course. The assistant actually defecated in his pants, according to Don. Now that’s a cruel joke! Don also liked to explore some of the old abandoned gold mines in nearby Joshua Tree National Park, as my family does. He said as a young boy (he would have been 14 in 1945) he climbed down an old rusty ladder into one of the shafts. About a yard or so from the bottom, he decided it was too dangerous and began to climb back out, but his elbow hit a spider web about as big as a banjo string. “I looked into this hole,” he said “and I saw the web spinning inward to where there were skulls of small animals. I dove upwards out of the hole and got the heck out of there.” Now Don can be prone to exaggeration on occasion, but he swears this is a true story. We’ll spend the next couple of days swapping stories and remembering the early years of Backwoods Home Magazine.

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