Chooch
When I find myself in the unfamiliar
Out in the middle of nowhere
I think about the saying
If you don’t belong - don’t be long
For one afternoon Jeff and I were testing the abilities of our rented pickup on gravel roads in rural Idaho. We stopped in a small town hoping for a beer. With the bowling alley and it's bar long shuttered, our best bet was a bucolic general store. There I found no to-go beverages but four ash trays and a dense encyclopedia of photography from 1956 which includes an entire section describing how to work with lizards.
The cashier has a radio-scanner running on the shelf behind the register. I wonder what could be all that chatter and begin to pay attention. The police are responding to calls describing “two suspicious white males that came into town about fifteen minutes ago driving a new, white, Ford” I glanced at our truck through the window and asked if she thought they were talking about us.
She took my $2.25 and closed the cash register with an immediate and nervous, “Nope!”
