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FRONT COVER OF MY BOOK
(click on image to read)
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BACK COVER
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5 STARS on Amazon!
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Click this link to purchase on Amazon.
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(Paperback $8.77 E-book .99¢)
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INSIDE THE MOUTH OF THE COLUMBIA RIVER
(click on any photo to enlarge)
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ON THE MISSOURI RIVER
(special effects provided by God)
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ON THE SNAKE RIVER
(my dog UB is visible in canoe)
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PORTAGING AROUND GARRISON DAM IN THE DAKOTAS (FIFTH LARGEST EARTHEN DAM IN THE WORLD)
Besides portaging the dams, I pulled my canoe/cart across South Dakota from the northern boarder to the southern boarder, (300 miles) traveling on rural blacktops and gravel roads from farm to farm and town to town.
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WALKING OVER THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS
(500 MILES)
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SAMPLE OF MY BOOK,
AMERICAN ERRAND
(first 5 pages)
Trail to Trail
Chapter I
“WE COULD MAKE THE
JOURNEY. You know, like Lewis & Clark did. We could canoe the rivers and
walk over the mountains.”
James
caught the light in his older brother’s eyes. Frank, it seemed, had pulled the
idea from thin air.
The
family had gathered around Frank’s dinner table just like every Sunday, and as
usual they were enjoying a good deal of animated conversation. Frank, however,
had hit upon something special. His idea opened a trail into the great wide-open
and the two brothers were suddenly fixed on it like a pair of boys making
far-flung camping plans.
Frank’s
wife Kathy was a level-headed woman and, seeing the two men heading into the
great unknown, decided to intervene, “Frank, we would have to pull Megan out of
college.”
Frank’s
eyes filled with realization even as his jaw went slack. He turned to his wife
and tried to backtrack but Kathy wasn’t having it, “We would have to sell our
house. You would lose your retirement. And...”
While
Frank got a good reminding of life’s realities, James sat immersed in his own
situation. Certainly he would have liked to of had children but his ex-wife had
felt differently, so he lived alone in a motor home at the end of a dead-end
road. James wasn’t without hope however. He had an old canoe and some camping
gear tucked away. All that was needed was a good dusting off. He had some money
in the bank, not a lot, but enough.
After
an evening of family time, James took his leave with hugs and well wishes. He
drove into the cool of night, beyond the city limits where the stars of
November shone bright. On an empty gravel lane he followed the lay of the land,
climbing the prairie-covered hills, descending wooded ravines. He went with
thoughts on what his older brother had said, and such being the case, perhaps
he felt something not so terribly removed from what Captain Meriwether Lewis
felt after President Jefferson laid out his plan for an expedition. Something
like a spark to the heart. Not a thrill-seeking spark, but that spark that
gives meaning to life.
James’s
home could be found at the end of Wild Horse Road in Jefferson County, Kansas.
James didn’t own the property but lived there by the grace of his friend and
landlord Mark, a high-school teacher who lived with his wife and son in town.
James wouldn’t have moved there if he hadn’t needed a cheap place to live. To
his surprise, it turned out perfectly, secluded and beautiful, between rolling
pasture and wooded ravine. And down in the crux of the ravine, immediately
below James’ motor home, a spring had carved a horse-shoe-shaped pool out of
the rock. The spring pool was crystal clear, never ran dry, and rarely froze in
winter.
On
a rocky shelf above the spring, James had cleared undergrowth by hand to claim
the excellent contour of the land which was shaded by a grove of walnut trees.
And keeping with that flow, James had parked his old church bus behind his
motor home so that both were parallel parked atop the rock shelf. Both motor
home and church bus were of 70's
vintage. The motor home was earth tone in color. The church bus was bright
white with bold black Christian insignias and vivid stained-glass windows. In
the summer- time, both motor home and church bus appeared to sit in a grassy
cove peppered with rocks and bordered by trumpeter vines in bloom. The walnut
trees provided shade. A hand-buried line supplied electric power. A barn cat
controlled rodents while her kittens played in the yard.
Monday
as usual, Frank came to visit and also perhaps to check on James who was nine
years his junior. And as usual, on seeing Frank coming up the trail, James’s
dog UB, though old and frail,
barked and danced and wagged his tail.
“How’s
life at ‘the compound?’” Frank asked with a wry smile, standing on a wooden
pallet that served as a stoop.
“Good,”
James replied happily.
With Frank comfortably seated inside, James
pulled down a large window shade on which he had mounted a map of the USA. “I’ve been thinking
of what you said about the Lewis and Clark trail, and you know, I’ve come to
realize, I’m in a good position to give this a shot.”
Frank seemed worried. James might drown in the
river, or fall from a cliff in the mountains. Moreover, Frank’s fears were
magnified by the lens through which he saw his little brother who for some
years had been chasing after things that couldn’t put a crumb of bread on the
table. In fact, having gotten onto such a path, James had willingly given up a
very successful business which he’d built from scratch. Fifteen years of hard
work, apparently thrown away. James also sold his house and gave away most of
his home furnishings. And things had only gotten “worse” from there. Most
recently, James had made an ink pen from a falcon feather which, as far as he
could tell, floated down from above. With the feather, James paid homage to his
forefathers in verse by candle lantern. Only after showing his mystic feather
to Frank had James learned it wasn’t a falcon feather but a turkey feather.
Some months before finding the feather, James
had found a long-forgotten pioneer graveyard with the help of a third-generation
farmer. The old farmer had told James to walk past a giant cotton- wood tree on
the horizon and then continue until he found a wagon road hidden in tall
prairie grass—,
“Find
the road and follow it,” the old farmer had said, purposefully neglecting to
tell James what waited at its end. So James did as the farmer said and walked
toward the cottonwood. Soon the farmer’s place seemed a tiny island of trees in
a sea of corn and soy beans behind. It sunk from sight as James went over the
next rise. He skirted the edge of a pond that had filled with silt to become a
cattail marsh with frogs singing in a chorus. From there the fields were taken
over with hedge and hawthorn trees. James walked with a weave to avoid their
prickly branches. On the other side of the wood, at the base of a long low
rise, James came out in a virgin prairie, wide in girth, and featureless as the
blue sky above. At once James noticed how the angle of the sun fell upon the
native grass to betray the shadows of two parallel lines. There lay the wagon
road. Its ruts were hidden even though they were deep in the earth. James
followed their shadows with his eyes across the prairie, rising slowly to a
hilltop where stood a small crown of trees. The trees, which must have been
great in their day, had gone the way of those who lie below. Their bark had been
stripped away, their storm-wrecked limbs bleached by sun and time. Below these
wood skeletons, the graves lay concealed in a thicket. Only an ornate fence
spear protruded here and there to tell of the Victorian age. Also, the top of a
granite obelisk was just visible in the center of the plot. There the pioneers
had laid their loved ones to rest. The last to be laid down was in 1895. And by all
appearances, there hadn’t been anyone to pay their respects in modern times
even though the cemetery lay just ten miles outside a thriving city. But to be
fair, local folk kept the place a secret for fear of thieves and vandals. The
number of graves surprised James. And he should have seen it coming before he
crawled into the thicket but, as he made his way from grave to grave, he
realized that nearly all were children. So there James was on his hands and
knees, getting closer to something he could not explain, thinking about how it
must have been for those fathers and mothers who had to bury their young. And
he realized, he did not understand the struggles of the past. He did not know
the sum of his debt.
Some
folks thought James crazy but in truth he was answering a call. He did not know
what he was called to but only knew it to be right in his heart. And as for the
Lewis and Clark trail, James saw it as an extension of the path he was already
on, and he had already gone beyond the point of turning back.
Several
days after James spoke with his brother Frank, their sister Patricia reached
him through the modern magic of a telephone (and what would those pioneers have
thought, had they known that a 150
years later, people at opposite ends of the Oregon Trail would be speaking
clearly to one another through midair!)––,
“James,”
said Patricia, “you can do it. I know you can. And I want you to know that, at
least on this side of the [continental] divide, I’ll do everything I can to
help you.”
Throughout
the winter James worked at meeting obligations unrelated to his dream except
that they had to be done in lieu of beginning on it. Then in mid-March, James
removed a tarp from atop his motor home to reveal a dusty canoe. He put the
boat in a 9' X 26' over-the-road
cargo-box he’d had trucked in to serve as a workshop. The cargo-box had a
ceiling of clear fiberglass which let plenty of daylight in. James strung up
plenty of lights so he could work day and night. Next he climbed to a luggage
rack atop his church bus where a steel locker contained four large plastic tubs
full of camping gear. James brought down his gear and took it into the cargo
box where he laid it out alongside his canoe. He next went around behind his
bus where a small wooden deck provided easy access through the back door. Above
the door, a sign read, “FOLLOW
US, WE`’RE FOLLOWING JESUS!”
James
had made the inside of his church bus into a workshop. And a fine workshop it
was, with workbenches and cabinets custom fit to the contour of the interior.
The floor of the workshop was rubberized because it had originally been a
school bus. Thus having everything he needed, James turned on the power and set
about building the invention that had previously existed only in his mind, a
lightweight portage system that integrated canoe, machine, and man.
Although
James hoped to be ready in a month, he actually completed his preparations in
seven weeks. His tasks included constructing a portaging machine, fixing up an
old car that could be thrown away, getting his gear in order, figuring out an unrefrigerated
diet, completing physical training, putting the compound into mothballs,
arranging to have his rat-killing cat fed while he was away, and so on.
Based
on logistical reasons to be later revealed, James decided to attempt the Lewis
and Clark trail in reverse. In other words, he would go inbound on their
outbound route (from west to east). Therefore James needed to find a way to get
his one-man-expedition to the Pacific Ocean some 1,800 miles away. And that was how it came to pass
that his friend and landlord Mark stood shaking his head while asking––,
“James,
do you really think that this [junky old car] can make it over the mountains?”
The
object of Mark’s question was an automobile from the gas crunch days of the
early 1980s, a real runt of a
rust bucket with its interior gone to rags.
With a worried gleam, James looked up from the
engine bay, “Yeah.”
Mark
could hardly keep from laughing.
“It’ll
make it,” said James, wrenching on the grease-caked engine. “I’ll make it, make
it.”
James
had no choice but to make do, having neither budget nor time to afford better.
In fact his plan was so short it ended at the beginning, beyond which he had no
plan other than to put his boat in the water and paddle.
AMERICAN ERRAND
Cynthia in Illinois: "James, 4
am... just finished your book. my eyes are tired but my
Click on back cover to read.
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ON THE WAY TO THE WEST COAST, TO BEGIN MY JOURNEY AT THE MOUTH OF THE COLUMBIA RIVER.
(Photo looking north from the BLUE MOUNTAINS to
THE COLUMBIA RIVER BASIN)
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| UB |
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| CAMPED IN THE BADLANDS OF MONTANA |
AMERICAN ERRAND
READER REVIEWS
(UNSOLICITED, NON-AMAZON)
Mark in Kansas: “I was dragging myself to work in the
morning because I couldn’t put it
down at night.”
down at night.”
Longtime Mayor of
Blunt S. Dakota: “The book arrived last Saturday. And I read it and
was
done on Monday. I found that every time I laid it down to do something, I could hardly
wait to get back to reading again.”
done on Monday. I found that every time I laid it down to do something, I could hardly
wait to get back to reading again.”
Mike in Idaho: “I
have to wonder if you even know what you've achieved... Your story
is
coming right down the street of the folks - it's a journey into the center of the heart of God
himself.”
coming right down the street of the folks - it's a journey into the center of the heart of God
himself.”
Randy in Colorado: "I put off some chores and honey-do’s that needed to be done to read
a little of your book Saturday morning - I ended up reading all day and a good part of
yesterday. About 7:00pm my wife commented, ' you’ve been reading that book all day, can you
put it down long enough to eat dinner?' "
a little of your book Saturday morning - I ended up reading all day and a good part of
yesterday. About 7:00pm my wife commented, ' you’ve been reading that book all day, can you
put it down long enough to eat dinner?' "
Harold in N. Dakota: “Just completed your book I am a slow reader but it was great it
is the first book I have ever read all the ways had trouble keeping a interest in a book but your
book did that I was very pleased to be able to do that being I am 68 years old...”
book did that I was very pleased to be able to do that being I am 68 years old...”
Marcille in Kansas: "I stayed glued to American
Errand, reading on Labor Day weekend, between
activities on an antique auto tour. The author's incredible
determination was amazing.
Surely only by the grace of God did he survive to tell his
adventure."
Photographer in Vancouver, WA: "I read your book
with gusto - it held my interest throughout."
Director of Sales for software firm in Kansas: "Thoroughly
enjoyed the read."
Retired Newspaper Publisher in Maine: "…enjoying
your book very much."
Carol in S. Dakota: "...enjoying
reading it."
heart and soul feel refreshed and my faith in God even stronger."
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After completing the LEWIS AND CLARK TRAIL and writing my book
AMERICAN ERRAND, I went on a series of horse and wagon missions in rural America.
My mission was to inspire people to hold on to their small farms and towns, to their rural way of life,
to one another, and all that they held near and dear.
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My horse Reba and I in rural Kansas
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My mission, which I am still doing today,
includes the
booklet pictured below, a culmination of what I've learned on the trail.
Click on image for clear view.
People of faith really seem to like it. In fact it is being read around the world.
You can also purchase it in paperback on Amazon.
I priced it as low as they would allow and I make no profit.
(Paperback $3.83 E-book .99¢)
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Please also visit my other websites covering my travels by horse and wagon in
rural America. The websites have journals, pictures, and videos of traveling the
old way. Lots of good people, plenty of adventure, plus the literature I wrote and
handed out on the trail. The links are below:
Faith March 2012:
Faith March 2013:
After my journey of 2013, Reba and I traveled to small towns with truck and trailer
for many years where we walked the towns passing out the above booklet,
AMERICA'S FAITH FRONTIER.
In 2018 I began a new faith based project, a fiction story. A three book set about a family in the wilderness. It's a whopping adventure! Today (Dec 2023) I am halfway finished with the third and final book and hope to have the trilogy completed and published in another year. Reba is still with me and although I seldom wagon or ride her anymore, we go for walks together everyday. It's a nice break from my writing which otherwise consumes me (in a good way).
Thank you for visiting, and
may God bless you!
Reba
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