Turner's Diner, Tire, and Lube
Where they’ve burned the ‘No Smoking’ signs, but never the toast
Bill Evans has taken to stealing radiators for liquor money
A cathead biscuit smothered in hot gravy and the company of strangers like us can make waking up in the morning almost tolerable
It’s 7:43 AM. Merle is on the radio making empty promises. “Someday when things are good / I’m going to leave you,” he sings. But we know better. I am sitting in a corner booth, surrounded by the rising tufts of Marlboros, and still trying to wake up good. Coffee stouter than napalm is dripping, slow and thick, into a pot purchased when Bill Clinton was still attorney general of our fair state. Breakfast is on its way. It’s the only reason I got out of bed before the sun had a chance to warp my feet.
I am not a morning person. If the Good Lord had intended for me to see the sun rise, he would have scheduled that for the middle of the day. I rise early because I ought to, sometimes because I have to, but never because I want to. I can’t recall one good thing in my life ever happening before noon. It’s never good news when the phone rings at 5 AM. It’s either people in the hospital, folks dead or dying, or …
Trucking Our Way Through the Regulatory Apocalypse
Ford F-150s and Dodge RAMs were shaped not by men, but by chickens
Through the lens of NY photog Lee Friedlander, we see trucks as miniature domestic love affairs: mobile homes, trusted companions, coworkers, carriers of what looks like junk.
Meanwhile, we are denied the use of cheap and super-practical motorized donkeys made by VW, Toyota, Datsun, and Suzuki on the road to the state-mandated nightmare of Elon Musk’s new Cybertruck.
I don’t own a truck. I’ve wanted one, off and on over the years, but the circumstances — financial, familial — have never quite coalesced in the right way to make it happen. The kind of truck that would be ideal for me is a small truck, like an early Ford Ranger or Chevy S-10, but alas I’m not alone in this desire, and supply is limited. These days, in my area of cow-country New York, you need upward of $10,000 for a rusty 4x4 Ranger with well over 100,000 miles on it. The old Tacomas have all been hipsterfied, as have the candy-striped 80s F-150s. It’s not that I love Rangers, which aren’t reliable or powerful or good-looking. It’s that I’m somewhere on the border between lifestyle and utility, and I don’t want a midsize or oversized honker. I drive a rusting early-aughts Mercedes station wagon and I don’t enjoy sitting high over the road. What I want in a truck is a way to bring sheets of plywood home from the …
Howl
The Coyote-Human crisis threatens to erupt into full-scale warfare
Savage interlopers bite children, horses; they sense our fear
One man rises up and chokes his rabid foe to death with his bare hands. But will others summon the courage to follow his example?
Our nation is under siege.
For months now, Americans young and old from every region have faced a series of terrible assaults from savage interlopers, attacks that have no parallel in recent memory. So frequent have these incidents become that it’s impossible to list them all, let alone give account of their troubling specifics. But lest we grow numb to the threat that they present to our families and communities, County Highway believes it’s incumbent upon us to offer a sample of these recent stories, sparing no detail.
Arlington, Texas. The caller to 9-11 was frantic, possibly in shock. She pleaded with the dispatcher to send an ambulance, but couldn’t at first identify her location, only that she was in a public park. “Two big coyotes,” she managed to report while holding back tears, had bitten her small daughter and attempted to drag her into the woods — an attempt which was …
