Little Epiphanies

(an excerpt from “Count None But Sunny Hours”) School dances were torture for someone like me who had a vivid imagination and the desire to punch above his weight. From all the books I had read, I aspired to be a dashing – or at least tortured – person. However, the reality of suburban 20th…

by Kevin Carrel Footer Dennis is going to the moon. He asked me if I wanted to come along and though I have signed up for most of his adventures, I’m sitting this one out. He’s got the crash helmet and the air supply ready. He is still working on propulsion but assures me he…

I chanced upon this signal box behind a truckstop in Kingman, Arizona where we spent the night. I woke early and walked between the trucks as the sun came up over the desert. Truckers in overalls emerged groggy from their cabs, each carrying a wide-mouth thermos waiting to be filled with the steaming coffee of…

After the West begins the Beyond, a place of inscrutable intentions and cross-purposes that blow you off-course like the gusts over Altamont Pass, where contraptions of precarious beauty born of human hubris float like effigies on the once-pristine hills now stained in the blood of a generation’s lost dreams. Meanwhile, in the Sierras, giant trees…

There are truckstops of such sublime, searing beauty. I took this picture from a patch of dirt off to the side. This is the overflow lot where a few diesel trucks had parked to get their statutory rest, away from the noise of the semis downshifting from freeway speed and kids spewing from family vacation…

By Kevin Carrel Footer COBSCOOK BAY, MAINE – I have always been about exploring: the big house, my dad’s locked closet, a woman’s body, the backroads of this world, myself. The great explorers of the New World, of the Artics? They have nothing on me. This morning I sit in a wooden shelter overlooking a…