A long hard day on the road, and in the news, but save all that, because before it, while I slept, I was obsessed by a simple image from very long ago, and that’s what will work for spilling on a quiet stormish evening.

I left home the minute I was allowed to at eighteen and I went first to a town with a girl in it. The town was Kingman.

I got a room at a quiet hotel downtown that doesn’t exist anymore, called the Beale. Then I got a job, with the county road crew, which involved taking asphalt to places and dumping it into washed-out road holes around Mohave County and raking it into place and rolling over the raked places with the dump truck.

There are some stories there, but just one for now.

The road crew was headquartered at the airport.

The airport wasn’t really an airport as far as I could tell, but rather a graveyard for planes, and most of them military planes.

The buildings were mostly quonset hut type things, and the road crew offices were in a part of one of them.

It was a very inefficient part of local government. Sometimes part of a crew would just be hanging around for parts of a day. We used our time to explore the buildings.

Once, some one of us found a cache of something useful.

In a big wooden bin about waist high, there were about a hundred piled coats. Really nice ones, military grade, Air Force probably, all sizes.

They might have been sitting there for decades.

We all spent a little time picking one out for ourselves that worked for size and style.

The one I got was really warm, and that was nice, because it was winter and the job started early. (My Mustang took a while to warm up before I headed out the highway to it. )

It made me feel kind of official to wear it too.

Once I had it on and body heat had warmed it for a while, it began to smell like warm motor oil.

I think the smell was probably something they had put on the coats to waterproof them, or mothproof maybe, or both.

It was a smell I came to associate with comfort and work.

I don’t know whatever happened to that coat, but for some inexplicable reason I thought about it a good part of the night, and woke up knowing I’d write about it tonight.

I think perhaps … there was no traffic sound in the dreamtime, because of this curfew, and that made me feel comfortable and think about olden times, but that’s a partial explantion at best.

Life During Wartime.