[...] Strange things happened. Others were said to have happened. A tall skinny senior we called Gopher worked shift at Gus’s. Gopher was a bright but odd country kid with a perpetually puzzled expression. You had a feeling he wasn’t always sure where he was. Being immensely tall and wearing a Norfolk and Western cap, he looked like a lighthouse disguised as a railroad engineer.

One day (I was told, and hope it is true) a woman pulled up to the island in a Corvair—a car, now extinct, that was shaped like a bar of soap and low to the ground. The car was as short as Gopher was tall. From altitude Gopher asked, “Can I help you, Ma’am?

“Do you have a rest room?”

The distance was too great. Gopher thought she had said, “Whisk broom,” and responded, “No, Ma’am, but we could blow it out for you with the air hose.” In the resulting turmoil, Gopher had no idea why she was yelling at him.

The roads were a course in humanity. We picked up a jack-leg sociology that, later, years of thumbing the continent would verify. The better the car, the worse the people in it. Owners of Cadillacs were awful snots, but people in old pickups would go out of their way for you. That sounds too cute, but it’s true. Cadillacs didn’t impress us anyway. There was just something wrong with those people. Now if they’d had a huge Chrysler hemi with pistons like buckets and cross-bolted bearing journals…. [...]