As a recovering journalist, my memories of the job come and go, some quite indistinct—like this tornado recollection I left at JD Allen’s place not long ago:
“I ‘chased’ one in the Panhandle one time so the photographer I was working with could get a decent shot of it. He was driving. We were about a mile from the thing and it was very big and very black and moving very fast on the ground. I was very tempted to bail out, but he was driving too fast. Fortunately he took his shot and [we] got the hell out of the way.”
It’s so flat up there, just miles and miles, as someone has said, of miles and miles. But my favorite spot still is Happy, the town without a frown. One grain elevator, though. And a cookbook.















