Breakfast With the Chief of Police

Somewhere in New Mexico - January 26, 2007

We pull into a small town in New Mexico. There is a small diner open for breakfast. We walk over an icy four-lane highway and go into the restaurant.


There are four patrons who warmly welcome us and ask us to sit at their table close to the heater. One of them is C_____, who is dressed as a working cowboy with jeans, a flannel shirt, and a faded jacket. We speak to them and exchange life stories. They all live in town. One-by-one, everyone leaves except C_____ and the cook who is the owner.

C_____ appears to be about 50 years old. C_____ asks me about my Pink Floyd T-shirt and expresses a love for the early Floyd albums. We discuss rock concerts we have attended. He ticks of eight or nine groups. I mention a few including the free “love-in” nude "flower power" 60’s concert we attended with Jerry Garcia and Timothy Leary in San Francisco.

We begin to discuss Ken Kesey’s “One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and Tom Wolfe’s “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.”. We both hint at a brief love of hallucinogens terminated reluctantly by impending maturity.

C_____ tells us about his trips to the Mediterranean on an aircraft carrier. I tell him about seeing the Pacific in a C-124. The cook comes out and tells me that C_____ is the Chief of Police and has been making several movies with a Hollywood film crew.

C_____ explains to us that there are 180 people in his town and it’s pretty boring. He says most of the people here are ranchers and haven’t really adopted big city attitudes. They have computers and DSL but are very old-fashioned in many ways. Until three years ago he was the elected sheriff of the entire county.

He has been working with film crews doing remakes of “The Hitcher”, “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “The Birds”. The Hitcher is one of my favorite all-time movies. He tells me to look out for some surprising plot changes but offers no plot-spoilers.

We pay the bill and say goodbye. I tell him I seldom have an opportunity to discuss my history of drug use at breakfast with a Police Chief. He says that he would just as soon not have his constituents know about his.

Mrs. Phred and I fill the RV with gas on the way out of town. A blacksmith is shoeing a horse in the snow-covered convenience store parking lot. We both agree that breakfast in small-town America often provides interesting experiences and memories.

Bad Hair Days and Under Toads

Navarre Beach, Florida

On the way here, we pass the little fishing town of Panacea. We remember going to visit Mrs. Phred’s older hippie friend in 1965. He has a little cabin with things on the wall that say “Peace” “Love” and other hippie ideas. He is my first contact with the hippie culture. We drive back to the FSU campus 25 miles in the night on Mrs. Phred’s motor scooter. She yells that the moist air makes her hair all “frizzy”. That’s the first time she tells me that, but not the last.



The beach here extends for 30 miles. There is a stretch of 10 miles that is a national seashore. The beach is littered with seaweed, plastic trash, coconuts and jellyfish carcasses. We see maybe four other people on the long stretch of white sand beach and dunes. It’s Monday and cloudy. We stretch out our beach towel and lay back to listen to the pounding surf.



I think that laying on the beach is what retired people should do. As Timothy Leary would have said, “This is really it”…or is it? A young couple walking on the beach waves at us and Mrs. Phred says, “they are thinking, ‘that is us in 40 years.’ ”…I tell her, “If they’re lucky”.



Mrs. Phred at first refuses me permission to swim based on the the rip currents and later relents. “Aye, Captain”, I say, “the crew is grateful.” We endure this paradise for maybe 45 minutes and then Mrs. Phred goes back to the Toyota to read her book out of the wind. I go out into the ocean up to my knees and let the waves crash over me. I think about the ocean “Under Toad” that my parents always talked about.



I see a flock of pelicans coming my way from about a mile down the beach and try to take pictures. By two we get heavy rain and thunderstorms. We’ve made reservations for a three day weekend in New Orleans and then three days in Betty’s RV Park in Abbeville, Louisiana.


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