My name is Nick Abel. May 1985 to May 1986 when I was 24 was my life is a crazy journey,

so let's have an adventure and see what happens year. My Backroads of America year, my living in my

car and couch surfing year. This was decades before so many YouTubers clued us in

on how to make that work. I had no idea how to make it work, and it got hard. One night in

Columbia, Missouri, I heard a tap at the window of my beloved green Chevy citation.

A cop suggested I move along.

I'd been parked safely in a huge industrial maze for almost a week

and was sitting behind the wheel trying to write a poem by Pennlight.

And then, wham, just like that, I had to find a new place to crash. The cop clued

me in that there was a crackdown going on. People living in their cars were being heavily fined,

so he gave me a chance to haul stakes without hassle. It was six o'clock and dark and cold.

I just started driving north, angry at the man, as I always was back then in various ways,

picking a direction almost at random.

The biggest dot on the map that way was a place called Moberly, something to shoot for, at least.

I still had almost five days before I was supposed to join up with

a major apartheid protest in D.C. The long stretch between the two points was flat and bland,

and I was just quietly stewing in my resentment all the way. At about eight, I went at slow speed down some struggling

main street in a tiny burg, not much more than 15 or 20 huddled houses, a thrift shop, a hair

salon, and a volunteer fire department displaying the name of the town, barn top, plus a church with

a misspelled Bible verse on its lawn sign. The surface of the street was speckled with

glistening white frost. I had been almost a whole day without a drink, and suddenly that seemed unacceptable to me.

So when a little roadside dive popped up just about a quarter mile outside barn top,

...