I Travel for Gravel

Before

240 pounds later

The gravel apron in front of the Divine Cabin over the years has been scraped and washed away and grass grows there now hiding ticks and chiggers that bite me, and for four years we have asked the landlord for fresh gravel, because the road needs some too, but it never came. In despair I phoned the gravel mine and they'd deliver a cubic yard for $215, $75 of that delivery charge, and dump-truck the gravel in a pile as tall as I and I'd have to hire someone with a spreader or spend years spreading it shovelful by shovelful, alone.

So every summer more bugs bit me and I didn't even have to go into the woods but simply step outside. Mowing helped, but now I haven't a mower and have asked the landlord to supply one as the lease requires. They don't want to. Phoning mowing professionals got me estimates I felt ashamed I could not pay.

It occurred to me, in my misery, to buy and spread my own gravel and choke off the grass, solving at once the chigger and the mowing and the apron problem, and went to Home Depot, a 30-mile round trip, because they would load my car for me, and bought 8 bags of 30 lbs. each for a total of $31. I thought it was named "Viagra stone" (a dirty mind is a perennial resource). Said nothing of this to the teenager dragging the 240-lb. cart out to my car and loading it, as I could not. As an employee he may not take a tip. But I said, "You're not taking it; I'm giving it," and dropped money in his apron pocket.

Doesn't it look like Viagra stone?

With my own labor I could buy five more such loads before hitting $215. Hefting each bag I dropped them at strategic intervals on the apron, slit the bags, dumped and raked a while and was pleased as heck with my result but there was much more apron to cover.

Now I had big plans. About to return to Home Depot to reload I thought to try the nearby Walmart. An elderly employee said to go to the checkout if I wanted their bags of gravel, but the garden area checkout, at 8 p.m., was closed, and the young employee said he did not work in this section and could not cashier, so I just went home.

I thought it would amuse me to shop at every gravel-selling retail around here and score them on how well I was served. My work on the apron is satisfying as a long-lasting solution to a frustrating, expensive problem.

Walmart: Always Prepared

I shop at the local Walmart because I can find everything there except plain yogurt, which is not an Ozark foothills food, and fresh fish. That's because everyone who shops there catches their own. I saw the above, and it's new, a real eye-catcher, in its Customer Service area. I assume it's needed on the occasions when a disgruntled customer is returning things and might be armed. Didn't used to have that at the Kresge's, Goldblatt's, and other department stores of yore. Nor at Woolworth's, where I was a teenage cashier.

Did you know that the first 5 to 15 feet inside a store's front door is its "decompression zone" where you forget what happened in the parking lot and prepare mentally to shop? Walmart doesn't put merchandise in the decompression zone -- it puts a greeter there! -- but just beyond the zone they pile up seasonal or faddish (such as "Duck Dynasty") merchandise on both sides of ya. Ninety-five percent of shoppers will next turn to the right, so the wall to their right after they turn is, in the retail business, called "the power wall," and my Walmart has its pharmacy and over-the-counter drugs there, with cosmetics nearby.

Three Cheers for the Red

Crocheted tire cover photographed in the Wal-Mart parking lot in Eureka, MO. Don't that beat all. It's beautiful, too.

A Wal-Mart Weekend

Drove to Bentonville, Arkansas, original home of Wal-Mart, and ended up Saturday morning with the locals at the farmer's market on the quaint and very green main square in the town center, with its two-story monument to soldiers of the Confederacy. There was kohlrabi and chard aplenty, and buckwheat crepes, and musical entertainment provided by a hot duo called The Tin Pan Alley Cats (a cover of "Your Cheatin' Heart" that would do Hank Senior proud). But the big draw for all the out-of-state cars was the place pictured above, on Main and Central, the original Sam Walton five-and-dime store, seed for all the Wal-Marts that have taken over the planet since. People make "pilgrimages" to this place, honest Injun, and Wal-Mart is working on a Wal-Mart Museum and a high-end art museum that will bring the longhairs to town as well. I myself am a big fan of peopleofwalmart.com.

My friend Reeve, after showing me downtown Bentonville, also took me to my very first Sam's Club. I'd never been to a Sam's Club; it makes no sense for one person to buy a membership and purchase in such obscene bulk as you can buy at Sam's Club, but this place was the size of four football fields and stacked to the ceiling with everything except "Soul Seasoning" in the spice section, which I use to season my greens. They just did not carry it. I was AMAZED that purchased items are not bagged and that you must hand the cash-register receipt to a person at the exit who checks your items against your receipt before he lets you go. I mean, you wait in LINE to get OUT of the store. It was so very East Berlin! Those Sam's Club workers were earning their money. The way the place was set up so diabolically clever, that everywhere you looked, you suddenly felt you NEEDED an above-ground pool, huge bags of dog food, gallons of shampoo: Reeve bought $87 worth of cheese in huge bricks you could build a house with. Why, my jaw hit the floor right there.

Ride a Feral Hog

Only 50 cents a ride. I sent this photo to Reeve. He wrote me back, "Where the heck are you?"

In Missouri, of course. Only in Missouri can you ride an electric feral hog at the local Wal-Mart. Now, you are saying, "That's a razorback." In Arkansas they may have electric razorbacks. But in Missouri it's an electric feral hog. (Actually, the words mean the same thing. But this here is nobody's mascot.)

BTW, the "Rapture," or the end of the world, was a bust, so now you have plenty of time to ride a feral hog. It isn't sinful.