dicks,soft- spoken country sheriffs with something black and menacing in old eyes color of faded grey flannel shirt. . .                                                                                                       And always car trouble : in St. Louis traded the 1942 Studebaker in ( it has a built-in engineering flaw like the Rube ) on an old Packard limousine heated up and barely made Kansas City   , and bought a Ford turned out to be an oil burner , packed it on a jeep we push too hard ( they are no good for highway driving ) – and burn something out inside , rattling around , went back to the old Ford V-8 . Can’t beat that engine for getting there , oil burner or no.  And the U.S. drag closes around us like no other drag in the world , worse than the Andes , high mountain towns , cold wind down from postcards mountains , thin air like death in the throat , river towns of Ecuador , malaria grey as junk under black Stetson , muzzle loading shotguns , vultures pecking trhough the mud street- and what hits you when you get of the Malmo Ferry in ( no juice tax on the Ferry ) Sweden knocks all that cheap, tax free juice right out of you and brings you all the way down : averted eyes in the cemetery in the middle of the town (every town in Sweden seems to be built around a cemetery ) , and nothing to do in the afternoon ,not a bar not a movie and I blaste my last stick of Tangier tea and I said “K.E. let’s get right back on that ferry .” But there is no drag like U.S. drag . You can’t see it, you don’t know where it comes from .Take one of those cocktail lounges at the end of a subdivision street – every block of houses has its own bar and drugstore