Spotter's Guide To The September 2018 Issue Of Road&Track

This is the ADVENTURE issue of R&T so naturally it features an ADVENTURE BIKE doing ADVENTUROUS things. If you're not ready for that level of adventure, however, may I show you something from our Milder Adventure Department?

Last month, I went to Clarksdale, MS in search of the blues. This was a return to the ground that I trod in 2011, as discussed here. This time I paid less attention to my own anguish and more to the music and stories that surrounded me. In a perfect world, I would have had 10,000 words to share the things I saw and learned with you. Maybe someday when I'm old and idle I will rewrite some of these stories in "expanded editions" for my similarly aged long-time readers. In particular, I will talk about the fruitless trip that photographer Andrew Trahan and I made to "Wonderlight City" in hopes to meet Robert "Bilbo" Walker. We didn't know that he had died late last year. What we found was a tattered dream that had already been reclaimed by the Delta; a torrent of greenery had first-burst around then enveloped Bilbo's club, his outdoor furniture, and the sad old motorhome that had collapsed into the soft earth near the boundary of a dirt road between no place and nowhere.

If you want to read about Bilbo, and I think you do, there's a much longer treatment available on Mashable. If you're a writer, or someone who would like to be a writer, compare the Mashable post with the same author's version of the same story for Hemispheres magazine. The first piece is, I think, the story as he wanted to tell it; the second is the story as his editors saw it. Very interesting to compare the two.