The Circle Game:

My Life on the Road

"Yesterday a child came out to wander
Caught a dragonfly inside a jar
Fearful when the sky was full of thunder
And tearful at the falling of a star"

Joni Mitchell The Circle Game 1968

Yesterday a Child Went Out to Wander 1948-59

My father was a member of the "great generation", he spent the winter of 1944-45 as a guest of the Third Reich in Barth, Germany. They called the place he stayed on his European vacation "Stalag Luft One."

He never got over the poverty of the Great Depression, and the stress and guilt of the prisoner of war experience tainted our home.

When I was two years old and out of diapers, I made a break for the border.

Didn't make it, but hey, it was my first try. My panicked parents found me four blocks South, sitting in the middle of an intersection.

Been runnin' ever since.

House goes down the river

The Kansas "Kaw" River valley traverses a broad flat floodplain. Many farms were homesteaded there in the 19th century. One of my earliest memories is of a flood on the river. Father took me, leaving Mother and little brother behind. We walked over the ridge where the University of Kansas stands, and went down to the flooded Kaw.

He lifted me up to sit on a cement ledge and I looked down. This might have been my first excursion with my Dad. There didn't seem to be anything to see.

He pointed upstream and gently turned me toward the spectacle. Coming down river was a grey wood frame two-story and attic farmhouse. Still upright, it tumbled slowly in the current. Suddenly the big house ran aground and began to break up. In what was probably just a minute, it was gone.

"Daddy, why did they put their house in the water?"

I have seen the results of many mistakes, but that house going down the river, clear evidence of human fallibility, might be my earliest memory.

Bridge to nowhere: the first interstate

I remember the earliest US Interstate Highways. It was in the 1950's, during the Eisenhower administration. I was eight years old when my mother insisted the we walk five miles into the country to view the marvelous progress. Our heap, a 1939 Chevy six, had just run a rod through the block.

All the highway that was finished was a huge cement dual overpass with no other paved surface anywhere near it. I couldn't understand what it was doing way up there. Today the road is known as I-70.

Our highway network took fifty years to build and is still incomplete. Sure, I liked Ike, but after 2,000,000 highway miles over 50 years I believe America made a big strategic error.

Stacking huge blocks of concrete in the sky is so Sphinx-and-Pyramid era. The worst thing about our transportation system is its basic lack of expandability: it has already occupied all the available two dimensional space and has to be closed down for additions or repairs.

What part of inherently self-limiting isn't intuitively obvious?

A major long-term purpose of this website is to propose a system that could replace the dumb transportation system I consider to be the second biggest obstacle to human progress. (Uncontrolled population growth is the first.)

Bicycle Blues

We lived in married student housing at the University of Kansas, which consisted of an uninsulated former officers' barracks from the big war. When I was six, some kid slipped the chain on his 20-inch bicycle and abandoned it in front of our apartment.

Toys were real scarce, I couldn't believe my luck.

I'd like to say I found a wrench and fixed that chain, but that would have been mechanically precocious. I repeatedly reset the chain, rode about 15 feet until it jumped off the sprocket, and started over.

I did this 10 hours a day for two weeks until the owner's dad showed up in a wood-paneled 1954 Chevy station wagon to reclaim the bike.

We had no television or radio at KU, so a child's opportunities for expanding consciousness were limited. But events beginning in my sixth year established a pattern for life.

Last Steam Locomotive

At the age of six, Mother took me to the train depot in Lawrence to see the last steam locomotive on the Kansas City, Lawrence & Southern Railroad line.

We waited in silence with a group of maybe 50 others, mostly passengers.

At last the mighty engine approached, billowing smoke and steam. I drew back from the rails to avoid the loud and shiny drivers, but looked admiringly up at the engineer.

I knew where I wanted to sit.

Three Ragwing Pipers - 707 Flyover

Near the married student housing complex, which was called "Sunnyside", there were large intramural football fields.

One day I was playing with cheap toy cars on dirt streets when I heard a roar overhead. An airplane! No, three brightly colored airplanes. My luck had finally changed.

Now imagine a restless boy who is seven and has never seen an aircraft, as three ragwing Piper Tri-pacers not only overflew the apartments maybe 400 feet above ground level, but circled back to land on the grass intermural fields I played on.

I ran to greet my heroes as if they were visitors from outer space.

But they taxied around and took off before I could reach the spot, dang.

Awesome though they were, the three Pipers were just the warm-up band. A couple weeks later, I was playing with cheap toy airplanes on a dirt airstrip when I heard a huge roar overhead.

My jaw dropped. I started running for the intermural fields.

Overhead, at a low altitude that would get any airman jail time today, was an enormous Boeing 707 jetliner. Unfortunately only for me, the jet wasn't trying to land, but I gave chase anyway.

It is said that Soichiro Honda experienced a life changing vision when the first car rumbled through his small Japanese village. The boy gave chase excitedly, as certain boys and strong dogs will always do. He founded a motorcycle company.

I had little ambition to found anything, but I wanted to drive every car, ride every bike, and fly every plane I could get my hands on.

Cartwheels Lost to

Car Wheels Through the Town 1959-66

Oil Change Special
My first Driving Instructor
The Apprentice: Car Keys of the 1960s
First Motorcycle Passenger: Honda 50cc Super Cub 1965
Jimmy, the Sleeping Motorcycle Passenger

Route 66 1967-1971

Shelter from the Storm 1972-1992

Fast Lube Crime
Ford Mustang: I gotta Pony Car (Introductory Story Only)

Truckin' 1992-2005

Easy Rider 2005-?

End Edgar V. "Ed" Sherbenou Biography, goto Sitemap