Abbey

From Flag to Winslow to Holbrook; and then through strange, sad, desolate little places called Adamana and Navajo and Chambers and Sanders and Houck and Lupton - all the way to Albuquerque, which we reached at sundown. I left the train when two rough-looking customers came aboard my boxcar; one of them began paring his fingernails with a switchblade knife while the other stared at me with somber interest. I had forty dollars hidden in my shoe. Not to mention other treasures. I slipped out of there quick. Suddenly homesick I went the rest of the way by bus, nonstop, about twenty-five hundred miles, the ideal ordeal of travel, second only to a seasick troopship.

- From "How It Was" in Beyond the Wall by Edward Abbey