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Post Offi ce: A just as alluring as the other. Colt was an felt the tingling of being where time
all-American boy in most other ways – and place briefly intersected to create

Short Story he played every sport he could, followed a lasting image. Colt wondered often
those he couldn’t. He wanted to visit all if anyone besides him even thought
by Chad Dean 50 states just to be patriotic and was like that anymore, if ever. He kept a
well on his way to accomplishing that number of albums in his car, hoping to
feat. He felt at home in a national park, maintain if not mimic the mindset that
“Book of stamps, please,” Colt said.
a history museum, a brightly-painted had produced them in the late 1970s,
He was the only customer in the American car with a loud engine. But especially 1977. But listening usually
Sudlersville post office at that partic- he could not explain his fascination with discouraged, rather than motivate him;
ular moment. He had accumulated a tragic heroes, with lost causes, with fatal he knew the era of the country-rock-folk
few weeks’ vacation that summer and flaws. He was shocked as a little boy, singer-songwriter was over and wasn’t
decided a road trip was the best way to when watching the North and South coming back. Worse yet, he could not
spend them. He had always been fasci- miniseries, to discover the Confederacy visit the year and the spot that inspired
nated by the open road since he was a lost the Civil War. He could have had no these classic songs. The best he could
boy, when his family piled into an old real grasp on the causes of the war, the do was patronize the tourist traps that
station wagon or never-been-washed racial undertones, the rhetoric of the had been created because of them. Each
Ford truck in pursuit of a part for one abolitionist movement or states’ rights might have been worth a pass through
of their tractors or medicine for one of demagogues. He was intrigued with the town and a picture, but it was not and
their dairy cows. Those days were in the way the rebels carried themselves, their would not ever be the same as it was.

past for good - the farm had been sold, dedication in the face of impossible odds, His pursuit of baseball iconography was

his siblings had scattered and pursued their attractive flag he recognized in his a different matter altogether. To him,

their own lives – but the lure of the high- youth was still flying here and there in baseball was a language. The rules, the

way still lingered as a fire in his belly. In the countryside and in particular on the uniforms, the strategy, the ballparks had

fact, it was the primary intangible thing state fair midway. In his twenties, he’d not radically changed since the begin-
that motivated Colt; sure, he needed spent time in Richmond, in Charleston, ning. Little leaguers in every town played
to work to pay for his house, his car, in Atlanta, hoping he could fi nd others virtually the same game as the pros.
and other bills, but what got him out that shared that nostalgic if not quixotic This was Americana, this was culture,

of bed in the morning, what got him mentality, but it was fading. Colt had this was transcendent history he could
through the doldrums of winter and the gradually, subconsciously, allowed his appreciate in the moment. Th e currency

mountain of paperwork he had to sort focus to shift away from the Old South of baseball statistics, records, and anec-
through week by week at his job was his and towards faded stars of the sports and dotal personalities was timeless. Colt
love of travel. Not the normal sort of celebrity world.
appreciated Field of Dreams and went to
summer vacation, however. Th ere were
Colt found himself in Key West on Iowa to see the farm as instructed. Heck,
no weekends at the beach, no Disney
the trail of mellow subversives Ernest in his own cattle pasture (they grew
World on his itinerary. Ever. Colt stared
Hemingway and Jimmy Buffett. He went mostly soybeans as opposed to corn

at maps, made lists, and then crossed his
to Las Vegas and California and Houston and furthermore it already had a fence)

conquests off those lists. Call him eccen-

to understand the brilliant madness he devised a makeshift diamond so he
tric, call him meticulous, call him OCD,
of Howard Hughes. He retraced the and the other neighborhood kids could
but this quasi-obsession did make for
route of Smokey and the Bandit but emulate the movie. His school book
some rather unique excursions to oft en
limited himself to viewing the movie reports any time he could get away with
exotic albeit obscure locales in search
only once a year lest he decide on boot- it were about the W. P. Kinsella novel that
of an iconic sign, dilapidated building,
legging or truck driving (or banditry) inspired the film. Colt, of course, could

or battlefield statue, and on more than

as a full-time career. He walked in the not stop there: he knew he needed to go
one occasion required passage through
footsteps of Jesse James in Missouri, in to Greenville, South Carolina, to tour
several forgotten dirt-road counties
Tennessee, in Kentucky, in Minnesota. “Shoeless Joe” Jackson’s house and did
using the coordinates of a decommis-
He drove the same Lost Highway and so. Three times. He crossed the border

sioned highway to some buckling race-

parked at the same West Virginia gas into Georgia to find Ty Cobb’s house too,
track really for no other reason than to
station where Hank Williams spent his reticently investigating if all the people
please himself with the accomplishment
last night. At some point he realized that there in Royston were that passionate –
of fi nding it.
his heroes, for the most part, were dead. or that paranoid. And now his pursuit of
Colt was in Sudlersville looking for He could only be where they had been anti-heroes had brought him to Queen
Jimmie Foxx. He knew that “Double X” and often he and the locals encoun- Anne’s County, Maryland.
had been gone for half a century; Foxx tered there, maybe not even all the locals, He had been there before for rather
drank himself to death aft er a Hall of just the most dedicated ones [read: old pedestrian reasons. The more time Colt

Fame baseball career. The one detail was people] appreciated the history and

spent on the Eastern Shore, however, the
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