I was heading for Merkel partly because the mailman’s map suggested it as a detour round Abilene, and partly because I’d heard of a man there who scratched a living selling secondhand cars, making sculptures out of old radiator-grilles, and raising earthworms in abandoned refrigerator bodies: the embodiment of that can-do western ethos, the kind of new frontiersman I’d hoped to encounter. He sounded truly heroic, and I was looking forward to meeting him. There are magazines who buy profiles of people like that. They pay badly, and they pay late, but when all else fails you soon find yourself slinking towards their door.

After a long crawl round the town’s side-streets, I finally found Mr Earthworm’s place on …

Let’s get one thing straight. The American people care about your comfort. That is an incontrovertible fact. So does Uncle Sam, and so does every individual state government. And the Forest Service, and the National Parks Service, and whoever administers the State Parks, State Recreation Areas, Wildlife Reserves, Wilderness Areas, State Historical Sites, Game Reserves, National Monuments, Historic Grasslands and all those other places that dot the map and invite the curious traveller to investigate. Whether you’re hurtling along freeways or sitting on a folded canvas chair waiting for Canada geese to pass overhead on their northward migration, you can bet that there’ll be a place to park and a place to answer that call of nature. So long …

At breakfast in the motel café next morning I am surprised and delighted to receive, along with my eggs and toast and bacon, a decent portion of hash browns. I mention it to the waitress. “Most places just don’t give you enough.” She agrees. “Jest kinda tickles your appetite, don’t it? But d’you know, most people go out of here and leave their plates half full.”

I look at the table oppposite where some kind of feed salesman in a suit is toying with his breakfast as he talks discounts to a rancher in jeans, suspenders and boots.

The waitress has hit the nail right on the head. When it comes to eating a square meal, Americans simply can’t …

Buffalo Gap has a population of 499. It’s a charming little place set either side of a twisting lane, its houses huddled under a canopy of magnolias and live-oaks. It was here that I stumbled across Lola’s place.

Lola’s might best be described as a shack, certainly as seen from the road: a tiny place with one square window and a little door, wedged between a rickety-looking tin-roofed building and a squat timber house with a hitching-rail outside the front door.

A single pick-up truck was parked outside Lola’s, its front bumper kissing a bleached tree-stump that marked the edge of a narrow, dusty sidewalk. There was no indication that Lola’s was a café: it just looked as though it ought to …

Close your eyes. This won’t take a moment. I want you to picture… a one-horse town. And I guess that’s all I need to say, isn’t it?

But just in case, let’s say it’s midday, the sun’s blazing down on Main Street, the mythical `one horse` is grabbing some shut-eye under the hanging-tree and one oldtimer is sitting asleep outside the barber shop. I dare say you now have a very good idea of the sort of scene I want you to conjure up. But just in case, let’s sling in a tumbleweed.

Right, that’s the setting. Now for the stranger. You know he’s going to ride into town real slow. There is no other way, is …

I have been to the States many times over the past twenty years or so. I have a pretty fair idea how things work here. The people live in over-heated houses (air conditioned in summer to the point where you have to have a sweater handy); they go to the shops in a car; if they walk anywhere it’s round the block or round the neighbourhood park, and, much as the English used to dress for dinner, so they dress for their walks - in neat shorts, clean trainers, white socks, a sun visor, a walkman, as often as not clutching a thirty-two ounce insulated drinking vessel. They call it going for a walk, but it isn’t. It’s an …

Now here’s a question. Just how does a one-time freight-train guard and rat-catcher, ex-laundry hand, butter-melter, post-boy and nightwatchman, formerly one of Her Majesty’s Immigration Officers, later a station shunter, then a university lecturer, on occasion a brickie’s labourer and, while I think of it, a cocoa-sifter, language tutor, signalman and landscape gardener, not to mention that glorious year when, armed with two buckets and a couple of squeegees, he was the sole proprietor of Clear Day Windows, Inc., of Albuquerque, New Mexico, which business he sold for $1,000 in cash just four hours before he was due to leave town and drive all the way back to Newark New Jersey in a fourteen-year-old Ford station wagon, then turned …