My inner voice is that of a world bygone and only in musty books in sunny soft days of the bookstores there in, Hood River, Oregon. Off the boat for a while trying to find something to get in to, besides after the usual pool game we came traipsing out of, I was already hit by wanting to find nostalgia and sentimentality of course, I’m alone in far- from-home small town lit by exciting faces that want to be making brew and catching the wind in their surfing sails, and sipping lattes of spit or looking for credit. A town indeed known for this, and the silence that wind creates around stirred conversation. I find cool dusty two storied record shop and buy two records. Both second-time purchases for I cannot recall where my first copies were lost to, most likely in someone’s house behind the wall unit warped. I spend most of my time either on the grass of the University, or in Artifacts book store, where the counter help is a wise older looking woman with typical thin rectangular glasses that sit half way down on her nose with opened button-down purple macramé sweater and she’s looking at me, watching to see if I’m apt to steal a thing or two, but I surprise her with a few questions about the history of her shop instead. And the coffee shop next door is too modern and dull to explain its interiors, but fitting because the coffee was bad. Nonetheless, it does the job of keeping me walking and I go as far as my time left until I have to rush back to the boat dock will let me. I discover train tracks that follow the rivers edge, and imagine the length they lead into the nothingness yellow hills of Idaho and Montano, pondering still how useful the trains are these days. I think about James Kurilla on railroad jobs through Minnesota, and how if it were cold I might be wearing the weathered scarf or flipping up the collar to walk alone beside the tracks, walking back from my railroad shift having been left off at the last notch in those railroad ties. Buy a pack of filterless Stanton cigarettes just to seek that feeling of that time, and then, nostalgia and sentimentality would be mine. For I am the grandson of Old Weird America, and of a lost country that will never be again, wrapped up in remembering then, while sleeping generations grow up unlearning old lessons.