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Other Voices, Other Towns

The Traveler’s Story

Caleb Pirtle III

Copyright 2011 by Venture Galleries, LLC

1220 Chateau Lane

Hideaway, Texas 75771

214. 564. 1493.

Contact: www.venturegalleries.com

Published in eBook format by Venture Galleries, LLC

Converted by http://www.eBookIt.com

ISBN-13: 978-0-9842-0836-4

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval program, or transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise except as may be expressly permitted by the applicable copyright statutes or in writing by the author and publisher.

Text: Caleb Pirtle III

Editing and Design: Linda Greer Pirtle

Cover Design: Jutta Medina

Cover Photograph: Glenn Hyde

Prologue

My travels have never been measured in miles, only in people. The places I’ve gone, the sights I’ve seen, the long back roads I’ve walked have never been as important as the people I’ve met along the way.

Their voices stay with me. So do the stories they have told me.

The voices may come from down the road, at the counter of a diner, on the bar stool in a beer joint, sitting in the front yard of a mountain cabin, along a stretch of spun-sugar sand, back in the darkness of a pine thicket, amidst the downtown traffic jam of a city at sundown, or from the faint memories of a distant past.

Everyone who crosses my path when I travel has a story to tell. It may be personal. It may be something that happened last week or the year before. It may have been handed down for more than a single generation.

On numerous occasions, I’ve simply sat for awhile with the oldest man whittling and whistling on a courthouse lawn, spent time with the ladies who fight against all odds to preserve our past and our architectural heritage, or bumped into strangers who have elbowed their way into chili cook-offs, watermelon thumps, shrimp or crawfish boils, intergalactic chicken fly-offs, contests for tobacco spittin’, prune spittin’, rattlesnake milking, jalapeno gobbling, and turkey galloping.

Those voices, those recollections, those stories reflect the personality of the land itself.

Mountains fade into the distance. Beaches are timeless. The tides come and they go, but once they have gone, they are gone forever.

The town I’ll never forget today is forgotten tomorrow.

Voices remain eternal. Some people collect the oddest of things.

I collect stories. Here are a few that are as vibrant today as when I first heard them.