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The Great Outdoors

WASHBOARD – Home Country

March 9, 2012February 4, 2017 Slim Randles

Life is kinda like a corrugated, washboard ranch road, I believe. Give anything enough time and experience and warts and scars and grooves will get worn in it. The down times and the up times, and the way they tend to alternate can lead to a corrugation in our dirt roads and our lives.

Any good cowboy knows how to handle a washboard road, though. Taken slowly, a pickup truck hits each little dip and rattles its carburetor until it puts a kink in the distributor clamp. It takes forever to get someplace, and the scenery never seems to change. It makes for a tedious drive to that line shack or windmill or distant pasture. Of course, it does give a guy time to compose a symphony or a letter to Congress.

Unless there is a huge hole in the washboard road ahead which needs to be avoided, there is only one way to handle a washboard road or a person’s life: gun it.

Oh yeah. You step down on the pedal and kick that monster up to about 52 miles an hour and everything smooths out. Fly, baby, fly. We hit only the high spots on the road and live a bit daringly, challenging the existence of any possible oil pan-killing rock ahead. The country slips by more excitingly and a driver tends to grin a lot.

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And in life, we can wallow forever in the slow and low stuff and take ages to get somewhere, or we can floor it, give a yell, and skip along on the high spots.
Somehow, that sounds like more fun.

Brought to you by Slim’s award-winning books at www.slimrandles.com, and in better bookstores and bunkhouses throughout the free world.

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Six years ago he began writing a syndicated humor column for newspapers called “Home Country.” He’s also the author of 16 books, including three novels and the biography of The Rounders author, Max Evans. One of Slim’s most recent books, “A Cowboy’s Guide to Growing Up Right” has won two state awards and one national award.

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Slim Randles

Six years ago he began writing a syndicated humor column for newspapers called “Home Country.” He’s also the author of 16 books, including three novels and the biography of The Rounders author, Max Evans. One of Slim’s most recent books, “A Cowboy’s Guide to Growing Up Right” has won two state awards and one national award. > Read Full Biography > More Articles Written By This Writer

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