Thomas Doty – Storyteller

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Among Buttercups and Nettles

In the springtime desert of Northeast California, rattling slow-motion-low-4 in my Japanese Jeep, I come across the rusting carcass of a 1920s Studebaker at the end of what can barely be called a road.

In this meadow of wildflowers, where this car chugged to the end of its last trip anywhere, I prop up the steering wheel. I lean scraps of tires inside the fenders and drag the wood-framed back windows across the meadow and balance them over the hole that was once the trunk.

I work for an hour, and this once-green-now-rust-orange car takes new form among buttercups and nettles, where daisies push up through the floorboards and climb toward spring.

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