Intro

Every Thursday night in the summer I turned twenty-four, I would get off work from my newspaper job between ten and eleven, climb into my soft top Jeep CJ-5, and drive east from Northern Virginia, sticky sweltering humidity churning in my wake as I crossed the Potomac River into DC, traversed Maryland, climbed the slope of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, and touched down on the Eastern Shore, salty tidewater behind me and the yellow sand of Delaware’s Rehobeth Beach ahead of me. Urban smells gave way to the night scents of farmland, rich and fecund and muddy, punctuated occasionally by the pungent odor of Purdue chicken farms, owned by Frank Purdue, himself bald and looking strikingly like a plucked hen. (“It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.”)

The roads were rural, two-lane, and empty. I drove in darkness, my window down, the buffeting air in my left ear, the sounds of Baltimore Orioles baseball games on the radio in my right,