October 21, 2024

Five years ago Saturday, October 19, a urological surgeon removed my left kidney at Sentara hospital in Woodbridge, Virginia. The procedure, performed with an advanced tool called the Da Vinci system, took six hours.

The kidney is the most complicated organ in the human body, packed with veins, capillaries, and channels that carry substances like myoglobin and creatine, products of muscle exertion, from throughout the body to the kidneys to be treated for removal. The kidneys are the body’s sanitation system.

The procedure is a ureteral nephrectomy, the standard for kidney cancer. If the tumor is located near the surface of the organ, the doc sometimes can reach in and snip it away. Your kidney will recover. If the tumor is a deep “renal pelvic mass” like mine, then no discussion, it comes out. The kidney is too complex and too dense for surgical acrobatics.

The Da Vinci system, which can be used for many minimally invasive operations, consists of a computer console, a sidecart with several interactive arms, and a 3D camera. The surgeon manipulates the arms, which are fitted with surgical instruments, to perform incisions, observing his work via the camera.

When you lose one kidney the other one takes over. Kidney care means hydrating, sixty ounces of water per day. I’m still trying to get that right.

It took more than a year to get to that October day. In June 2018 our family doctor did some tests, then sent me to the local urology practice. The urologist wanted more tests, which were no fun, no fun at all. Then he wanted an MRI.

I got the MRI at a local imaging place the morning we left on our cross-country road trip. A couple of hours later we were on the highway. We headed out on U.S. 50 from Woodbridge and crossed into West Virginia. That night we camped at a state park just east of Parkersburg, an old industrial town on the Ohio River. The next morning we drove into Ohio.

Three days later we crossed the Mississippi into St. Louis. We rode the elevator to the top of the Arch and looked out at the city. Then the cell phone rang. The nurse practitioner at the urology practice said they needed a biopsy. She gave me a week.

Instead of turning around and driving home in a bad mood, we pushed onto historic U.S. Route 66 just west of St. Louis. We followed the Mother Road through Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. We camped and saw some interesting stuff: the World’s Largest Rocking Chair in Fanning., Mo., the Blue Whale in Catoosa, Okla., the Cadillac Ranch outside Amarillo. We took a detour to see Sedona, Ariz.

We left the van with daughter Kathleen in Las Vegas and flew home for the biopsy. Two weeks later we were back in Vegas. The kidney situation ended the road trip. We picked up the van and headed for home, but did stop to see the Grand Canyon, the Alamo, Galveston, and New Orleans.

I wondered, we all wondered. In June I had just finished an ultra-trail run. Sometimes after these things there’s bleeding. After a mountain race four months earlier I spent three days in a hospital with rhabdomyolysis, a condition caused by dehydration that stresses the kidneys.

Home from the road trip, the medical stuff took over. Cancer? I thought I was in pretty good shape. This was a “high-grade” urothelial carcinoma, which is one of the reasons folks lose kidneys. The surgery was set for October. Then in late September, the chest pain, the ER visit, the new diagnosis: “thymic carcinoma,” a mass in my chest. The urologist canceled the nephrectomy.

In December a cardiovascular surgeon at Arlington Hospital Center opened my chest and cracked my sternum in a mediastinum “resection.” He found the mass next to my heart and aborted the operation. “You need further treatment,” he said.  

Our son Michael, a radiation medical physicist, arranged visits with surgical and radiation oncologists at Penn Med in Philadelphia. My insurance didn’t work at Penn, we ended up at Virginia Cancer Specialists for 30 days of radiation and then chemotherapy, which flowed through a chest port. The radiation blasted my lungs. I lost weight. Then eight months of recovery.

October 19 arrived. Staff people wheeled me into the Sentara surgical space. Six hours later I woke up. Getting better included a couple of ER visits. I got acquainted with my right kidney.

A year later, in September 2020, we sold the Virginia house and packed for South Carolina. The day before the closing I saw the Virginia oncologist for the last time. “You need a biopsy ASAP,” he said. “We’re moving out of state tomorrow,” I answered. It was all I could think to say.

The doc said, “I have a med school classmate who ended up in Greenville. I’ll call him.” We shook hands, I left. We had the closing the next morning, then got on the road to the Palmetto State.

In mid-November PRISMA Health in Greenville called. The new doctor ordered the biopsy, a PET scan, an appointment with a surgeon. Before Christmas I was in the operating room.

It turns out that the 2019 nephrectomy did not go smoothly. Urothelial carcinoma cells migrated and reconstituted along the ribcage. So another operation, another month of radiation. A year flew by. In late 2022 a scan found a recurrence of the thymic carcinoma in my liver and pleura, the lining of the lung.

The doc assigned a year of immunotherapy. No progress. In January he switched me to oral chemo, six milligrams, or two pills per day. I keep a chart, most days I remember to take them. A CT scan this week will show what’s going on.

I recall: October 19, 2019 was crisp, cool, clear. From the hospital room window the sky was an iridescent blue. I shifted in the bed stiffly. The temporary stent stung when I moved. Five days later I was out of there.

I’m doing better with hydrating, not easy. So far, Mr. Right Kidney is OK. Still getting out to trails.

We may look back on five years, any five years, as a rush of moments of joy or regret, some we create, others are created for us. With cancer there’s no choosing. We become witnesses, seeking meaning, understanding. We learn, we persevere. We move on.

October 14, 2024

Folks who live hundreds of miles from North Carolina are insisting that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is out of hurricane relief funds because it gave money to illegal immigrants.  They get their information, I guessed, from the internet or right-wing TV shows. Or from Donald Trump.

FEMA maintains a webpage to counter Hurricane Helene rumors. Among them, in addition to the one cited above: FEMA is demanding donations from victims; FEMA provides only $750 to victims; FEMA is denying assistance to Republicans; FEMA is confiscating property of hurricane survivors.

Also: FEMA is restricting airspace for recovery operations; FEMA is distributing aid based on demographic characteristics, e.g., race, religion, national origin, gender preference, disability.

Then too: towns destroyed in the storm will be bulldozed and the land taken by the government. FEMA helicopter contractors prevented delivery of relief supplies. The Biden administration used satellite technology to create Hurricane Helene to punish Republican-leaning areas.

Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene suggested that the government may have a way to control the weather. Someone proposed that North Carolinians form a militia to confront FEMA officials.

Under FEMA’s Shelter and Services Program, the agency provides grants to state and local governments and non-profit organizations to support “non-citizen” immigrants released by the Department of Homeland Security who are awaiting immigration hearings. This program is separate from FEMA’s disaster relief funding, for which it received more than $35 billion from Congress.

Trump, though, said and still is saying that “Biden and Harris stole a billion dollars of disaster money to give to illegal immigrants.”

Republican Tennessee governor Bill Lee rebutted stories that FEMA or state agencies are confiscating relief funds. He added though that “there’s some belief and understanding that the root of the misinformation is ‘foreign sources’ just to confuse on the ground what’s happening here.” 

Kevin Corbin, a Republican North Carolina state senator who represents a district hit by Helene, wrote a Facebook post: “Will you all help STOP this conspiracy theory junk that is floating all over Facebook and the internet about the floods? Please don’t let these crazy stories consume you or have you continually contact your elected officials to see if they are true.” Dozens of other North Carolina local and state officials condemned the rumors.

FEMA is coordinating a force of some 8,000 personnel on the scene in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, and Virginia. Last week federal aid already approved came to more than $344 million.

As of last Wednesday the agency had provided $60 million to 52,000 North Carolina households. Some 800 FEMA staff are on the ground, and 1,200 search-and-rescue personnel have rescued more than 3,200 people. On Oct. 7 President Biden sent 500 more active-duty troops to the state.

The five other Helene-affected states show similar numbers. As of midweek FEMA had provided $77 million to 97,000 South Carolina households and $5 million for 900 households in Tennessee. Some $87 million was provided to 13,000 Florida households. More than 76,000 Georgia households received over $59 million. Some 700 Virginia households received more than $1 million.  

These statistics are provided by guess who—FEMA. But then, people who believe the lies aren’t going to believe FEMA’s figures.

Why the lies? Some are repeated because of ignorance of how FEMA operates. Others are calculated, based on prejudice, bigotry, or wishful thinking. Millions believe anything Trump says. Belief has become more important than truth. In a bizarre twist of how human beings perceive reality, reporting of objective truth—facts—only binds the believers more firmly to the lies. Facts that contradict the rumors, even when provided by federal, state, and local officials, scientists, and policy experts, are rejected.

Fear of immigrants is a central Republican campaign theme. Many Republicans, North and South, believe Democrats want to hand the country over to illegals. The Helene rumors attack the federal response, which is led by Democrats. Some of them, like Trump’s charge that immigrants are getting Helene relief money, are tainted by racism.

The journalist W.J. Cash, in his epic work, The Mind of the South, published in 1941, argues that racism was an element of Southern culture well before the Civil War. Poor White Southerners who did not own slaves scratched out their livelihood far from the affluent coastal plantations. Yet slavery reassured them that despite their poverty, another class—Blacks—stood even lower on the social scale.

Fundamentalist Protestantism replaced genteel Virginia Episcopalianism in poor Southern communities. Backwoods preachers pushed a doctrine that slavery was the God-given destiny for the Black race.

Cash observes that during Reconstruction many lower- and middle-class Whites believed the new privileges of citizenship of former slaves threatened their own economic and political status. Southerners joined the Ku Klux Klan. Racial violence and Jim Crow spread in the South. The migration of Blacks to northern cities stoked Northern racism. In the 1920s the state with the largest Klan membership was Indiana.

Beginning in the 1950s, Republicans, by consciously appealing to racist Southerners, won political power in the South. In 2005 the Republican National Committee apologized to the NAACP for targeting White voters and ignoring Blacks. Republicans still control all Southern state legislatures.

It’s not a long leap to recognize brown-skinned people are now targets of racists. Last week we learned that Helene rumors are targeting Jews, including Asheville mayor Esther Manheimer, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, and FEMA public-affairs director Jaclyn Rothenberg. The rumor machine spun faster. Then Hurricane Milton came ashore.      

October 7, 2024

We were still in New Hampshire when we saw Marie’s tree video. The foot-thick trunk—we thought it was a tree trunk—had crashed through the next-door neighbor’s fence and crushed four ten-foot-long sections of ours. The broken branches extended half the length of the yard and twisted 20 feet into the air.

The Southeast is living the horror of Helene. Greenville County, S.C., doesn’t have North Carolina’s network of mountain rivers, which obliterated communities. The impression here is of numbness. The damaged and destroyed homes, the road closures, the massive stacks of debris, show the results of the collision of 70mph gusts and ten inches of rain with suburban landscaping.

Since we arrived here I said I wished the street had more shade trees. The subdivision was put up thirty years ago when builders leveled everything that grew. They left a few at the far end of the block. Many of those now are bent and broken.

We stared at what looked like two fallen trees. One appeared to be cut almost cleanly from its base, the branches extending into the tangled remains of our fence. The second, which leaned from the next-door neighbor’s yard, showed one end shorn off like a savagely amputated arm, the other end entangled with the first one.

The guy next door explained that we weren’t looking at tree trunks, but at two foot-thick limbs from a tree two doors down. The wind had ripped them from the tree and launched them across two backyards into ours. One was at least 40 feet long, easily weighing several thousand pounds.

He added that if it had blown north instead of west it would have crushed part of his house. The impact of limb on roof—no contest. We squinted at the towering tree two doors away. Two jagged gashes show where the limbs had separated from the trunk.

Hell broke loose here while we enjoyed our trip. At the storm’s end the internet was down, restaurants and gas stations, those that were open, couldn’t process card payments. Vehicles waited for gas in long lines, recalling the historic shortage of 1974. 

Traffic signals now are working. Supermarkets are open, although some shelves are empty. Schools are closed because buses can’t maneuver around mountains of debris piled along roads. Churches and charities are still handing out food and bottled water. Some residential neighborhoods are jungles. One block from our street a row of cypress has been mowed down. A quarter-mile of fence nearby has crumpled under the fallen treeline.

I shuffled through the yard picking up broken branches. The neighbor behind us, Jackie, waved from her side of the fence. “I’m sorry about this,” she said. “I’ve got a guy coming this afternoon to cut the stuff close to the house. I can’t get a regular tree service, they’re all overwhelmed. I’ll get him to take care of all this, if he can.

“The sound of the wind and rain last Thursday night was terrifying. I heard thunder, then crashing and popping, like transformers exploding. It was the tree limbs coming down. Then we lost power.”

I walked back to the house. It was sweet of her to apologize for a weather disaster. Our insurance adjuster said it was an “act of God.” No human being is responsible, not Jackie, not the guy next door. The fallen limbs had been alive. If they were dead the property owner would have been delinquent for not taking them down.

The Upstate news is that thousands of homes are still without power. The local utility reported another half-dozen subdivisions are back online. We drove past a field where giant machines were turning mountains of yard cuttings into mulch. The mulch piled at least fifty feet high.

Jackie’s guy, O.J., showed up with his chainsaw. He tore through the fallen limbs, kicking the cut stumps toward his truck. I lugged the clippings to the curb. Four hours later Mother Nature’s mess was picked up. Only the shattered fence pickets and spars remained.

We walked the block for a closer look. Across the street two huge full-growth trees were uprooted, one clipped the house. Behind a half-dozen homes trees slanted at crazy angles, down but not flattened. Down the street an entire hedgerow had been ripped out. And so on.

It was pouring rain when we flew out early last Thursday. The plane ascended into low clouds, which we now know was Helene’s advance guard. It rained harder in Charlotte. In Manchester, a thousand miles from Upstate, the heavens opened, the northern fringe of the monster. Then it was gone. Friday was clear and cloudless.

In winter we glance at New Hampshire weather reports and shiver. The mercury drops below zero, the snowdrifts pile up. The sundry store in Errol stocks racks of heavy arctic-capable insulated parkas, mittens, boots. We browsed, feeling the thickness of the sleeves and hoods, the face-covering balaclavas. You don’t see this stuff in South Carolina.

We left Errol invigorated by the crisp autumn air. On U.S. 16 we crossed the 13-mile woods, a stretch of thick virgin forest that bounds the wild Androscoggin River, passing “Moose Crossing” signs. We retraced our northbound route, through Milan, Berlin, Gorham, Franconia, Woodstock, Concord. Manchester was chilly, warning of winter.

Sure, they have power shutdowns, tree falls, and road closures up there. They know about winter. I’ve been telling friends that the Blue Ridge, as it inclines southwest from North Carolina into Georgia, protects northwest South Carolina from the hurricanes and tornadoes, the storm surges and torrential rains. Weather treats us gently here.

Then the act of God: we got ten inches of rain. Buncombe County, N.C., which is Asheville, and points east past Black Mountain, and north and west to East Tennessee got close to 30 inches. The torrents gushed down the mountains and across the Southeast piedmont. The rivers rushed through civilization. God is saying: Be ready. This will happen again.   

September 30, 2024

Very little has changed in Manchester in years. Elm Street, the main business route through New Hampshire’s largest town, offers the same eccentric mix of shops and eating places. At noon on Thursday the sidewalks were nearly deserted, drenched by the sweeping rains, the leading edge of Hurricane Helene.

Even in September this is a winter town. Fifty years ago brown smog rose over the old mills along the fast-moving Merrimack River, when coal and oil were the primary heating fuels. Eventually the smog lifted, leaving the snowbanks gray, as they lasted through April. The snow sweeps in through winter, but the place doesn’t shut down. New Hampshire people, like cold-weather people elsewhere, pile on the layers, get coffee, and go to work and school.

We escaped South Carolina before Helene’s rain and winds lashed the Southeast. The “abbatial blessing” ceremony at St. Anselm Abbey, the initial reason we came, was sweet and unique. Thirty Benedictine monks processed into the grand Abbey Church. My college classmate Mark, the outgoing Abbot, handed over his staff to Isaac, who now takes over the spiritual leadership of the monastery.

 Later that day our daughter Marie called to report that a neighbor’s huge tree had crashed in our backyard, crumpling about fifty feet of fence. She sent a video that showed the newly painted pickets and spars in splinters. Power is still out around the Upstate. Western North Carolinians are worse off.

A thousand miles north the sun shone on the brilliant New England foliage. We pushed on to Errol in the far-north corner of the state for our three days of R&R. The idea was a taste of quiet in remoteness. We left Manchester early, getting ahead of the leaf-peepers. We paused in Concord to get the flavor of the state capital.

I walked the gold-domed State House grounds, taking in history. A bronze Daniel Webster scowls next to the building. Nearby is the poignant eight-foot-high statue of Christa McAuliffe, the brave New Hampshire elementary school teacher who died in the January 1986 Challenger explosion. Her pedestal bears the humble words, “I touch the future, I teach.”

Interstate 93 winds into the White Mountains, the trees and peaks glowing with color. Just past Franconia we tacked northeast on U.S. 3. Hikers’ vehicles lined the shoulder near the trails. Trump signs showed up, so did Harris-Walz banners. We turned into Berlin (BUR-lin, not Ber-LIN), astride the now fast-moving, now-tranquil Androscoggin River. The city altered the pronunciation during World War I to avoid association with the German capital.

The town is classic old New England milltown, the cramped brick rowhouses, the soaring steeples, the dregs of the old paper mills. Industry failed here and moved on. A state jail and federal prison landed in the town.

Eventually we turned on U.S. 16, still following the Androscoggin. We pulled over in Milan to walk through a flea market, more market than customers, but a chance to stare out at the multi-color horizon. The highway continues past spacious ranches and colonials alternating with downscale shacks and mobile homes. As we neared Errol civilization seemed to fade into the forest.

Errol is a sort of rugged island on N.H. 20, a secondary state road. The rental, across from Akers Pond, didn’t match the mental image we had of the place. This was Great North Woods New Hampshire, but Akers Pond Road, from what we saw, looked like a backwoods trail in coal-country Kentucky. Three guys in cowboy hats leaned on their Ramchargers and F-150s parked next to our place.

We asked a young girl about a grocery store and restaurant. She looked back blankly and asked a guy standing nearby with a fishing rod. “Stay on the main road to Colebrook, about 20 minutes,” he said.

The 200 or so Errol citizens really do drive 15 miles to Colebrook to find groceries. Which is what we did. We raced along the near-deserted road, through Dixville Notch, famous as the place where the first votes in presidential elections are reported. In 2020 Joe Biden took the hamlet’s five votes. Where the voters live we couldn’t tell.

In Colebrook we found the Wilderness Restaurant on Main Street. It was a late lunch, a couple of other tables were still occupied by local oldsters. We chatted with the young woman who brought the menus, trying not to sound like foreigners. She gave directions to the IGA. We asked where we really were. “We’re 15 minutes from Canada, only five from Vermont. I live in Canaan, in Vermont. I go over to Canada all the time,” she said.

The IGA occupied space next to a Chevy dealership. We picked up some stuff and headed back to the rental.

The leaves are at their peak of loveliness, the lakes mirrorlike and tranquil, the mountains rugged and forbidding. The Colebrook-Errol route alternates paved and unpaved stretches, passing through a couple of state parks. A few visitors’ cars parked here and there.

Back in Errol, we continued past the Catholic mission church to what looked like the main intersection. A Stop ‘N Go market stood on one corner, a general store across the street. We pulled into a parking lot along the Androscoggin. Suddenly I noticed a raft full of helmeted folks waving paddles as they flew over the rapids and disappeared. This is a pretty spot, we thought. Remote. Isolated. But pretty.

Back at the rental the cowboys with their pickups were gone. Not a soul walked the street. We unpacked and explored the place. A little worn on the outside, but otherwise okay. We sat on the deck and, as the sun set, looked out at the pond.   

September 23, 2024

Famoda Farm is off the beaten track, even for this area, which is saying something. But a scenic country drive for some might be a dreary, monotonous trek through the middle of nowhere for others.

The farm is a 300-acre homestead owned by the Brown family. William and Minnie Brown bought the land in 1945. “Famoda” comes from the first two letters of father, mother, and daughters. We read that over the years the Brown daughters, Shirley, Doris, and Heather took pride in every blue ribbon they won. At one point Shirley was the Shorthorn Princess, and Doris was named American Angus Queen.

Last week we saw the Famoda booth at the Greenville farmer’s market and stopped to hear the pitch. The friendly young woman stood in front of a display of the farm’s products, but didn’t try to sell. Instead she handed us a brochure. “Come out and see us, we’re in Taylors,” she said with a smile.

A few days later we drove up to Taylors. The farm is out in the sticks, about a 25-mile hike that seemed much farther. It was dreary and drizzling, but we found the place.  The road wound past large lots and wide pastures where cattle grazed. We passed a sign, “Entering Tigerville,” then found the farm a mile farther along.

We drove up the gravel driveway and looked around. We saw no one else and stepped into the “Farm to Table” shop. The place offered grass-fed beef and pork, non-pasturized milk and yogurt, local honey, jams, preserves. The inventory would appeal to the clientele of some hip urban health-food bistro. But this was down-home Upstate South Carolina. We browsed, the only customers, and bought a few things.

The lady at the register was happy to chat. She urged us to walk the property and see the animals penned in a nearby barn, the events venue, the ice-cream shop. “There’s a wonderful meat ‘n three just a couple of miles from here,” she offered.

Having lived in the South for a long time, I know a meat ‘n three is country for a local place where you tuck into your fried steak, fried chicken, or fried fish and a couple or three sides. “You mean the Hungry Drover?” I asked. “That’s it,” she said, smiling. “My daughter took me a while back, she said have the fried flounder, so I did. It was delicious.”

I wandered over to the barn. A half-dozen straw-lined pens were home to a couple of well-fed pigs, a dozen goats, some cows and donkeys. The pigs and goats pushed their faces through the slats and stared at me and whined, as if asking me to let them out.

A fence crossed a wide pasture where cattle grazed. Another barn stood a couple of hundred yards off, framed against the North Carolina Blue Ridge. The hazy rounded peaks extend northeast toward Asheville and northwest toward the far end of the state where the tall mountains rise, eventually becoming the Great Smokies.

It’s pretty country, an alluring quality of Upstate. But then, this is South Carolina. Slaves worked this land 160 years ago. Reconstruction brought years of racial violence and Jim Crow.

That was about it. We headed for the Hungry Drover, which I know is popular, the parking lot is always full. I had stopped there once and picked up a sandwich. It was lunchtime, we got lucky and found a spot. The name taps into the local cattle-raising business, which is all over that part of the county.

We’ve been to Hungry Drover-type places a hundred times. The tables are fitted with black-and white crisscross tablecovers. The patrons enjoy the meat ‘n three menu: chicken fried steak with sausage gravy; grilled smoked sausage and onions, peppers, and potatoes; a pulled pork plate; hamburger steak, onions, and gravy. You could also have tomato pie and bacon tomato pie. Then too, the fried flounder.

We went off-menu and got sandwiches. The place was packed but strangely quiet, serene, even. No large-screen TV hung on the wall broadcasting ESPN or Fox. Patrons, young and old, chatted. The crowd was a mix, women in jeans, guys wearing ballcaps and workshirts, white-haired seniors. A few folks in button-down shirts and dresses stood out. This is farm country, but the suburbs are encroaching, bringing subdivisions and mini-mansions.

Years ago we would visit the Cowan Café in Sandy’s hometown in Franklin County, Tennessee. It was the Hungry Drover of that time and place, the meat ‘n three, the good coffee, the good company, the sense that the world might be complicated somewhere else, but here and now things were okay. You had the same mix of farmers, truckers, and folks from up the street.

Her parents moved away from Cowan, we stopped going. The Cowan Café closed, now it’s a Mexican takeout. But the same kind of place springs up elsewhere, in the next town, in any town. Back east and up north, I think of Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, diners are everywhere, everyone goes, you hear Spanish, Italian, Arabic. The menus offer everything, steak, pasta, pizza—and your basic meat ‘n three. It’s the Hungry Drover in another place.

I wondered about the politics of the place. South Carolina is hard-core red Republican, one of the seven Congressional districts is Democratic. Yet six weeks before the election, Trump signs are scarce. In 2016 I drove across Pennsylvania, every barn advertised for Trump. Same in 2020 in backstate Virginia. Months ago he put on a rally in nearby Pickens. But since then, quiet.

Maybe the folks at Hungry Drover, and the crowd is probably similar every day, are thinking about other things. The bass tournament at Lake Hartwell is always big, now we’re in football season, high school games are a big deal, so is Clemson. The state economy is booming. Yankees are crowding in, buying big homes in new subdivisions.

It’s still quiet out in Taylors and Tigerville, the roads are near-empty, the cattle are grazing. The Brown family is still selling their grass-fed beef and pesticide-free eggs. Visitors like us drift in, look at the animals, stop at the ice cream shop. Then, if they’re up for a square meal, they may head for the Hungry Drover. Meat ‘n three sounds good.