Just 100 Miles from Home: Exploring the Tri-State with Joe Aaron.

Published by the Author, (1983). First Edition. Signed and inscribed by the Author. Octavo, blue illustrated cloth (hardcover), 259 pp. Very Good, with former-owner inscription. From Introduction: ...I have traveled many thousands of miles along the Tri-State’s back roads and byways since that summer day in 1971 when it all began, pulling a camper trailer behind a pickup truck. I have camped, with a growing nervousness, along the usually placid Wabash when it was not simply a river but a creeping sea of springtime water lapping ever closer to the camper wheels. I have camped at Pennyrile in Old Kaintuck, in fair weather and foul, and have heard the tireless whippoorwill in frivolous song at midnight. I have visited places called Shakerag and Siberia and Dogwalk and Harco, places called Monkey’s Eyebrown and Wamble Mountain and Hell’s Half Acre and Paradise. I have eaten rattlesnake meat deep-fried over a campfire and evaporated salt for my breakfast eggs from the stinking waters near Equality, and on a vine-twisted hillside in Indiana have admired the sandstone sculptures of an artist who lived and died in virtual anonymity. And everywhere I have talked to the people I met along the way -- the endlessly fascinating people, ranging from the Duncan brothers of Golconda to the gentle man they call Mr. Red to Mrs. Robert Barrett of Winslow, whom I will not soon forget. I like to believe that I have taken the pulse of this fair place we call home, that I have defined its character and that I have -- well, that I have sung a love song to it, because I know of no other place I’d rather live. And I hope that I have selected the 91 pieces in this book with enough care that they will catch the flavor of the 800 others that, with tears and anguish, I had to cull out. But what I really hope is that, if you read this book at all, you will enjoy it., That will be about the same as having a best seller.