TRACKING HAPPINESS: Chapter 19

This is CHAPTER 19 in our series offering gossip, novel backstory, and personal confessions about TRACKING HAPPINESS: A SOUTHERN CHICKEN ADVENTURE. We’re working our way through a novel here. If you’re just now discovering us, you can jump in now or go back to the first entry and catch up. If you jump in now, I can’t promise you it won’t be confusing, but it might be interesting too.

Ok. Last we left off: Lucinda and her mother’s boyfriend Clyde had taken off to find the dude wearing the mirrored sunglasses who seemingly has been stalking Lucinda. Or birddogging her. Or something.

This chapter will end with the train going through the Moffat Tunnel. The Moffat Tunnel is in Colorado. The tunnel cuts through the Continental Divide. The tunnel’s apex is the highest elevation on the entire Amtrak network. The Continental Divide technically is the continent’s divider between rivers that flow to the Pacific Ocean or the Atlantic Ocean. Now, there’s a Continental Divide in North Carolina too. That’s the Eastern Continental Divide. It divides between water flowing to the Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico. The divide in this chapter that runs down the spine of the Rockies is called the Great Continental Divide. That’s the one with the Moffat Tunnel. There’s a lot of info out there on the Moffat Tunnel (all of them acting like the tunnel is “little known”—how can that big hole in the Continental Divide be “little known”?) I picked for the Notes Section an article from the Colorado Historic Newspapers Association because some fluke renders it full of typos (“the historic revolutionary tattles of Concord and Lexington”) that make it extra-fun to read. The world’s longest railway tunnel is in Switzerland through the Alps.

Conveying all this serious information has worn me out. So. 

That’s enough preliminary information. Now go read Chapter 19 of TRACKING HAPPINESS: A SOUTHERN CHICKEN ADVENTURE

Fun Chicken Fact: Roosters have spurs on their legs. These spurs can hurt you, particularly if you’re a kid. Please don’t email asking me anything else about this Fun Chicken Fact. It came from a friend, and, even though she also told me something about using a potato on the spurs, that’s not anything I can talk knowledgeably about. In some breeds, hens have spurs too. That’s all I know about chicken spurs. 

FOOTNOTES: The Moffat Tunnel History