“‘No shirt, no sleeves, no service. . . . No guns.'”

My buddy Floyd is a native of Wisconsin. He’s half Minnesotan and half Wisconsinite, which makes him half German and half Norwegian and about six-feet nine-inches of Aryan genetics. It’s impossible not to attract attention when traveling with Floyd. I’m going to have a T-shirt made for him that preempts the two questions that he’s asked wherever he goes:

No, I’ve never played basketball on a team.
Six foot nine.

Although Floyd sticks out like a miniskirt in a Methodist church, it never occurred to me that he might be out of his natural element in a place as common as a Carolina gas station. We found ourselves at one en route to the Okefenokee Swamp, and I noticed that he seemed a little nervous for reasons not apparent to me. The cash register line was orderly and quiet, although the clientele might have looked the slightest bit surly. I should have known then that I was taking a friend on something more than a field trip.