25. To the Stars Through Difficulty: Stephen Meats

Seventeen miles south of Concordia in a small stand of trees off old
Highway 81 there was once a wayside drinking fountain, a single pipe rising
out the ground from which welled up perpetually the coldest clearest water.
It’s long since been effaced by the four-lane, but fifty years ago,
for restless teenagers in town, to drive out to the fountain of a summer night,
to watch the lights of the safe and familiar streets disappear in the rearview mirror,
was to venture close to the edge of a dark yet beckoning unknown, where,
balanced on the very rim of our world, we would tune the car radios to KOMA
in Oklahoma City, and with the Top Forty pouring down from a limitless sky,
drink of the cold artesian flow and dance for our lives.

— Stephen Meats

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