As I’ve said before, stay with me. It might be worth it.
I don’t know the exact year, but somewhere in Eddie’s past he discovered a book written by a Nebraska rancher named Danny Liska. The book was “Two Wheels to Adventure” and it told the remarkable story of this man’s travels via a BMW R60 motorcycle from his home in Niobrara, up the Alcan Highway to the Arctic Circle in Alaska and then south through the Darien Gap to the southernmost tip of South America in 1960.
A few years later, BMW sponsored Danny as he traveled from northern Norway to Capetown, South Africa.
Eddie was fascinated by the stories of Danny’s adventures and so one day he set out for Niobrara with no plan other than to simply go there.
He arrived late one night, in the rain. He stopped at “The Trading Post”, a convenience store/car wash on Nebraska Highway 12 to see if they could tell him where the laundry mat was so he could dry his clothes. At the time, there wasn’t a laundry mat but they suggested he go up to “The Two Rivers” because they had washers & dryers he could use.
He found The Two Rivers on Park Avenue, went in and stood there dripping water on the brick floor. He was in shock at what he saw. It was an old west saloon with a beautiful wooden bar that ran the length of the large room on one side, with a huge, stone fireplace burning brightly on the other side. The walls were covered in huge elk and deer heads. He felt as if he had stepped back in time. The bartender asked if he could help him. “I’m looking for a laundry mat so I can dry my clothes.”
The friendly bartender invited him into an area off of the bar/dining room where there were several washers & dryers. Eddie soon found out that this unusual establishment was a bar, restaurant and hotel. The bartender was actually the owner, Rayder Swanson. He showed Eddie to a room & told him that if he was hungry, he could fix him a frozen pizza because the kitchen was closed for the night. Eddie changed into dry clothes, put his wet riding gear in the dryer, sat at the bar & ate the pizza.
He told Rayder about the book he had read and asked him if he knew about Danny Liska.
This is a town of 400 people. Of course he knew about Danny. That was when Eddie was told about Arlene Liska, Danny’s ex-wife and, according to Rayder, the riding partner on many of his adventures. Eddie was skeptical about this since there was no mention of this in the book and not a single picture of her.
“Who do you think took all those pictures?” Rayder asked. He promised to have Arlene come by the next day to meet Eddie.
Arlene did come to The Two Rivers to meet Eddie. She showed him pictures 
and memorabilia from her trips through South America and Africa.
As Eddie pieced the story together, it was obvious that upon Danny & Arlene’s split, Danny decided to erase Arlene from the past. To the extent that she was cut out of a picture on the back jacket of the book and replaced by a drawing of a tropical bird.
A deep, decades-long friendship between this unlikely pair was borne and a love affair with a remote village on the northeast border of Nebraska along the Missouri River started to take shape.
Dang it, that was short. I have to say though Lurleen; I do love the pace.
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