Well it’s time once again to take a little stroll down memory lane and since we are approaching the winter months, I wanted to take some time to tell you about the “ice fields,” as well as a story about “the flow.” 

We’ll start with the flow, which was taught to me by Doug Gilbert and Tommy “Wildfire” Rich. First of all, when you’re traveling in the car with the boys, it is almost a cardinal sin to not finish ALL of your beer. Whether it is in a can or a bottle, if you left even one sip and tried to discard the evidence the boys would somehow know.   

Maybe some of the ring veterans who read the site can e-mail and tell me why that is; I never did figure that out? The only reason I could come up with is because maybe it was to preserve the rest of the beer for the other boys!??!? Anyway, the flow is a pretty common concept. What it means is you have to pace yourself when drinking on the road. OK, so the only person who doesn’t have to pace himself is the designated driver.

It’s very easy to get in the habit of making the same trips by car over and over and over again. Once a week, at most once a month, was more typical but you can only cover the same stretch of highway so many times before having the path, the timing, the little travel issues down cold. I’m going through that right now with my work for NWA Wildside. I could tell you every exit, every stop and how long it should take the average person to get from Tampa to Atlanta and back to Tampa again.  

In the USWA days, it was Nashville to Memphis, Memphis to Nashville, Nashville to Louisville, Louisville to Evansville. You can ask any of the boys about the one road that led from Memphis to Tunica, MS - no one wanted to drive it. It was notorious for bad driving conditions and accidents. 

Anyway, the flow was the concept of pacing yourself with your drinking. If you immediately drank one or two beers and then had to make a “pit stop” along the way, that was the cycle you’d be in; needless to say, the boys would get very upset when you stopped every one or two beers, so you had to get your flow going. We would try to expand that out to every three or four beers. I’m sure some of us had bladders the size of footballs but it’s just part of “passing the time.”