Slim Randles is a small-town newspaperman and a syndicated columnist.

Life is kinda like a corrugated, washboard ranch road, I believe. You give anything enough time and experience and you’ll find that warts and scars and grooves will get worn in it. The down times and the up times can lead to a corrugation in our dirt roads and our lives.

Any good cowboy knows how to handle a washboard road, though. Taken slowly, a pickup truck hits each little dip and rattles its carburetor until it puts a kink in the distributor clamp. It takes forever to get someplace, of course, but it does give a guy time to compose a symphony or a letter to Congress.

There is only one way to handle a washboard road: gun it!

Oh yeah, Mama. You step down on the pedal and kick that monster up to about 52 miles an hour and everything smooths out. Fly, baby, fly.

We hit only the high spots on the road and live a bit daringly, challenging the existence of any possible oilpan-killing rock ahead. The country slips by more excitingly and a driver tends to grin a lot.

And in life, we can wallow forever in the slow and low stuff and take ages to get somewhere, or we can floor it, give a yell, and skip along on the high spots.

Somehow, that sounds like more fun.