Day Nine... Midwestern Charm
Looking at the map overnight, I see there’s a possible route a bit out of the way that’ll take me through Poplar Bluff, Missouri on the way to The Lake of the Ozarks so I text an ex-girlfriend and ask if she wants me to say hi to her folks. “Lol!!! You should!!! If you need a thing you just let me know. They'll gladly take you in!” Turns out, that’s gonna be the rare kind word I hear from a Missourian. Maybe I shoulda added the extra hour and a half to my day.
Ed greets me with a cup of nightcrawlers, asks how I slept in the storm (beautifully) and invites me fishing before the clouds roll in. “Scattered showers coming,” he warns, “I track these things.” I’ve got a tough day of driving ahead and I gotta get some miles, but before we go, Ed joins me by the water’s edge for a ceremony for Saza. I toss a handful of his ashes into Orchard Lake and Ed looks at me with a sad smile, “I wish I’d done that for my wife.”
Pause. Then…
“You got Facebook?”
Carbondale, The Big Muddy River, Murphysboro, Appletown with its Apple Fest, Jonesboro… these are feeling like places to be left. I flip on Tom Petty and we roll through the Shawnee National Forest, it’s nothing but trees and cornfields and cursed soybeans for miles and miles and miles until suddenly up jumps the Mississippi.
I pull off the truck route on the banks of the river just shy of the Chester Bridge, with the grey clouds looming upriver, the morning sky is a photo. I look over and there’s a dude in a van taking the same photo I am. We wave at each other and converge in symmetry, mid-conversation already by the time we close the gap. Dutch King Sr. has on stiff dark jeans, a baby blue cowboy button up with a big silver cross dangling and the most mesmerizing gold front on his upper left tooth. I struggle to keep my eyes from drifting the entire conversation. He and his girlfriend run a service delivering visitors to the correctional facility. He used to be incarcerated there himself, drugs in his youth, now he tries to help kids in the city learn how food grows, take em out to the country, show em other ways the world works. Dutch had a chance yesterday to go up in an airplane for the first time, he shows me the vid on his phone, “Got 130 views already,” he beams. We trade notions of knights meeting on the king’s road in medieval times, talk about the origin of the salute from using one hand to lift your visor and see the eyes of the stranger. Seeing the eyes of the stranger is very important to Dutch, he’s teaching his son to look people in the eyes. I try to keep mine from slipping to the gold front. We take a picture together, smiling against foreboding skies, and as the raindrops start to find us we embrace and retreat to our respective vans.
This morning loves this happy traveler, I think as we roll out of Illinois. Dutch had me so charmed, I forgot to walk Sadie by the river. That’s gonna come back.
Missouri greets me with a thunderclap, as if to say, “C’mon asshole, let’s fight.” The skies open up and we practically slip right on Hwy H through cornfields. My first stretch of treacherous driving, really, so I take pause at a convenience store. The guy at the counter thinks I’m shoplifting. The toilet’s backed up (more foreshadowing.) The faces are not friendly. I seem to have rolled through a town composed entirely of hospices and rehab clinics. There’s traffic in the streets and people smoking and vaping cloud formations out of stopped cars. All of them are trying to force me on the Interstate. But I won’t go. I’m sliding on winding streets barreling away from whatever Missouri fiasco I stumbled into when, completely out of character, Sadie climbs up onto the center console. Initially, I’m kind of excited about this, I’d like her to occasionally ride shotgun rather than on the couch behind me. But then I catch a whiff of something. And she’s frantic, scrambling for an exit like she did the first night in Summersville Lake. After she beheads dashboard Bojack with a tail-whip I pull into the first driveway I can find which turns out to be a church.
Welcome to Missouri. My dog has pooped her pants.
Sadie races to the grass in the rain and I tidy up the small mess she’s made of her blanket and herself. And then we just sit in the mud for a second. Only when we turn back on the road do I see the sign telling me we’re on The Trail of Tears. I hate these fucking historical markers, I’ve seen ‘em in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, all over and there’s some sort of snotty pride to it. They use the word ‘Heritage’ when it should say ‘Shame.’ These are commemorations of a death march. We deserve to have our noses rubbed in it. I’m grateful to my dog, my spiritual advisor, for shitting on our house. It was the right thing to do.
The day turns towards the sun on 8 North, we pull off on Main St in Potosi to check the antique shops for nothing in particular. Although I do need a spatula. I’ve been making do with a forky spoony combination that lacks finesse. The women in the antique dealer welcome Sadie and a girl who looks maybe 15, but wears a wedding band, takes a particular shine to her. I almost buy an Easy Rider style Captain America helmet, but come to my senses when I see it’s ‘not safe for use.’ In the car section I find a metal Brinks armored car that actually says on the side “A Division of Pittston” which was the parent company of the Buffalo Mining Company that my father successfully sued. I send him a pic and ask if he wants it, but the reply doesn’t come until we’re rolling through the Mark Twain National Forest some 50 miles later.
I swerve to avoid running over a turtle. The steam from the rain rises like mystic from hot asphalt. I cherry pick some childhood favorite Billy Joel songs and if I wasn’t already cheered up, the town of Huzzah puts me over the top. I roll through their canoe and pony camp by the river and for the first time I think maybe I’d like to ride a horse. I jump down again for photos in the town of St. James that’s adorable in that decayed Americana way that announces it’s a 66 byway before I find the sign. One final rinse of rain releases us onto the absolute roller coaster Rte 42 and we ride this country, chasing the sunset, all the way to Lake of the Ozarks State Park. I close the day with Pearl Jam’s Just Breathe.
It’s almost dark in the park, but I wend my way through hundreds of sites until I see the water’s edge and find a plug-in just off the lakefront. I wish I could do a touch of political research, but I’m well off the grid. All day I’ve seen the state covered in signs for campaigns of all levels — Judge Brown, Clayton, Judge Crump, McGirl — state house and senate and sheriff and council, but I didn’t see anything for national offices. Nothing for Hawley or Sen. Claire McCaskill and that’s supposed to be a very tough race. Something tells me she’s in trouble.
I cook up hot dogs with bbq sauce and cheese over an open fire I nurse with wet wood and if I thought the stars were out last night, well, I didn’t know. In the pitch darkness of Lake of the Ozarks State Park, for the first time, the STARS come out. I look up and my jaw falls open and I stare until Sadie pulls me into the van and onto the couch. I’m sifting through my notepad, stumbling over an entry that seems to read, “Dreams are prisons that keep us sleeping,” when the dog paws it out of my hand. She puts her head there instead and I sit and pet her and she pets me. She knows how to love. She knows when to love. She knows that it’s as crucial a part of the day as mealtimes.
I’m very, very, very tired.
I fall asleep without meaning to.
