Night Eight... The Midsection of the Heartland

I've already dodged the cities of Lexington, Louisville, Cincinnati and Indianapolis, I’m certainly not going anywhere near St. Louis. I ditch the Interstate for a gas station in Burnt Prairie, Illinois where a couple of greasy faced welders who’ve been working all day in the mud throw some recommendations at me. I have a bad track records with recs from greasy faces, but Garden of the Gods sounds pretty solid. They point me in the direction of 45 South and possibly 1 and within a few minutes I’ve spotted a tiny, hand painted wooden sign advertising the backyard honey I’ve been looking for all my life. 

Walking onto a stranger’s property in a small town always brings the most creative anxiety. I half expect a shotgun blast to ring out without warning, but I’m pretty sure that mid-day, at least, even the touchiest of ‘get off my lawns’ would throw me a minimum heads-up. Regardless, I can’t seem to find the entrance or even a window into the red-painted tin shack that purportedly deals this honey. Somehow, Roche Smothers sees me coming. I doubt it’s a closed-circuit camera. He ushers me into his metal shack where the first thing he does is flip on all the lights revealing his bespectacled 60something wife on the couch and all I can think is… what were they doing in the dark? It’s mid-afternoon and they’ve got the warming glow of Fox News coming from a small tv hanging on the wall, but really, it was probably super dark in there. Roche is north of 70, wrinkled, slow-moving, scary, to be honest, but he’s not really in the mood for chit chat. He just wants to move some honey. I take the pound and a half bottle for 8 bucks and get the hell out of there.

45 South is a parade ground of cornfields and the most unfortunate, ugly, short, featureless crop there is… soy beans. Soy beans look like shrubbery that didn’t make it. Soy beans look like filler in an electronic background, like somebody cut and pasted that same lame plant over and over and over. The tiny towns that break up the monotony of soy country offer a little more entertainment. I stop at Doug’s Food Mart in Norris City and flip through the video rental selection taking pics of friends’ movies. I talk the ugliness of soy beans with the 4 women working the pizza counter. One of the women is very attractive, but she knows the least about soy beans. I’m wandering back to the van when I find myself running scenarios in my head with good-looking no-soy pizza-girl. I wonder if she’d run off to a lake with a stranger in a van? That’s not showing very good judgment. Nevertheless, it starts to dawn on me that it’s been a week on the road and this may be the closest I’ve come to falling in love with a woman. Gonna have to work on that. I’ve seen so much, I’m starting to notice the things that aren’t there. Last night’s darkness, for instance, that was a first. I’m still waiting for the skies to clear and show me some country stars. And I mean, if this is eden then how come it’s so hard to find a single fruit tree or beautiful girl?

I pull over at a big bull in El Dorado, I always make it a point to pull over at large bulls, this one is in front of a BBQ shack called Dad’s where a woman with a sweet smile and funny teeth sells me an all time plate of ribs and fried okra that I take to go. In the ten minutes it takes to prepare the plate, I stare up the street wondering about the people of this town, wondering where they’re bound, listening to the locals talk about jobs and college. It’s SIU territory, all I know about Souther Illinois is they’re the Salukis and that’s some kind of dog and that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. There’s an 18 year old kid talking to what must be a town elder cuz he’s got a collared shirt and gigantic calf muscles and I think how beyond what’s in the ground, what’s in the water, what’s in the air, a town really needs dreamers. A place needs people who see things that aren’t quite there yet and set to the task of making something imaginary real. Dreamers need dreams and they probably get them from art, from games, from videos, from books, from stories, from somewhere made-up. That’s the job of these images pumped in from strangers thousands of miles away, these messages in a bottle that end up on the shelves of Doug’s Food Mart. Art are the dreams you see with your eyes open. 

My food is ready before I dip any further philosophical and I’m off the last leg to Crab Orchard Lake. I find the access road after a couple of tries and the small city noise quickly vanishes and my lingering fears that I may have picked a loser, well, I didn’t have to worry. I back right up next to a cove overlooking a purple sunset on a perfect fishing spot. I park next to a 4x4 hauling a huge trailer and quickly get a hollered hello from a 63 year old ambling giant, two time 1st LT Ed Jackson, US Army, RET. Ed speaks at an ear-splitting level that rattles the water, I notice his ears are likely split, propped open by pink plastic hearing aids, the result of 23 years as an engineer, working with helicopters all around the world. He’s quick to add that he also did 7 years in the National Guard so 30 total. “Where’s the most beautiful place in the world?” I ask him. Without hesitation, Ed shouts, “Germany and Austria. I liked Vietnam too. Course there was a war on, but that didn’t bother me none.” Ed’s warm and sweet and more than a little rattled and slightly worried about infringing on my space, just a bit of Mice and Men to him, but I welcome the conversation. I’m pretty sure I was looking for Ed. He’s coming from his home in Tennessee, in the area to see the VA about replacing his gimpy left knee, he’s already had the right one done. Ed was born in Detroit, of all places, his folks put him out of the house when he was 15, he was living in his car. Enlisted at 17, married at 19, his wife Linda died of pancreas cancer in 2009, but before that they saw the US for 5 years in this big ol’ camper. He gets good mileage, could make Florida under 600 bucks, he says, but Linda liked to stop at everything, taught him to stop at everything. The Biggest Gumball and such. He was living his life in fast forward from as early as he could remember. Linda made him slow down. Ed’s girlfriend now, she likes to go out on pontoon boats, all girls do, Ed assures me, that’s where the action is. He’s thinking of trading in this rig for a toy hauler, fitting a golf cart and a boat in the back, he needs the help getting around. We talk fishing, tv, engine power and Benghazi until the sun’s down. I think I bring him around a little bit that at the very least Hillary did not want her friend to die. Ed, though, he’d never let his guys go anywhere unprepared, he punched out a warrant officer who tried to send them out under-equipped, that’s how he got bucked down, that’s why he had to make 1st Lieutenant twice. He never lost a man.

Ed invites me to watch satellite tv in his trailer, but there’s not much I want to see on there other than the size of the fires in California. My rules of the road are starting to form into a religion and I’m not sure television has much place right now. I do need to get online and study Beto O’Rourke’s just released 34 day Texas tour schedule and figure out where to intercept him. He’s starting in El Paso and zig zagging east. It’s gonna be challenging. Before I get into that, I crack a beer brewed in bourbon barrels I picked up in Bardstown to pair with my ribs I share with the dog. As the last of the light disappears into the lake finally, finally, the stars come out.