Day Eleven... Gone Fishin'
I didn’t need to set an alarm. I wake up at 6:36am. Then again at 7:45. I’ve made coffee and eaten and prepped a bag of sandwiches and fed and walked the dog before my phone dings at 8:15. By 9, I’ve given up and had to set foot in a Wal-Mart which apparently has the monopoly on fishing licenses, but I refuse to buy anything else from these bastards. Except this cup of nightcrawlers. And maybe that plastic bucket — no! I refuse. By 9:54, I’ve coaxed Sadie into a 22 foot 10 person “fishing” boat with a massive something horsepower outboard engine and TJ with the sunglasses and the tank top is walking me through my idle speed and trimming the motor and whatever just waves me off and tells me not to go past the something or another that he’s marked on the map.
“Are there any rules?” I call back.
“What do you mean?” He shrugs.
We clear the no wake buoys and I drop the throttle and Sadie slides on the deck and I hear her nails scratching the fiberglass as she surveys the rapidly shifting landscape for purchase. I tap down the throttle a couple more clicks and the wind’s in my face and somehow my hat’s staying on and I’ve got that kinda smile where the tears roll out the corners of your eyes, but you can’t quite figure out why. Once we hit the big chop of the open high traffic portion of the lake, Sadie determines that the back left (port stern) corner is her best bet with her right front paw clipped to my ankle. We bounce and cut and race under the bridge and check the massive homes and hotels and restaurants and bars along the shoreline. It may be a party lake, but this is enough of a party for me. We hang a loop and cruise into a quiet offshoot, slipping past waverunners and waterskiers and kids being towed on inflatable rings and rafts and what seem to be puffy dancefloors that you just chuck a handful of people on and drag em around for a while. We locate an idle spot and idle, troll for a while, drop anchor. Fish.
Pulling a long, wriggly nightcrawler from a cup of dirt initiates a Proustian flashback to being a kid on the pond at my parents’ farm in Virginia. I’m curling this worm around the base of the hook and stabbing it a few times through when it occurs to me that my father taught me to bait a fishing pole. As I cast out from pure muscle memory, I forgive him for never teaching me to shave. I don’t catch anything. But I also don’t have any thoughts. Not for hours. I eat a sandwich. I putter. I take my shirt off and stand on the back of the boat and watch the water. I can practically feel my brain waves shifting.
A little after noon I dock back at the marina without crashing and Sadie scrambles up onto the wood, splaying her feet out wide in every direction. I’m not so sure she loves boats. She takes shelter in the office for a minute while a couple tourists pet her and then we climb onboard Dumbo wondering if we’ve got any business left with The Lake of the Ozarks. This is really the vacation portion of this excursion. I should get the most out of it.
We take Meyers Manx Matt’s idea and drive up to Bagnell Dam to cruise the strip which is so kitschy and broken and poorly fixed, I love it to death. You can sense the Route 66 of it. Matt’s right about the arcades that were and that are, the last surviving is basically a massive shed/warehouse with plug-in fans circulating hot fresh air between hundreds of vintage Skee-Balls and pinballs interspersed with later model Big Buck Hunters and the occasional 80s gem. The strip has a boarded-up, most certainly haunted, amusement park called Two Bit Town with a 30 foot mildly offensive wooden Indian out front in mid salute/curse you white man posture. In its heyday it had bumper boats! Also haunted. I get an ice cream, as I am legally obligated to do whenever the temp spikes 90 and the ice cream store has a vintage facade. I check the t-shirt shops, but find them lacking. There’s a bizarre anti-creativity bent that runs through these places like the shirts are supposed to be terrible, like that’s part of the appeal. It’s the inverse of hipster irony, the MAGA crowd irony. I can’t imagine anyone’s walking around cheerily and proudly sporting their “Democrat/Republican/Pissed Off!!!” checkbox/ballot t-shirt. These things are brutal abuses of in-the-moment jokes that never last beyond the purchase. I once bought my Dad a Gumby surfing t-shirt with puffy fluorescent pinks and yellows and greens and shit on it, it was the 80s, and that man had to look at that nauseating chunky vomit cloth and smile and admire it and say thank you to his little boy who’d wasted whatever money he’d managed to snake out of probably his own wallet, knowing he’d have to hold on to this trash rag for years until it could be disposed of without negative emotional repercussions. That’s how that man started one of his birthdays. The hippie peace frog shirts bring it all rushing back and I rush out pausing only to grab a cold drink for the road. In a refrigerated case as wide as a movie screen, there’s nothing with less sugar than a Pepsi.
“Staying cool?” The nicest lady in Missouri asks me at checkout.
“I was never cool,” I assure her.
We hightail it outta town following the old 66 which has tragically been completely paved over and obliterated by I-44. Like a clean-up crew’s come through after a mass murder. There’s nothing to see here.
I’ve checked The Beto Tour schedule through Texas and our best bet is intercepting them in San Antonio. He’s gonna get there Sunday, with two events scheduled Tuesday morning and evening before pushing off southeast to the Gulf Coast. Since that looks like my best chance to get to chase a good chunk of the tour that gives me a leisurely few days to get there and if I wait in Arkansas, he’ll only come closer to me. I hit up my friend Adam in Morrilton. He’s just gotten home from taking the family to Los Angeles for a week. He tells me to come on over. I also get invitations to Northern Michigan and Chicago, which are tempting, but neither dovetail with the Mission. So we chart a course South through Missouri…
I don’t know if it was a throwaway line tossed into a classic Simpsons episode when there was a flag with only 49 stars on it and Grandpa Simpson said, “I’ll be deep in the cold, cold ground before I recognize Missourah,” but it’s been playing on a loop in my head for about a day. As I’m looking at the map, suddenly it’s dislodged by another Simpsons line and I hear Nelson Muntz inexplicably exclaiming, “I’ve always wanted to see Macon, Georgia.” It’s a deep cut. It’s ok if you don’t get why that would obviously lead me to Branson, Missouri. It doesn’t really deserve explanation. You see, Nelson loves Andy Williams. Bart’s gotten a car, they’re on a road trip with Martin and Milhouse and he’s about to not stop in Branson because “My Dad says it’s like Vegas if it were run by Ned Flanders,” really I shouldn’t be…
Anyway, there’s no fucking way I’m missing Branson, Missouri.
I get off the highway at the Historic Downtown exit because I’m nothing if not an academic and a student of history. We get an ice cream. Mr. B’s. Vintage. Sadie makes friends with several ancient scooter riding seniors and a homeopathic medicine man offers to cure my leg pain. He seems stunned when I tell him I don’t really have any. First he’s heard that all day. Down by the waterfront under a bridge we find a quiet place for a Saza ceremony. “Branson, Missouri,” I tell him. This is one of the ones when I laugh as I toss ashes.
The roads is Branson make no sense.
Nothing in Branson makes any sense.
There are streetlights so you can criss-cross interwoven streets. Oh, they’re color coded in case you need to take the yellow to the blue to the red to Yakov Smirnoff’s permanent residence. I’d imagine he’s having something of a resurgence in this new era of Russo-American relations, that is if he’d ever tapered off at all. In Branson. After many Missouri curses such as “Gosh” and “Jerf” and “Cripes,” I stumble upon the strip. The Mount Rushmore of John Wayne and Lucille Ball faces and the Hollywood sign in front of the Empire State Building with King Kong climbing it. Nothing about this is historically accurate or to scale in any way. The Titanic is crashed across the street. Also none of these are casinos. They’re just big garish weirdnesses. They’ve got The Beatles, though, and next door to them the equally culturally relevant The Duttons. They refer to people as if they’re famous when they’re not and they seem genuinely baffled by the genuinely famous as if they’re mostly meant for decoration.
I laugh for five minutes solid.
Then I pull off immediately at the World’s Largest Toy Museum. For the first time, I switch on Dumbo’s generator and fire up the big A/C unit for the dog because I have no idea how long I’m going to be in this toy museum. I race in the front door and a kid puts his hand on my chest and says in a perfect Missouri cadence, “You need something?” “Yeah, I wanna see the toys,” I answer, baffled, slightly put off. The Kid’s older Colleague proceeds to rattle off some stats, “Well, there’s two museums filled with the history of toys…”
“Uh huh. Uh huh. What are we talking about here?” I’m still confused.
There’s a long pause.
“Is there an admission fee?” I ask. Like I’m a fucking alien.
“Yes,” the Old Missouri Bastard condescends me. And I hate this place already.
“How much!?”
“18 dollars,” Old Bastard says.
And somewhere in between those two short statements/sentences/whatever, I’ve had time to consider what might be in there that I haven’t seen already or couldn’t look up on ebay. And I was unable to think of a single thing. So… 18 dollars? I’d have to spend two hours in here to get like the equivalent of one Jurassic World’s worth of entertainment out of it.
“Well, that’s too much!” I rebel. I’ve had it with Missouri people. They can lip out even the easiest tap-in of interactions.
Rolling out of Branson takes us along the shores of Table Rock Lake where that awful Duck Boat disaster happened a couple weeks ago. There are memorials and signs and I can’t get over how big the place is. We’ve gone lakefront resort to lakefront resort in an afternoon and it doesn’t seem possible. I’m looking for a scenic viewpoint while we’re climbing 65 South away from the lake and pursuing that elusive moment’s peace takes us onto a side road that says Boat Launch. I’m questioning the decision after a couple of miles of cows and farms when I see a quite nicely painted sign that says ‘Farm Fresh Eggs.”
Now this is a welcoming property.
The front porch has a sign that says come on in and sit down on our porch. There’s a model of an old Gulf service station propped up against the skyline next to a refurbished barn from the 40s. Someone’s put some work into making this place beautiful. That someone’s name turns out to be Michelle Stacy who answers the door when I knock. She tucks her cat back inside and leads me into the garage where her husband’s cherry Ford sits in wait. They’re designing the property together to host weddings and events, they’ve christened it Cricket Creek Farm. There’s a huge view of the mountains and the sky all the way down to the lake. Michelle’s built an enclosure for her chickens with arced wire-framed tunnels connecting the laying boxes to the leisure areas to the chicken salon, I suppose. They had their eye on the place for years before they managed to get it and fix it up. In that time, Michelle’s gone back to college to become a surgical technician. She’s 53. She has 7 grandkids. I would’ve guessed none of that. Thought she was my age, maybe, soft features, no air of suspicion, genial, open, busy, but not too busy to as she says, “Visit with me.” I buy two dozen eggs. I ask her where I am and she tells me, “Omaha, Arkansas.”
Well, you know what? I’ll be deep in the cold, cold earth before I recognize Missourah!
Other than learning that the whole “Show Me State” thing has metastasized into a weird chip on the shoulder, my biggest takeaways from Missouri are that I saw one Tesla and maybe a thousand dead armadillos. The plight of the armadillo goes underreported in the mainstream coastal media.
I decide to make a run all the way for Adam’s and although it's not really breaking an official rule of mine, more of a preference, the ride's gonna take me into the dark.
