Day 30: Kansas City, Kansas, to St. Louis, Missouri

Big wheel, but it stopped turning.

Tuesday 22 October – As we flitted about through work, love, loss, Canada, cheese, friends, chickens and other fascinating conversational topics last night, M.N. and I touched also on Kansas City attractions and the Mighty Mo.  Along with the bagels, berries and a thank-you note (for visiting – this is excessive) she left for me on the breakfast table, I found directions to the Arabia Steamboat Museum, on the Missouri side of the city.  It sounded potentially interesting, so off I went.

This is the actual snag that sank the Arabia.

And it was fascinating!  (As usual, so was navigating Kansas City’s highways.  Gosh, what a lot of them there are, and how very far the city stretches.)  The Arabia sank in 1856, a victim of the many ‘snags’ that littered the shallow, muddy and notoriously shifty river.  In the age of steamship travel, crews would cut down trees along the riverbanks to burn in their boats’ engine rooms, leaving stumps and other detritus behind.  The ravaged banks were highly susceptible to erosion, the Big Muddy changed course frequently, and lumber litter, large and small, eventually made it into the river.  A wooden-hulled ship encountering a well-hidden, branchy tree trunk often came out the worse.  That’s what happened to the Arabia, whose passengers evacuated after the evening smash, but whose cargo (including one mule) sank completely into the mud overnight.

Fast forward fifty years or so, and the Army Corps of Engineers had taken steps to constrain the river to a consistent course, reduce erosion and deepen her channel.  So now the Missouri stays pretty much put.  And then, more than another half-century later, a local HVAC contractor starts chatting about sunken ships with one of his customers, and later shares an idea with his parents and brother:  let’s find one, and dig it up.  They recruited a couple of friends with critical expertise, chose the Arabia as their target, and located her in a cornfield.  The field’s owner agreed to let them dig after the crops were harvested, as long as they finished before planting season.  That, incidentally, means they were digging through the coldest months of the year, deep into the wet, muddy soil.

Mostly hardware, and a small fraction of the total haul.
Other display areas feature housewares, medicines,
'dry goods' and more.  A few decades after the dig, they
still have people cleaning off the recovered cargo.

They pulled up large pieces of the ship as well as about 200 tons of her cargo, and decided to create a museum rather than try to sell off their ‘treasure.’  So for fifteen bucks, you can peruse numerous displays of 19^th-century hardware, building and farming tools, housewares, medicines, clothing and more, plus see a short movie about the ship and her re-discoverers.  The 20^th-century story is, I think, the more interesting, but learning about the Mighty Mo’s caprice and vile reputation was fascinating as well.

Charming people, our hardy frontier ancestors.

And the museum is located at the River Market, which also houses shops and restaurants.  And one of those restaurants is Beignet, a New Orleans-style coffee shop.  It seemed the most interesting of several attractive options, so although I don’t particularly care for doughnuts I ordered one.  And then I asked the woman at the counter whether she was from New Orleans – I was thinking Katrina refugee.  She’s not.  So I ordered some blueberry-cornbread pancakes, and asked why a New Orleans-style café.  But it wasn’t until my third, increasingly tentative question, that she started to talk.  I am so glad I kept asking.

Beignet, with that funky/cozy KC vibe.

I don’t know her name.  I know she grew up in Pittsburgh, loves New Orleans, worked as a massage therapist at a casino in Los Angeles, lived in San Francisco, fell in love, somewhere along the way, with a chef from Johnson County, Kansas.  Eventually they moved there together, with their multi-racial son (father is as white as Americans get; mother is multi-racial), and opened a restaurant in nearby KC.  Mum went a little bit nuts in the heartland for several years, helping her son cope with gawkers and prejudice and peculiar questions about his own and his mother’s hair, amongst many, many other things.  She thought of her role in that community as one of educating and enlightening, which helped, but eventually she demanded the family go urban, and she found Kansas City much more broad-minded and culturally stimulating than its southwestern suburbs.  She opened Beignet as an outlet for her love of the Federal City and chicory coffee, and it’s doing well enough to help support the bigger restaurant.  And now and again, someone she knew in Johnson County stops in for a visit, often thrilled to have made the mad journey to the energetic and dangerous city.

If my description makes her sound self-satisfied or intolerant, my writing is sorely at fault.  She was open, honest, vivid and curious; fascinating and perfectly willing to be educated or enlightened herself, and she had a broad smile and a huge heart.  She’s one of my favorite random strangers in a long journey.

It's the one in the middle.  Go there.

After the serendipity of Beignet, I set my sights, and the GPS, on Christopher Elbow’s flagship shop on McGee Street.  I first discovered the man Elbow through Halls Kansas City, an “unique shopping experience,” “[c]reated by Hallmark founder Joyce C. Hall in 1916 to be ‘first with the best in Kansas City.’”  There’s a Halls store across from KC’s least-favorite luxury hotel, where I have stayed for investor trips when it was a Fairmont, a Ritz and an Intercontinental, and I only ever stayed there between about 2005 and 2008.  Anyway, Halls was one of the first retailers to carry Mr. Elbow’s high-end chocolates, and I was thrilled to discover them, back in 2005 or 2006.  But I only ever got them when I needed to be in Kansas City for work, and I only ever got them at Halls.  On this, far-more-fabulous-than-work trip, I was at liberty to seek and enjoy the Elbow HQ.

It’s in a downtown neighborhood that reminds me a bit of Spokane.  A little gritty, lots of potential to be funky, late-19^th to mid-20^th century architecture; this is nothing like Boston, which I consider my hometown, but I feel very at home here.

This is the sleek/cozy part of town.

And the shop is pure bliss, not just the delightful aroma and the menu with many, many varieties of hot chocolate, but also the delightful woman at the counter.  She’s a news photographer, or was, born in Detroit to Canadian parents long enough ago that she covered the 1976 Republican convention in Kansas City.  She was living near DC, my current abode, at the time; later she moved to Los Angeles.  She stayed there for many years, without every getting to like it.  (The Beignet owner loved living outside L.A.; she made use of the ocean.  I should have inquired of the Elbow staffer, but I was really pushing my departure deadline.)  So eventually she and her sister decided to move together.  They knew they liked what they’d seen of Kansas City, Washington, DC, and New York City, and planned to head east, stopping in each, and then choose one.  They loved KC on arrival and never finished the trip.  The journey, of course, continues.  (That’s meant to be profound.)

Okay, so by the time I’d heard her story, and a bit from a customer who’d recently moved from the Carolinas to KC, and had spent over $150 on gifts and cocoa, and had juggled my packages and take-away cup, I was starting to worry about making it to St. Louis in time for dinner with friends.  It’s not far, but I’d dug in to the city rather enjoyably and could not dally any longer.  So I u-turned on McGee and got myself back to route 70.

This stretch of 70 is sub-revelatory.  I was amused to see a Dairy Queen, and remember my peanut-buster parfait craving in west Texas.  After 30 minutes at Christopher Elbow, the thought of a peanut-buster parfait stimulated my gag reflex.  There were a lot of Walmarts and fast-food places along the highway, professional-quality billboards (not the homemade-style ones of South Dakota and Montana), and exits to strip malls.  There were also a few cornfields, some real, true autumnal oranges in the turning trees, and more ponds than anywhere else I’d been but Alaska.

After about two hours of highway driving, there was a big bridge that carried me, cackling triumphantly, across a wide span of the Mighty Missouri.  Why is there no scenic viewpoint on the highway?  There are scenic viewpoints all over the throughways just north of here, and northwest of here.  From Detroit to Seattle, I saw scenic viewpoints several times a day.

The meadow, pre-crushing and fighting back.

Here above the Big Ol’ Muddy, I have to take an unplanned exit, park in the grass-checkered parking lot of Yahweh’s Assembly in Messiah church near Boonville, and tromp into a little wood wearing my city walking shoes and a dress, emerge into a meadow of very mixed flora that smells wonderful as I bend and crush it – evoking warmth, sustenance, wildness and comfort at once – and get repaid for my abuse of the poor mangled meadow with several score of burrs.  And still, no view of the river.  However, speeding east on 70 again, pulling burrs out of my tights and flinging them out the sunroof, I did see a grape vineyard, about twelve miles west of Columbia.  I visited Columbia several years ago, very briefly, and wrote about the event in an e-mail to a couple of sisters.  They thought it was funny, so I’ve posted it to this blog.

I was delighted to see the grapes, in part as a break from cereals and cotton (and strip malls), and in part because they reminded me of a visit to Augusta, Missouri, a few years earlier to tour the wineries.  Missouri was a strong wine region in the years before Prohibition, and some commentators think it would be more important than California today if all the growers and winemakers hadn’t been derailed in the 1920s.  Too many of the wineries I saw were focused on the party-bus market, but some were making excellent wines, notably the Augusta Winery.  Their Norton Reserve wine was especially good, and the whole history of Norton grapes (also called Cynthiana) and their development as the American grape, and the history of winemaking in the U.S. generally, is fascinating.  I shan’t blather on about it though.  I mean, I didn’t even make it to Augusta on this trip.

I didn’t really make it to Columbia, either, just cruised through.  I was tempted by a Budget Inn on the city outskirts, though.  It had a big LED screen by the highway, which advertised – in giant red letters – a dog and cat adopt-a-thon, boots and tattoos.  I could have stopped for a tattoo, but of what?  A cat in need of adopting?  A boot?  And where would I get it?  And why?  Anyway, almost everyone I know who has a tattoo has assured me, with deep feeling, that it hurt a lot, plus scabbing.  I can’t think of anyone I know well who has more than one tattoo.

No, tattoos require a kind of commitment I don’t care to foster.  So does keeping a ‘Ron Paul for President’ sign up in your yard for more than a year after the last primary.  And yet one sees a smattering of those signs, especially in rural areas, and I spotted a few more in the center of Missouri, having seen them in Pennsylvania, and South Dakota, and Texas, and maybe a few other locations.  I never once saw a Bachmann, Cain, Perry or Gingrich sign, and fewer Romneys than Pauls.  More Obamas than either, though, in my highly unreliable, entirely not credible, painfully unscientific survey.

I wonder if I could draw any parallels with the painfully unscientific observation that the J. Geils Band song ‘Centerfold’ is still popular enough to play on classic rock stations all over the country.  I’ve heard it more than any other single song, and I don’t remember hearing any other J. Geils songs.  [A digression:  I spent New Year’s Eve of 1986 at a red-leather-and-dark-wood bar in an upscale Boston hotel, and Peter Wolf was amongst the celebrants.  After the midnight countdown, he said to the bartender, “It’s 1987, Joe, so let’s eighty-six the chicks.”  He seemed to think the line worth repeating, more than once.  When I told this story to some grad schools friends, Jesse from Saskatchewan said, “Good thing it wasn’t 1970.”  A few years later I heard Mr. Wolf sing at a benefit concert in a small bar in Cambridge, and his voice and songs from a solo album were both profoundly beautiful.  I’m not a big fan of ‘Centerfold,’ though.]

I made a few more random observations as I drew closer to St. Louis:  a cemetery in the middle of a field of stubble; a lot of Waffle Houses, car dealerships and Jack-in-the-Boxes; way too many billboards; the first deer-warning sign of the day in a close-in suburb.  St. Louis is a city of suburbs, or neighborhoods.  In just a few miles I passed through the towns of Town and Country, Frontenac, Ladue, Richmond Heights and Clayton.  Town and Country, population 10,581, is where I used to visit for work, spending days in a spaceship-like office and nights at the Marriott St. Louis West, doing triangular laps in the tiny indoor pool unless I lucked out on weather and fellow guests and could do normal laps in the medium-sized outdoor pool.

This is downtown Kansas City, which I've
thrown in here for visual relief.  I didn't take any photos
of strip malls, or the edges of Interstate 70.
KC is better looking by most standards.

Route 70 cuts across the meandering Missouri again just west of Town and Country, and I got to watch a magnificent, red-fire sunset over the river in the rear-view mirror.  The river re-crossing got me wondering whether route 70 came into being because the small cities and towns along the highway were already there, close to the river route, or whether the population centers developed after the road created easy transportation for people.  Which came first, the highway or the people who use it?

I could have asked my friend and former colleague T.M., but I got to her office a smug two minutes early, which only gave me time to change into my fancy party shoes.  The fancy party shoes go perfectly with burr-pulled tights, let me tell you.  We met up with two other friends/former colleagues, and unfortunately had much more fun things –kids, retirements, parties, husbands – to discuss than highway history.  T.M. always picks the restaurant for us; tonight we were at Bar Italia in the glossy Maryland Plaza.  Good food; great conversation.