Day 31: St. Louis, Missouri, to Manchester, Tennessee

Wednesday 23 October – Some parts of this Elizabethan Progress I planned carefully, especially in the early stages as I had my flight to Fairbanks booked, and lots of friends who needed to know when, exactly, I’d be barging through their front doors.  Once I got back from Alaska, though, things got a lot more ad hoc.  There were deadlines, like Day 28 needed to be Kansas City, so I wouldn’t bump up against M.N.’s weekend guest and marathon partner.  Day 29 needed to be St. Louis, when three friends were all available for dinner.  Between Fairbanks and Kansas City, though, I mostly planned as I went along, and after St. Louis, I had no idea how I’d get home.  Via a slight northern curve, as recommended by Mapquest and a kind neighbor who wanted me to ‘give Indiana another chance?’  Or I could take an almost-as-short route through the Kentucky bluegrass.

But then A.K. dropped a note inviting me to Sarasota.  If only I weren’t so ready to be home, and so unwilling to add an extra thousand miles of driving to the trip.  I did not turn down the invitation right away, though; I’ve learned a thing or two about these signs from the universe.  At some point on Tuesday night, as I pondered whether to stay another day at M.N.’s before heading home, I suddenly realized with perfect clarity that only a fool would skip the chance to see A.K.’s new home in Florida, and have whatever adventures might offer on that journey.  So I wrote to warn her I’d be there in three days, enjoyed a late-night chat with Mr. N., and went to bed excited and content.

Zoo duck, safe from dogs.  One hopes.

Wednesday morning started with a revivifying wrestling match with the N’s pool cover, and then 30 minutes of swimming.  That’s right:  late October, swimming, outdoors, St. Louis.  The pool cover, like fancy, unburst-able bubble wrap, did a great job of keeping the water warm.  I ought to look into joining a swim club; I love it so.  Back in the house, showered and clothed and ready to go, I opened the freezer in their kitchen to pull out my cold packs, and saw a duck.  It was a gosh-darn entire duck, with all its plumage, frozen whole.  I suspect Mr. N. uses it to train the dogs, or something.  One of them shows promise as a hunter.

For me, it is very weird to see an entire duck, with all its plumage, in a home freezer.

All the big cats are beautiful to me, but there's something
about these rosettes - and the 'tear tracks' on cheetahs -
that's especially alluring.  I still don't understand why
some people want to own a wild cat like this at home.  Did
you not notice the claws?  The powerful jumping muscles?
The stretch and reach and powerful jaws?

I had booked a reservation at The London Tea Room a few days earlier, as they require advance notice to cut the sandwiches extra small.  With the decision to boot-scoot Sarasota-wards, I phoned in to move my meal to sadly early for tea, and then set off to the wondrous St. Louis Zoo.  The zoo is not only wondrous, but free to all (though the off-street parking is painfully pricey).  They have a well-regarded cheetah conservation and study program, and great displays, from American Wood Ducks (and American termites – I never bother with that exhibit) to Malayan Sun Bears; from the painfully unattractive Bat Eared Fox to the silly-looking Grevey’s zebra (sorry, but their rear ends?) to the magnificently beautiful jaguar.  You can look at the hippos both above and below-water, thanks to a well-placed and extremely sturdy glass wall.

My luck was in, and all the cats were out, mostly basking in the chilly sunshine – except the cheetahs, but I was booked to meet them up close in their native land in a few weeks, so that was okay.  I put my 24 zoo photos online; you can look at them here.  There was so much to see, and for the good of the animals they’re well spread out, so there I was, back on the phone, changing my teatime again.

I learned about The London Tea Room from someone posting on The Uncrushable Jersey Dress, where tea comes up a lot, and had been looking forward to visiting for about two years.  This is mostly because I love Tea The Meal – so soothing – but also significantly because this particular tea room’s menu says things like, “Strawberry Salad:  Fresh sweet strawberries tossed with mixed greens and pecans in a strawberry vinaigrette, garnished with honey goat cheese, made from the elusive wish-granting, peace-loving honey goats of Zembla.  No extra charge.  8.95 USD.”  Droll, yes?  Of course, I didn’t eat the salad, just miniature sandwiches, a scone and some shortbread.  But I did get a white tablecloth, and a proper napkin, which the lunch-eaters around me did not, and the scone was great.

Now, at my pace, the 1,000-mile drive to Florida warranted two nights Econolodging, and I had a few oddments of food for motel meals.  But I needed a loaf of bread.  I figured downtown St. Louis, which housed the tea room, would have an artisanal bakery somewhere close at hand.  This downtown was a lot like Kansas City’s; a retro-yet-timeless style, with lots of brownstone and brick.  However, while there were more hip cocktail lounges and sushi bars than seemed sustainable, bakeries were thin on the ground.  A couple of tea room patrons (the staff, apparently, commuted from elsewheres, and got their carbs in-house while working) recommended a restaurant that might help, and I set off on the search.

I found a lousy grocery store – corn syrup in everything, although cole slaw, peanut butter and bread do not need corn syrup – and, after that, an independent bookstore.  The bookstore clerk suggested the wine bar next door, which had a sister restaurant that baked bread in-house.  The wine bar suggested the sister restaurant, which was just a block away.  The sister restaurant, in the after-lunch lull, had a bartender who checked with the non-retail bakery next door and then proffered half a loaf of whole grain, sliced.  That, folks, is how we get the marketing done in St. Louis.

Au revoir, St. Louis -- photo taken one-handed out the sunroof, maintaining a very conservative following distance
behind that truck.  If you've never seen it, you might be surprised how beautiful the St. Louis Arch is.

Illinois farming country in autumn.

It was very cloudy and a bit chilly as I headed east into Illinois in the mid-afternoon.  The cornfields soon returned, but here the stalks were all dried up and dead, and frequently interspersed with stubble fields, bare fields, and fields with summer-green shoots of something unidentified poking from the earth.  These big, flat fields, under a huge sky, were all bordered by deciduous trees with green, yellow and deep purple-red leaves.  And they got pretty as I moved further southeast, and the clouds cleared, letting in the sunshine.  That was more what I’d gotten used to; I had absurdly good weather almost every day of my six-week trip, and overcast St. Louis came as a surprise.  But sunshiny Illinois reassured me – it’s St. Louis, not me.

Illinois, however, was making me drive 65 miles per hour.  After over a month of 70 and 75, I felt like I was plodding.  The mid-Atlantic area, though, where I live and will do most of my driving in another week, limits driving speed to 55 in most areas.  I had a momentary worry that I wouldn’t be able to hack it, but then remembered that it’s really, really rare that I’m trying to get 400 miles before bed.  So I figured I’d probably be okay.

There’s a note in my journal that reads, “sunlight on water.”  I don’t know why I wrote that.  I wish I did.  I bet the reason was very good.

Actually taken just outside St. Louis, but it gives an
accurate idea of the Illinois/Kentucky trees in late October.

I do remember the fields turning to trees, and trying to peer through the trunks – at a sedate 65, that’s manageable – to see whether there were fields behind.  And the trees turning back to fields, and the sign advertising a Giant Superman Statue in Metropolis, Illinois, at the southern border of the state.  I was not even vaguely tempted to stop for the Giant Superman Statue in Metropolis.

The southern border of Illinois is formed by the Ohio River, and I crossed the river, into Kentucky, via a long bridge across the wide river; it’s about three-quarters of a mile.  The sun was dropping into the water off to my right, and the bridge has two steel arches, one at the beginning and one at the end.  I think those elements have something to do with keeping the whole structure up.  They are very mechanical, very engineered, and yet often so very beautiful.  I know I gasped as each metal hump swooped up before me, with the river on fire to the west.  I want to go back and do that again someday.

In Kentucky, the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln (as the welcome sign tells travelers), I had a moment of déjà vu.  The approach into Paducah, Kentucky, which looks too big for just 25,000 residents, was just like the approach into St. Louis from the west via 64/40; that mix of woods and offices and highway signs promising suburban comforts a short distance from the exit ramp.

In fact, one of the Food Next Exit signs included the logo for Showme’s, a restaurant I, who spent at least four weeks a year, and usually much more, in Missouri from 2004 through 2008, had never heard of before.  Missouri is famously the show-me state:  “I’m from Missouri,” you can say when you’re feeling skeptical, and if anyone seems confused you can add the kicker, “so you’ll have to show me.”  So why am I just finding out about this chain now, and in Kentucky?  Sadly, Showme’s doesn’t seem to have understood the original Missourian concept very well.  I’ve just looked up this chain, and it seems to be run on the Hooters model, with beer and wings on the menu and not much on the waitresses.  Cleavage wasn't what the Missouri people were necessarily demanding to see.

Yuk.  The National Quilt Museum seemed like a better bet.  Especially since seeing some of D.B.’s quilts (you remember D.B., back in Seattle) and hearing about her friend’s quilting machine.  However, it was 5:45pm, and I was unwilling to risk exiting, driving who knows how far to the museum, and finding out that it closed at 6:00.  Or wasn’t open on Wednesdays, or something.  But that makes another good reason to head back to the Illinois/Kentucky border country someday.

Other attractions I chose to skip included numerous vineyards.  There were a lot advertised on the highway signs in Illinois and Kentucky, but setting aside the whole drinking-and-driving question, when time is limited, I prefer to spend more of it on zoos, tea rooms, stubblefields and driving than on drinking midwestern wines.  Not that there aren’t probably some excellent ones – c.f. Augusta Winery, mentioned in the Day 30 post – just that there are probably a lot more sub-excellent ones, and often little to tell the difference until you’ve paid your five bucks for a tasting.

So drive I did, crossing counties via the Tennessee River, which wasn’t as broad as the Ohio, but still impressively wide.  I always play the license plate game in my head, albeit in a very distracted manner, when I’m on the road, and tonight in this Kentucky corner I noticed that the plates around me were overwhelmingly Illinois, Alabama and Tennessee, with the locals apparently busy in some other part of their state.  I wonder if that’s real, or if I wasn’t paying good attention (good enough to write a note about it, anyway), or if it was a one-time fluke.  Before I could solve the question, I noticed a billboard for Trail of Tears Park.  That would be another great place to explore, if it weren’t late, and I had a big stock of anti-depressants.  Seeing the sign on the highway, as an ‘attraction,’ was enough to shake me up a bit.  It’s like seeing a billboard advertising Dachau, or Nanking, or Hiroshima when you’re not expecting it, thinking about cheap motels and gulf-side beaches.  I do think it’s good for me to get jerked out of the quotidian and pleasant, and reminded of the too-frequent and brutal, but I doubt those will ever be experiences I actively seek.

Not long after, with no river, no warning, I was – blam – in Tennessee.  And Nashville was not far over the border, spiky and glittery and really rather elegant looking, especially in contrast to the billboards and chain stores of its outskirts.  I thought about stopping in the city for the night, so I could take a look around in the morning, but I was in no mood for urban cheap-motel prices.  Also, I really dislike the name ‘Murfreesboro,’ and wanted to get the town, not too far south of Nashville, behind me before I fell asleep.  About an hour past Nashville, I found a Quality Inn with Roman-style columns and friezes, a Sistine Chapel print, and a Grecian ruins print in the lobby, and a six-foot-tall Buddha-head fountain right outside.  I believe one of the Buddha’s powers is protecting travelers from irrational fears of Murfreesboro, which put me in the right place.

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.

Day 29: Blackwell, Oklahoma, to Kansas City, Kansas

Monday 21 October – Awaking to an Oklahoma drizzle, I shuffled to the Econolodge breakfast room and ironed my own waffle.  A local TV station’s Storm Watch was playing above the tables where we few late-departing travelers ate, and the reporter took a good bit of time to announce, essentially, that there was no hint of storms for the next seven days.  It was an interesting glimpse into the local psyche, though; I got the feeling that folks in northern Oklahoma and southern Kansas take their storms quite seriously – as, I guess, they should well.  I’m afraid I’m disinclined to take much precaution against storms, meteorological or personal, until they’re very close indeed.  Evidence?  Two months out of Blackwell, I’m back in Virginia surrounded by packing boxes I never really expected as I prepare to leave my beautiful, cozy little house forever.  And oh, I am so sad.

and a grasshopper you can barely see against the grass

The memories of Blackwell and environs are happy, though.  I recall well swimming oddly lumpen approximately circular laps in the little pentagonal pool at the motel, and hitting the Kansas state line, it seemed, minutes after getting in the car.  Kansas welcomes drivers with a seat-belt law and the proud announcement that it was 34^th US president Dwight D. Eisenhower’s home state, plus a five-mph increase in the speed limit – to 75.

I don’t know what radio station I’d found, but the music ceded to some kind of farm report not long after I crossed the border.  The news was mixed:  corn and soy prices both down, but wheat prices increasing as Brazil, the world’s third-largest importer of wheat, had increased its US order by six times, given weather issues in Argentina.  There were big wheat orders from China, too – but given those corn and soy markets, everyone still needed to exercise care.  No wonder factory farms exist, when farmers have to do hard physical work, hostage themselves to changeable weather, manage the financials of a business, and keep up with international events and plan long-term investments according to short-term fluctuations in those events.  Crikey.  I’d Drift to the Towns if confronted with all those demands.

Looking back is sometimes rewarding; I may do it too much, though.

Unless the beauty of farm country was enough to offset the crazy-making stress of being an economist, gardener, manager, meteorologist, accountant, mechanic and etc.  For instance, as I crossed a toll plaza (cross fingers the Easy Pass works in Kansas!), an enormous flock of small black birds rose in front of me like smoke from an overactive chimney.  The flock is, of course, composed of hundreds of individuals, and they operate to some degree independently.  But together, they form a single entity, like the magnetic filings in a Wooly Willy.  They clumped together into a ball, then narrowed to a thin line, which split as if by otherworldly force and resolved into two balls, and then I was past and gone, and resisting the temptation to turn and keep watching.

There were deer crossing signs again, and a dead deer resting against a Jersey barrier on the median.  The fields were mostly the stubble of some dark brownish-red plant, edged with tall, deciduous and still-green trees under a huge, pale blue sky.  I passed a combine (I think that’s what that machine is called) harvesting the crops – one of very few displays of human activity in all the thousands of miles of fields I’ve passed.  There was also a display of tiny pumps (about the size of a very large tractor), steadily rising and falling in one field.  Oil, maybe?

North of Wichita, south of Topeka

I just think it's gorgeous.  Not mesmerizing, but
energizingly gorgeous.

A patch of water called El Dorado Lake caught my attention for its near-impossible blueness, Paul Newman’s eyes blue, or deeper than that.  The lake was very still, and seemed to be a graveyard for a small stand of trees.  There was a dead, branchy trunk sticking up from the water every few yards.  When I wrote my poem ‘Cross Country’ in 1993, I imagined Kansas as flat and mesmerically unchanging.  Driving through it, I decided that hilly, grassy, tree-rich Kansas in early autumn under its gigantic blue sky is glorious.

So I stopped to take some photos.  I picked one of many narrow, unmarked access roads to fenced rangeland, parked the car by a gate, climbed said gate and did a bit of exploring.  The gate, incidentally, led to a second gate in an interior fence, so I wasn’t mucking about where the bull might be, just getting into the buffer zone where I could see farther.  My pictures don’t do the landscape justice, but I think my memories do – and the pictures help with that.

After re-climbing the gate, I got back into the car and turned around to head back onto the turnpike.  Before I got myself into first and onto the road, a state trooper pulled in next to me to ask if everything was okay.  I assured him the car and I were both well, and his state beautiful.  We waved and wished each other good days and parted.

"Your state is glorious," I tell the nice officer.

I’m glad he didn’t arrive as I was clambering about on fences and private properties.  The screaming headline in Blackwell’s paper that morning was, “Burglary Suspect Captured,” which is a long, sedate road from the headlines that feature in Washington, DC’s local news.  I wonder if police work is less stressful in a rural area like this – though I know it’s always hugely stressful – than on the wicked metropolitan coast.  I know they’re supposed to have meth labs all over the place, and biker gangs, but with so dramatically fewer people there’s just got to be less crime overall.

It’s a pretty straight shot from Oklahoma to Topeka on two superhighways, and I got to see more machines, and their implied people, working the fields.  Getting closer to the big-ish city, trees in early autumn colors began to dominate the landscape.  At one point, a highway worker ran across the turnpike in front of me – I went from 80 to 44mph in about three seconds.  I imagine that most of the time, south of Topeka, it’s fairly safe to run around the interstates.  There’s just not that much traffic.

That changes on Route 70, heading east from Topeka to Kansas City.  And KC itself, at rush hour, is a sprawling spaghetti storm of turn-offs and access roads and interconnectors with just a skosh more traffic than one likes.  By the time I get to M.N.’s neighborhood, the gas gauge is on one bar and the hunger-meter is on it’s-way-past-lunchtime, and there’s nothing but upscale malls full of home decorating and clothing stores.  Finally I locate a gas station and quiet the panicked low-fuel warning light, and then a grocery store where I can calm the nutritional warning pangs.  And there, in the grocery store, is M.N., picking up squash for tonight’s soup!  After a bit of squealing and huggery in the produce section, and a promise of quick hors d’oeuvres, I followed her to her house and settled in at the kitchen counter to snack and watch her prepare dinner.

Get this brilliant idea:  M.N. roasts the squash and onions and stuff before throwing them into the soup and blender-izing them.  I have done that a few times since, and it is reliably delicious in a rich, sweet way that one doesn’t usually get with squash soup.  You might like to try it yourself.

Nothing but blue skies for M.N. and the mister.  And oh,
what a blue.

M.N. and I also swapped stories of our recent romantic upheavals.  Hers involves meeting a charming man who fell for her on their first date, and she for him not long after.  Mine, of course, is rather less fairy-tale happy at present, but almost as dramatic.  Professionally, she is clocking along just fine, with occasional jaunts on the corporate jet, where they know to stock tequila for her.  More often she flies commercial, which means once or twice a year she jets to Chicago for a weekend lunch on her own nickel in order to keep her status level up.  I don’t know about you, but when I was a frequent flyer for work, that status thing was a real benefit.  There’s something about knowing you’re going to be able to carry your carry-on on that makes travel significantly less stressful.

So catching up was great fun, dinner was delicious, and meeting Mr. M.N. was – well, a bit thrilling.  M.N. is younger than I, drop-dead gorgeous and a brilliant business success, plus she just ran her first half-marathon, but I choose to believe the happiness she and the mister have found together is possible for us all.

The guest room showed no trace of mutual friend M.L.’s recent visit to run the full marathon.  I plunged asleep feeling a bit smug that both my host and hostess would be at the office before I bothered to get out of bed.