© 2012 John Drake Robinson
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ISBN-13: 978-1-9366-8840-1
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A Road Trip into America’s Hidden Heart
Traveling the Back Roads, Backwoods and Back Yards
John Drake Robinson
Acknowledgments
Love and thanks to the pair who awakened my mutant travel gene: Dad and sister Susan. A wave to six million Missourians I drove past, and to their ancestors who didn’t see me coming.
I found 32,314 stories on the road. Three storytellers showed me how to tell them: Bob Smith, Bob Carnett and Vance Heflin. Editors Mary V. Helsabeck, Rita Dallmeyer and Sarah Alban helped me sift and select and stay focused.
Thanks to local historians and researchers who keep the flame, and guides like Kaye Malins, Janeen Aggen, Angela Da Silva, Alan Peters and Maryellen McVicker.
I consulted detailed histories like Switzler’s 1889 Illustrated History of Missouri, and Walter Williams’ 1913 History of Northeast Missouri.
Thanks to the Missouri Division of Historic Preservation, storykeeper for properties on the National Historic Register, and to the State Historical Society of Missouri’s Robert L. Ramsay Missouri Place Names File. I tapped the well of three great geologists: Jerry Vineyard, Wally Howe, and Tom Beveridge’s Geologic Curiosities and Wonders of Missouri.
Cheers to the underappreciated workforce at Missouri’s Departments of Transportation, Conservation, Natural Resources, Divisions of Parks, Tourism, and the Board on Geographic Names.
Thanks to the 285 newspapers of the Missouri Press Association. Thanks to Inside Columbia Magazine, Missouri Life Magazine, and Show Me Missouri Magazine for allowing me to recount bits and pieces of my past articles from their pages.
Most important, my loving gratitude to Cheryl and our children and grandchildren for excusing my absences.
And Mom.
Erifnus thanks University Garage, her Car Spa. They think she’ll make it to 500,000 miles. I do too.
Truant
“Got a ham bone?” I asked the undertaker. I pulled a two-pound bag of great northern beans out of my overcoat pocket and plopped it on his desk. He looked puzzled.
“Last request,” I said, and told him about my sister.
She made the wish a few years back, during the funeral of an aunt. She told me, “When I die, I don’t want my visitation to smell like flowers. Put on a pot of ham and beans.”
I knew Susan was serious. But she was 47 years old when she told me. Healthy. Or so I thought. I put her request out of my mind. Six months later she died of a heart attack. So I brought beans to the undertaker. “Crock pot’s in the car,” I said. “I’ll go get it.”
The funeral director found a ham hock. We fired up the crock pot ten hours before visitation.
It was a fragrant funeral. And a hearty meal. My recipe, “Nearer My God to Bean Soup,” never made it into any church cookbooks. I understand.
Susan was a teacher. She told me she could always identify the children who had traveled, who had seen other parts of the world beyond their beaten path. “Well-traveled kids seem to adjust better to life,” she said. “They understand how things fit together.” But she worried. “Kids are spending more time with video games, less time with real life.”
She was right. Kids can tell you more about Grand Theft Auto than the Grand Canyon. When they ride in the family SUV they’re watching movie screens. Most of ’em can’t find Paris or Chicago on a map.
Bit by bit, I was drifting into a similar trap. My TV remote offered instant escape into a thousand channels. The Internet showed me the world so vividly, so easily that I scarcely noticed that more and more, I wasn’t touching or smelling or tasting it.
Like a lot of people, I took a job that strapped me to a cell phone. The phone grew into a Blackberry. If television is an opiate, Blackberry is heroin. I quickly became dependent on it. Every buzz stopped me until I peeked at the message.
I was adapting to the society of electrons, well-connected to friendly faces on my tiny screen, but oblivious to anything outside its circuit. I had become a prisoner, an addict attached to my wireless like a marionette, moving through hallways and streets and airports with my eyes fixed a foot in front of me where my tiny master made my thumbs dance.
But one message kept coming from outside my service area. “Well-traveled kids seem to adjust better to life,” Susan’s voice played in my mind. “They understand how things fit together.”
It made me stop and take inventory. My passport has two dozen stamps. I’ve been to every state. To reassure myself, I got out my state map to trace the roads I’d traveled. I was shocked. Aside from wearing deep grooves in a few skeletal routes, I’d bypassed 90 percent of the capillaries, those little roads where real America lives. I knew more about Iraq than I knew about the neighbors living just beyond my treadmill.
So I set out to touch them all. I drove every mile of every road on my state map. Driving was the easy part. Writing down notes at 60 mph was an adventure. After I finished, and began to decipher 40 notebooks full of disjointed scribbles, I realized a big problem: This wasn’t a trip from point A to point B. It was more like mowing a 68,000 square mile lawn. I struggled to organize my notebooks, and I fumbled for a way to tell this tale.
Then a sign came to me, a vision from a trusted source. My father spoke to me from the grave.
“Gravy,” I think he said. The voice was muffled, coming from the grave and all. But I knew what he meant. Find good food, because that’s where the good stories are. He was right.
Dad was a gravy freak. Pretty much everybody who knew about his addiction was surprised he lived to be 93. But gravy kept him going. And he scoured the globe for the world’s best gravy. Across five continents, in thousands of restaurants, he searched for his next fix. At every meal, he asked the server to load his plate with extra gravy.
Gathered around him at the dinner table, our family showed a full range of reactions to Dad’s gravy Jones: amusement, irritation, disgust. Truth is, gravy served him well. It was gravy that trained his arteries to form new branches around the blockage to his heart. It was gravy that made him happy, even while it made his children fearful for his health. We told the doctor; the doctor remained unfazed. He looked at us like we were narcs. “Your dad is 93. Let him eat what he wants.”
Dad did. After the beans and onions of his Depression-era youth, he launched into a lifetime obsession with gravy. And in between bites, he told great stories about dead people.
Like Injun Joe.
Around Dad’s home town of Hannibal, Joe Douglas is the town’s second-favorite son.
Sam Clemens, of course, is the town’s first favorite son. You know him as Mark Twain. He isn’t buried among the 15,000 headstones at Mt. Olivet Cemetery. But his mom and dad are, and most of the rest of his Hannibal family. So is Injun Joe, or, more precisely, the man Hannibalians think served as Twain’s model for Injun Joe.
Joe Douglas was a decent