Coastal Missouri
Driving on the Edge of Wild
John Drake Robinson
© 2013 John Drake Robinson
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical or by any information or storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the author.
Published in eBook format by Compass Flower Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-9366-8873-9
Trade Paperback ISBN 978-1-936688-72-2
Compass Flower Press
an imprint of AKA-Publishing
To Cheryl
Acknowledgments
Tony Hawks won a bar bet. His drinking buddies said he’d never be able to hitchhike around the perimeter of Ireland with a refrigerator. In Round Ireland with a Fridge, Tony inspired me to think outside the ice box.
Here’s a toast to Pete McCarthy, who died too soon, with a hundred great stories still sequestered inside his brain. That’s natural. We’ll all die with unused food in our refrigerators.
Pete wrote a lively tale about an Englishman touring Ireland. It’s the most engaging travel odyssey since Homer. In McCarthy’s Bar, the Catholic brothers at Pete’s grade school described him as “an unpleasant and frivolous boy who talks too much and will never make anything of himself, but he does take a punch well.” I found a role model.
Working with most editors, trading punches is part of the process. My rambling style and damaged attention span offer plenty of opportunities for button-down editors to smack me around. For this story, my thanks to Sarah Alban, who drew the short straw to wrestle with a meandering manuscript and a wandering mind.
The State Historical Society of Missouri allowed me to see the impressive E.B. Trail Collection of Steamboating. And thanks to the Missouri Press Association, whose members keep history alive. I continually consulted Tom Beveridge’s Geologic Curiosities and Wonders of Missouri.
It was an exhaustive process to develop a cover that captures the spirit of this book. When I saw On the Beach by Rolla artist Ellen Pearce, I knew I’d found the art to accompany the title. See more of Ellen’s delightful work at http://ellenpearce.com.
Thanks to the Missourians, good and bad, who gave character to these stories.
For the 374 people who drowned in Missouri waters during the time I drove these roads and floated these rivers and wrote this book, may your families be at peace. And in the name of the canoeist who died from a bullet to his face, may we all seek a deeper level of tolerance.
Not All Aboard
“Just throw me off the train.”
Even as I spoke, I knew I’d just pushed my own self-destruct button. But the conductor left me no choice.
I was an innocent man. I had just boarded the train, and found an empty window seat. Seconds later, I watched out my big window as we inched away from the train station.
Amtrak was taking me home. I settled back into my seat and listened to the rhythm of the steel wheels on the rails as the train gained momentum. Behind me I could hear the conductor moving up the aisle.
“Tickets.” He had his own rhythm. “Tickets,” he said with authority as the click of his ticket puncher punched its way closer to my seat. But when he reached me, his rhythm stopped. He looked at my ticket, then he let out a sigh that could only be followed by bad news.
“You shoulda boarded one stop earlier, at Union Station, downtown,” he told me. “Now you’ll have to buy another ticket.”
“What?” I thought he was joking.
“You didn’t get on board where you were supposed to.”
“What does it matter?” I protested. “I paid for the whole ride. I just joined you one stop later.”
“It throws off our accounting. I’ll have to charge you for another ticket.”
“You gotta be kidding me. I don’t have the money to buy another ticket. Tell you what: If I’ve messed up your accounting, just throw me off the train. I’ll get off right here.”
“You don’t have a credit card?”
“Not for this.” I said, looking him squarely in his name badge. “Throw me off the train, Brian.”
I knew I’d lost my cool. Brian the Conductor had unleashed my deep resentment of the railroad’s attitude. When the railroad barons first blazed their trails through here, they hired ruffians called tie hackers to chop whole forests into railroad ties. The railroads laid the tracks on the backs of dime-a-day labor. Then they murdered all the buffalo. Along the way they managed to piss off Jesse James. And now, me.
“I don’t normally do this,” Brian the Conductor said. “But I’ll call Union Station, and get you added on.”
“You don’t normally do this? How often does this happen?”
“A lot. People are always trying to get on in Kirkwood, instead of where they bought the ticket for: downtown.”
“Then why don’t you figure out a way to fix it?”
The conductor sighed and walked up the aisle to the next passenger. “Tickets.”
* * *
I was secretly thankful that Brian the Conductor didn’t throw me off the train. Even as we hurtled through the middle of America, I knew there was wilderness on the other side of this big window. It’s the kind of wilderness that offers good places to hide.
The train rolled across a trestle. I looked down at the Gasconade River, and saw the telltale signs of a manhunt. Posted on each bank beside the trestle were men carrying 12-gauge shotguns. Their green uniforms told me they were prison guards, looking for an escapee from one of the four prisons that hug this area’s riverbanks. Around here, when inmates go over the wall and make a run for it, they sneak along the easiest paths to freedom: riverbanks and railroad tracks. It’s the fastest way to make it through the thick underbrush in these wooded hills. So the cops post sentries on the bridges, and wait for escapees to show up, tired, cold, hungry. Ready to give up, usually.
The train crossed another river. More green-clad guards with shotguns.
I settled back in my seat and watched the scenery pass by the big window, farms and fields framed by second-growth forests and speckled with wild hemp that grows as high as an elephant’s eye. But mostly, I saw wilderness.
I snagged a newspaper from a vacant seat and scanned the first few pages. Within minutes the newspaper crumpled into my lap, and I fell asleep.
It wasn’t long before a recurrent nightmare hijacked my dream sequence, as it always does. The nightmare is vivid and real, because the events truly happened to me. Now look, I’m not superstitious, and I’m not prone to interacting with ghosts, holy or unholy. But I do know this: I shook hands with the Devil.
The handshake happened three decades ago. I’d joined a band to play a wedding reception in old Rosati Hall, a sweet relic in the vineyards that drape the rolling Ozark hills on the outskirts of St. James. The wedding reception was like a thousand others, at least from the view of a band. Joyous occasion. Happy crowd.
As we set up our instruments in this beautiful old wooden dance hall, a scuzzy man approached the bandstand and watched silently. He looked rough, the kind of rough that makes you wonder how he’d