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DAY 3: "Memphis is just like Yokohama."
I'd driven across the country before, sometimes on the interstates, sometimes on William Least Heat Moon's "Blue Highways," as often as possible on roads with dots. I'd been across the Trans-Canada and the Yellowhead. Always before I'd been in a big car, or in a station wagon with a mattress spread out in the back. But now, what with my losing battle against the standard of living, I was in the least expensive of tiny cars.
A year and a half ago, the old Empress had died and I'd gone to a credit union sale to buy the cheapest car on the lot. In an hour I drove off in a red Chevy Geo Metro with a thick black band acround the windows--Miami Heat colors. I've noticed lots of similar cars, but mine is the only one I've ever seen without a rental company sticker on it. I suppose, if I had any, it would be a comment on my taste. I suspect, though, that it'll be the last car stolen from the lot.
There's something wonderful about a small four-cylinder car, above and beyond the gas mileage. Sure, you get knocked around some by passing trucks, and the little thing won't go very fast, but your feeling of connection with the road is much stronger than it is in an American hog. You're closer to the wind, to the ground.
The smallness is also convenient. Everything in the car, except for stuff behind the back seat, is within easy reach. You can make different piles of things--on the seats, and especially on the floors, both front and back. Even held by a seat belt I can reach my Road Atlas or my USA Today Baseball Weekly, sitting on the floor in front of the suicide seat.
Some nights, like last night outside Jasper, I'll find an isolated place to haul out the chaise lounge. Other nights, perhaps in the parking lot of a crowded restaurant or an overpriced Ramada Inn, I'll fold the driver's seat back, spread a sheet under the pillow and bag, and curl diagonally into the passenger seat-well, just as one curls across a hammock. In the morning, a sponge bath and shave at an interstate rest stop or at one of the great American trucker havens, and I'm on my way.
The cockpit is the capsule. The crucial rules of the road are keep it clean and always put things back in their storage places. Whenever I get out of the car, take something with me to throw away. Whenever I get into the car, put anything I used back where I got it. Carry a dirty clothes bag and a souvenir container. Both will fill up along the way. The most free-flowing of trips requires the most anal compulsive attention to storage. The spirit of Robert Pirsig was with me, his teachings of mechanical care transmuted into the organization of space.
The morning is cold and wet here in upland Alabama. My alarm was set, but just after six the gray light and the birds wake me up. It's Thursday morning. I have a night game in Kansas City tomorrow, and today's plan is a meander through northern Mississippi to Memphis. I hope to get into Arkansas, maybe even southern Missouri, so that the drive tomorrow will be short. I saw my first minor league game ever last night, but the meaning of that fact hasn't clicked yet. Sliding around in the wet red clay, I pack up and head west.
What people do in northwestern Alabama is build mobile homes. There are miles and miles of them, all for sale. They sit in lots, row upon row, waiting for trailers to carry them off. The narrow highway fills with log trucks and wide loads, forcing people off the road like high school bullies.
What people do when not building mobile homes or decorating downtown streets with yellow ribbons is go to church. Church of the Abundant Light, Free Will Baptist, there are fundamental protestant denominations everywhere--or at least their signs, arrows pointing down dirt roads. Is there any other country in the world that advertises its churches the way America does?
Past Kansas and Carbon Hill I roll down U.S. 78, through the gentle hills into Mississippi. Ahead, past the Tombigbee River is Tupelo. Tupelo? Tupelo? Van Morrison sang about "Tupelo Honey." Bobby Gentry's singer's brother married Becky Thompson and bought a store in Tupelo after Billy Joe McCallister jumped off the Tallahatchee Bridge. What else? Omigod! Right! Elvis!
Two things will happen today. One will reverberate throughout the rest of my journey, becoming a theme along with baseball and Gramma. I will start to collect university campuses. The other--my clear discovery of the minor leagues--will attend me for the rest of my life, becoming part of what I fully intend to become an obsession. I attribute both of these occurrences, each heavy with existential import, to my tracing, one day in late-April, 1991, of Elvis, birth in Tupelo to death at Graceland.
Let me be clear. I am not, nor have I ever particularly been an Elvis fan. I think his voice was wonderful, one of the best and richest that I've ever heard. But I was never wild about his songs. I saw one of his movies--can't remember now which one--and didn't like it. What I really liked about Elvis was how much he pissed people off. Half an Elvis on the Ed Sullivan show was better than none; but it was also better than a whole Elvis. What a threat to the American way! Later, of course, poured into his gold lame jumpsuits, Elvis had become a Liberace'd symbol of another kind of America, of the wit and taste of Las Vegas.
Maybe I was traumatized in seventh grade. All the guys were going to stand up suddenly at 2:15 in Miss Cox's math class and sing "Heartbreak Hotel." At 2:15 I stood up and sang a solo. Well, there I was--might as well finish the verse. No way I was going to drive through Tupelo, Mississippi, and miss the house Elvis was born in. No way!
For a buck, you get two rooms. The gift shop and memorial chapel are on the house. Since the store won't take credit cards, its a pretty inexpensive proposition. The little wooden house is on the southeast side of Tupelo, at the end of the signs that direct us off the highway.
This is not Graceland. The place is relatively tasteful. The house is simply done, simply furnished. There's an attendant sitting there who accepts your dollar, but doesn't intrude on the moment. The chapel is more Danish modern than Mississippi rhinestone, spare pine-brown wooden benches framing a narrow, floor-to-ceiling front corner window. This is not a pilgrimmage site like Graceland. People are either dedicated Elvis fans, or, like me, they just drop by when they're in the neighborhood. It's as low key and civilized as Elvisiana gets.
But it is Elvis, and as I carried the first of my souvenir coffee mugs to the car, I felt the need to cleanse my palate before hitting Graceland. If I stayed on Mississippi 6, instead of following U.S. 78 northwest through the Holly Springs National Forest, I'd reach Oxford, just a short jaunt south of Memphis.
Oxford; William Faulkner; the Ole Miss Rebels in their ugly uniforms; Philip Alston Stone. Faulkner and his imaginative Yawknapatawpha folk would provide a kinky counterpoint to Elvis and his fans. But it was Phil Stone who had first made Mississippi seem exotic.
Stone was from Oxford. He was, I think, Faulkner's nephew. Skinny, tall, at least taller than me at the time, Stone was a couple of years ahead of me at what was then the Hotchkiss School for Boys in rural northwestern Connecticut. I had never met anybody from the south until, fleeing a family of crazy people, I managed to leave home for boarding school. I didn't know Phil Stone at all, other than to be intimidated now and then at a common meal by his acerbic wit and laconic drawl.
In those days, the late 1950s, the powers that be at Hotchkiss had apparently not yet quite figured out how electricity worked. Blackouts and brownouts were frequent. During one such, Phil Stone came over to the freshman dorm to pass the time reading to us from the novel he was writing. Geez! A novel. Stone must have been sixteen. What I remember was that it was a pretty spooky novel, a real piece of southern gothic, read in that exotic, soft accent in the dark, surrounded by candles. What a wonderful grim and odd pleasure he must have taken in weirding the shit out of us little kids. It was one of those scenes that got stored somewhere in my head, so that when I saw Oxford on the map, the memory flowed into Elvis's parking lot.
Stone went to Harvard, where he led the protest against the change from Latin to English on Harvard diplomas. I saw a picture of him in a toga on the front page of the New York Times. His novel was published. I can't remember its name now, but it was weird. I think it had a toss-the-newborn-baby-still-connected-to-the-umbilical-cord-into-the-garbage-can-atte mpted-infanticide scene. I also can't remember why, but he died young. I hadn't thought about him in years.
Oxford is also the home of the University of Mississippi, mythical home of azalea'd southern gentility. From James Meredith to Chuckie Mullins, may he rest in peace, the university bespeaks a certain elegance in change. Its campus, built to the side of a southern town with a real town square--somewhat gentrified stores surrounding a central municipal building--is, as advertised, full of stately red brick buildings, lawns, flowering trees.
After strolling the campus I stop at the Student Union to buy stamps. I want to mail Elvis Birthplace postcards to some friends, to show them that there are things in the world of redeeming value other than baseball. In a discarded USA Today I glance at the minor league report, to see if there were any information on last night's game in Birmingham. Instead, what I see is the schedule for tonight. I suddenly know that I want to see more minor league ball.
There is a game tonight in Memphis. The Chicks are playing Orlando. But that would leave me a long drive to Kansas City on Friday. Then I remember that Little Rock has a team--the Arkansas Travelers. Another mythical name. Ritchie Allen played there for a while, I think. I'd never been there. Sounds pretty exotic. If I get through Graceland in time, it is only 140 miles to Little Rock. Then tomorrow I could see the Ozarks. Let's do it.
Up I-55 I go, past Senatobia, Cold Water, and Hernando. No blue highways for a while. "Help me, Information," goes the rhythm of the road, "Get in touch with my Marie. She's the only one who'd call me here from Memphis, Tennessee." Here we've got Beale Street, the blues, B.B. King, Rufus Thomas. There is Sun Records, Carl Perkins, Elvis, and Graceland. I feel like the Japanese kids in Jim Jarmusch's movie Mystery Train, heading toward holiness. Unlike them, though, Memphis doesn't remind me of Yokohama with some of the buildings taken out.
Beale Street is hard to get to. Riverside Drive is closed for repairs, and the rest of the downtown, watched over by a large bronze statue of the King, is chopped up with detours. It's early afternoon, so nothing at all is happening on Beale Street, a place that lives at night. A few tourists stand on the corner near what will soon open as B.B. King's long-awaited club. Otherwise it's pretty quiet.
The road south to Elvis is not what I expect. I had thought Graceland to be something like a plantation mansion, just like the ones you see in the movies at Disney World, out in the country, down a one-lane tree-lined road. Instead the compound straddles a franchise strip just like the ones in Tallahassee or Tupelo. I imagine Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo stopping for Whoppers on their way back to Graceland.
The place is, as advertised in its brochures, unforgettable. To the right is the staging area--parking lot, shmatta shops selling souvenirs, three or four of them right together. It's like a third world market, where they have all the vegetable sellers together in one place, all the bakers in another. The Heartbreak Hotel Restaurant is here, as are the Elvis Presley Automobile Museum, Elvis's Tour Bus, Elvis's Airplanes, including the Lisa Marie which made its last flight to Memphis in 1984. All of these can be seen for a price, as can the "If I Can Dream Film," the Elvis movie shown at Graceland Plaza. Elvis music wafts out over the speaker system throughout the grounds. Pieces of the show can be seen in various combination packages, along with our tour to the mansion itself. Under time pressure, I choose the cheapo--the Mansion Tour for $7.95. It would only take an hour and a half.
Collecting my "Graceland's Photography Requests" brochure, printed in English, French, German, and Japanese, I board the bus for the trip across the highway to the house. It fills up with couples and groups of women who I'd guess were in their late-fifties to late-sixties, a bit older than Elvis would be were he still alive. Maybe I'm wrong, but these don't seem to be particularly funky people. I can't imagine them as screaming Elvis fans in the early years, when his body parts were well oiled and people were trying to deal with white boys singing black-influenced music. It could be that they liked his movies, but my guess is that they became fans, if at all, in his later lounge-lizard years. But then America makes a pretty big deal out of its dead pop icons, so--current sightings of Elvis aside--maybe its just part of our folk belief in contagious magic.
The mansion is quite attractive from the outside--stone facing, white pillars out in front, under the entrance portico. The front lawn, between the arcs of the looping driveway, is a little bit wild with flower and tree. To the side and back, green grass and grazing horses. I can imagine Graceland at an earlier time, at the edge of town.
It would be difficult, however, to overestimate the tackiness of the mansion's innards. A fifteen-foot one-piece white couch lines the sitting room, pointing to the gold-leaf grand piano in the music room. Chandeliers hang from the ceiling. The stairs to the basement are lined with mirrors, as is the sloping ceiling overhead. Elvis's aunt still lives on the upper floor, which is off limits to outsiders.
The poolroom has curtains covering the ceiling as well as the walls. It feels like a room in a sultan's harem. The television room--one wall lined with monitors--is painted geometrically in black, gold, silver, and white. A full bar sits at the entrance. The room is dark.
It is here that I begin, in complete surprise, to feel a growing sympathy with what Elvis's life must have been like. Here was a man who lived at night. Not only was his work night work, but his ability to exist out in the world in the light of day and the eye of the public must have been essentially nil. Year after year he must have spent his time in artificial light, in rooms with curtains drawn, able to be in the sun only with his cronies on his own land. I can understand how a person could go mad.
Back up to ground level is the piece de resistance, the "Jungle Room," decorated with carved-wood South Pacific-style furniture and sculptures. We are told that this room was designed to remind Elvis of his beloved Hawaii. What it looks like is Disney's Tiki Room. Having seen it somewhere else, Elvis had the ceiling covered with green carpeting, maybe to evoke the green canopy of the jungle. In any case it turned out to be excellent acoustic material, and Elvis actually did some recording here.
Outside are free-standing buildings containing the spare, functional offices where Presley business was coordinated, the racquetball court, complete with piano lounge and bar, where the King played the morning of his death, and the Hall of Gold. Guides take us through the latter, where Elvis's gold and platinum records are mounted, his various civic awards are displayed, and some of his costumes stand in glass cages.
I had hugely underestimated the number of records Elvis had made, the number of copies he had sold. I had also forgotten that soon after returning from his army stint in Germany, he had stopped performing in public. For many years he just made movies. I was surprised at his civic virtues. The man gave exorbitant amounts of monetary support, often anonymously, to institutions, organizations, and causes, especially in Memphis, but elsewhere as well.
What I hadn't forgotten was that his eating habits in the years before his death were about as bad as mine, with similar results--though my wardrobe camouflages it a little better. The guides, in their memorized spiels, with the misplaced tonal emphases we recognize from flight attendant talk, tippy-toe daintily around Elvis's death, never hinting that he ended up a fat, paranoid junkie.
My final moments are spent in the Meditation Garden. This must be the least tasteful hundred square yards in America. Elvis is buried here, together with his parents, among statues, fountains, and a smothering collection of flowers--real ones, wilting ones, silk ones, paper ones, plastic ones--flowers and notes, arriving daily, but left to clutter until the place looks like a retirement home for confetti. It looks like the gaudiest Mexican Indian Catholic saint's shrine imaginable. Enough is enough. I believe Elvis is dead. I must go.
Plastic commemorative cup between my thighs, I cross the bridge taking I-40 into Arkansas. The giant golden Great American Pyramid rising on the shoreline distracts my attention from the Mississippi River. Memphis, Egypt? Right! Later I would marvel more than once at how narrow the river is, how much smaller than I had remembered it, even at St. Louis. Just like the Ohio, it was smaller than its legend. Here, getting out of Memphis, is my chance to see it at its greatest. But I miss it.
Instead, just across the river in West Memphis, I find the biggest truck stop I have ever seen. Hundreds of trucks, parked in row after row around a set of buildings, gas pumps, and truck-washing stations. To drive the interstate highway system is to begin to sense how much American commerce relies on truck transport. Every sizable city I passed was ringed by an Interstate bypass, whose intersections were dotted with such truck stops, all full at any time of the 24-hour trucking day. I-40 is awash with trucks, single-haulers, double-haulers, all driven by people to whom speed limits are as familiar as Nietzsche. I am in an American war zone.
I now head slightly south of west, past the plowed fields and strange contoured shapes of tiny rice field berms, toward Little Rock. It is four hours until the Arkansas Travelers meet the Jackson Generals. Misinformed as to the stadium's whereabouts by the nice lady at the Arkansas welcome station, I will need all the time available.
Arkansas delta land is waterlogged. I cross the St. Francis River, the L'Anguille, the White, all flowing south to the Mississippi. Driving through the Cache River system, I am surrounded by water. To my right are three straight rows of trees marching parallel to the highway, partly submerged by what looks like a flooded lake. It has the look of a televised disaster.
The land dries as I hit the low wooded hills leading to Little Rock. There is a different feeling to the land. I am passed by two ESPN trucks, one looking like a production trailer. I wonder where they are going on this road. Arlington for a Ranger game? Back to L.A.? I can't think of too much else out here for ESPN, except maybe some "trash sports." I'll do-si-do with ESPN until I head off for the ballpark.
Like prairie cities from Dallas to Indianapolis, Little Rock rises suddenly out of the ground--a steel and glass Kilimanjaro. The only warnings are exit signs on the highway and a sudden glimpse through the spotty trees. I cross the Arkansas River just after rush hour. Loomed over by the TCBY corporate headquarters, downtown is pretty dead. I guess I'm not going to find all the young lawyers and government workers picnicking for lunch, like I saw in National Geographic. In fact, the part of the city near the river looks pretty run down, a bit skid row-like.
In the distance to the west, on a little rise, just like most of the others I will see, is the state Capital building. Beyond it, I will discover later, are the University of Arkansas-Little Rock and the fancier Anglo residential parts of town. Also over in that direction is the ballpark. Programmed by the nice welcome lady, however, my immediate destiny is elsewhere, through black south Little Rock to the State Fair complex, where nothing is going on. No ballgame. Nothing.
My most important daily task, as I wandered from city to city, was finding the ballpark. Sometimes, as with Busch Stadium in St. Louis, I had seen the park on television. It was near the arch. All I had to do was find the arch. Sometimes the name helped. Cincinnati's Riverfront Stadium, for instance, gave it away. A third of the time, the city map in my road atlas showed the park. I have no idea why sometimes they do and sometimes they don't.
For minor league parks, asking sometimes helps. That's how I found my way to the Hoover Met; but I was lucky to find a fan, because the way from Birmingham was not easy. I have since discovered the phone book, the first place to look at the edge of town for addresses and maps. In Little Rock, a whole convenience store full of people have a vague idea. Near the municipal park, they say. Go down here. Follow the park signs to the hill. Then maybe you'll see the cars.
The Arkansas Travelers, AA Texas League affiliate of the St. Louis Cardinals, play at Ray Winder Field. Where the Hoover Met was a minor league version of one of the new breed of stadiums--Royals' Stadium or Comiskey, complete with skyboxes--Ray Winder Field smelled of tradition. From the outside, walking down from the free grass parking up the hill, I could see the rustic wood facing of stadium walls and the ticket and concession area.
The field has one level of stands, running down the right and left field lines under a roof that stops at first and third bases. Aluminum box seats have names on the back, signaling season ticket holders; but you can sit there (with a box seat ticket) if they're empty. The outfield, commercial panels on its fences, is not symmetrical--345 to right, 390 to center, 330 to left. The scoreboard in left has the game score, as well as those of today's Cardinals game and of the opposition's major league affiliate. Tonight the Travs are playing the Jackson (Miss.) Generals, so the Houston Astro score is posted. Out beyond left field are a couple of brick buildings; it's left field, not right, but it reminds me of the park in Bull Durham. Like the Hoover Met, the field is covered with grass.
It's a gorgeous night, epiphanal. There's almost a full moon sitting over left center. A negligible breeze passes through the evening, adding to the slightest of mid-spring Arkansas chills. The national anthem is played blessedly fast. A few hundred miles west of Birmingham, its a bit lighter here at game time. The batters have problems seeing the pitches well for a few innings, until twilight is gone and the lights have taken over.
I am struck by a couple of things that will stay with me the whole trip. First, for some reason the baseballs don't seem as white as I remembered them, or as they seem on television. They seemed gray, dirty, hard to see. It may well be my eyes, because another surprise is that I just can not see the thwarted steal at second base. For the second night in a row, the runner thrown out seemed safe. Even in the daylight at Comiskey and Milwaukee County Stadium I won't be able to see this play right.
Sociability, and sales, at minor league parks are helped by contests, prizes for which are sponsored by local businesses advertising in the yearbooks and scorecards (the Travs scorecard announces "The Greatest Show on Dirt!"). Lucky numbers, stamped in the books, are called at the half innings. I win my first and only prize, a free meal at a local tavern. Since I am here today, gone tomorrow, I pass the chit on to an usherette.
The Travs go one further, however. Throughout the game, fans play bingo, directed by the camp counselor near the third base dugout. Again we play for prizes on cards handed out as we entered the field. As the real game goes on, and fans down a beer or two, the number of false "Bingo!"s rises until, about the time for the seventh inning stretch, the promotion peters out in friendly anarchy.
The collective feeling here is that we are all part of a bigger baseball family. Connections with the Cardinals (and for that matter the Louisville Redbirds--St. Louis's AAA team) are made regularly. The big prizes are trips to St. Louis to see the Big Team. Throughout the minor league games I will see, the sense of conjoint enterprise will be palpable, much more so than it is at the major league ballparks.
The left field stands are filled with young people in their teens and twenties. There are high school kids, students from University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the University of Central Arkansas, just up the road in Conway. There are young government workers; probably others. The guys are rowdy, but pleasantly so. They are having a good time, and their rowdiness is pretty clever. The girls, in flats and white sox--unlike the workout shoe uniform of most young Americans--seem a throwback to another time. They are the prettiest batch of women I will see at any of the parks on this trip.
The quality of ball doesn't seem to me to be quite as high as what I saw last night. Errors here, errors there. Jackson has a couple of kids who can hit. I wouldn't be surprised to see Kevin Dean in Houston before long. Mike Fiori, who played for the University of Miami in their championship year, comes in to pinch hit.
As the game goes on I move from the first base side to third base. Sitting in the front row for a while, I see the slope of the field. It's quite severe. The infield seems set up a couple of feet, grading very slightly down into the outfield. This may be an optical illusion, but the slope down to the dugouts and stands is not. This is drainage with a vengeance.
The Travs rally for two runs in the bottom of the eighth on a home run to center. It is now 4-3, Jackson. The crowd gets even rowdier, but it doesn't help. The potential tying run is thrown out in the ninth, needlessly trying to take an extra base on a bobbled double. The game ends 4-3.
Lost in Little Rock, I finally find the strip that takes me back to the bridge across the Arkansas River. Northwest on I-40, I head past Conway towards Morrilton. I pull off the road at a rest stop, head towards the cul-de-sac in back, past three good old boys drinking beers out of paper sacks. It's a bit colder than last night, but out comes the chaise lounge anyway. Again, hiding behind my car, I set up for bed.
I've come 446 miles today. I've seen Tupelo, Graceland, Beale Street, Ole Miss, and the Arkansas Travellers. Tomorrow, it's the Ozarks and the Kansas City Royals. As it turn's out, tomorrow will also bring nature at its most powerful and tragic. But I'm worn out, and I don't know that yet.
It's the evening of the third day.
DAY 4: I'm Going to Kansas City.
It's early Friday morning, foggy whiteout in north central Arkansas. Pale wisps of blue try to break through as I pack up and head west.
Today will be my first, and last, quest for a road breakfast. In an earlier life, road breakfasts were the hedonist centerpieces of my long-distance journeys. Up just after dawn, I'd grab a cup of coffee, then drive a couple of hours, stopping at about 9:00 for a "country breakfast"--eggs, sausage, biscuits, hash browns or grits, juice, coffee, maybe another round of one thing or another. On the road, I'd eat breakfast two, three times a day--at home, hardly ever.
Then, as nutrition and health journalists invented cholesterol, my body started to accumulate some of its current stately heft. I discovered that hearts were not just broken, worn on sleeves, or put on bumper stickers. They got clogged, enlarged, and stopped working. My local 24-hour breakfast place put up a sign, "Cholesterol Heaven," but the psychic damage was done. The thought of breakfast--dry cereal isn't food, don't be silly--now usually gives me conceptual indigestion, sympathetic burping.
This morning, however, I need a break. I've been two and a half days on the road, over 1300 miles, two nights sleeping under the stars. Tonight I will have to drive almost all night to make my one tight connection--night game in Kansas City to day game in Minneapolis. I won't take a leisurely breakfast, with newspaper and seconds, just a fast-food greaseball breakfast sandwich. Fortunately, the patron saints of unclogged arteries are looking out for me.
On the outskirts of Morrilton I stumble into the slowest McDonalds in North America. In the thirteen years since I moved from Boston to Miami, I have struggled with the leisurely pace at which things get done in the south. It hasn't been easy. People have pretty low expectations about how much can be done in a lifetime. I've learned to take a book with me everywhere, just in case I ever have to ask anybody for a public service, like totalling up my groceries at the market. The National Guard, I think, regularly crop- dusts south Florida with valium.
Well, this McDonalds in Morrilton made Miami look like the city in Koyaanisqaatsi. It's not that it's slow and inefficient, or that the people are incompetent. It's the way the rules are. A lot of visiting goes on here. Apparently, there's a franchise rule in this part of Arkansas that stipulates the ratio of so-called workers to customer/visitors as n-1 to 1 in any visiting situation, where n is the number of employees and managers on-site. Only one visitor may be visited with at a time. The one employee left out of the visiting is officially assigned the task of forgetting to cook things, hash browns and such. Should an order be inadvertantly taken, that is the signal to begin preparatory tasks.
The food is probably fresh, if and when it shows up, but unfortunately I am faced with a problem. My time off ends in another week. I have things to do. I know it's the wrong attitude, but there it is. Fortunately, I wait long enough for my grease-lust to pass, and I can leave. I will certainly satisfy it by eating ballpark food for another week. I really don't need to augment it in the morning. The Morrilton McDonalds cured me of breakfast, but if a cure's not on your agenda, bring along something to read.
I get morning coffee at one of the gas station-convenience store chains that tie the country together--7-11, BP, Raceway, Starvin' Marvin, Road Runner, Express Delta, Speedway--whole bunches of them. I could fill a trophy case with plastic chain-advertising twenty-ounce road coffee cups, each promising cheap refills. What I forget to do, while celebrating my escape from breakfast, is to get gas before heading north on Arkansas 21 into the Ozark National Forest.
Arkansas informality extends beyond its slow-food franchises. The Adopt-a-Highway signs now say that the Peterson family or Dave and Ray Conklin are responsible for this stretch of road, not some company, fraternity, or Chamber of Commerce. "Sure, come on over for lunch. Then we'll go out and pick up some highway trash." The fence along the interstate is reduced for a while to a single strand of wire. A dog trots alongside the road. Chickens dance down the shoulder, making a break from the nearby Tyson factory. This is, after all, old Route 66.
I am on my way to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. The detour to the Ole Miss campus had begun another evolutionary branch on this voyage. My biz is higher education. I can not pass by the opportunity to see a university or college campus. I will see a bunch of them on my way to ball games, finishing off the Big Ten and making a dent on the SEC. How can I miss a university that teaches its children to respond to the world with "Soooieee pig"?
One way to the U of A is down I-40, past long Lake Dardanelle to Alma, and up U.S. 17. The lake is the result of damming of the Arkansas River near Russellville, whose skyline is dominated by the huge funnel smoke stack of the local power plant. I am now into the foothills of the Ozarks. Bluffs line the road to the north. There are various routes through the Ozarks, skinny roads running north and south along the ridges. I pick Arkansas 21 out of Clarksville because it goes through Ozone, which I want to see before it's gone. Later Route 16 wild go through Boston, St. Paul, Durham, Delaney, and Crosses. It seems the right way to go.
The sun breaks through as I climb, shining on my gas needle as it works its way toward the red zone. This is another world. Ozark spring; the leaves are still light green. No double-haulers. My coffee jitters chill out. One gas station and this would be Shangri-La.
This is the rural south. I smell fresh cut hay. I also smell animal shit, the signature odor of farm country that sentimental city-people forget. As often in America, the beautiful land bespeaks poor people. Ludwig and Ozone are not Paris. Up I twist, past road kill, the Ozone Muzzle-Loading Shop, Mount Airy Cemetery, Ebenezer Hill Mission, Salus Free Holiness Church. Even up here the state has spent money to put up Adopt-a-Highway signs; but, by golly, the roads are clean.
Curving back and forth, the road reminds me of Oregon 34, from Corvallis to my ex-wife's family place on the Pacific Coast. I am sad.
Now down a hill is the intersection with Arkansas 16, the highway to Fayetteville. This junction is Fallsville. There is a country store here. It has a gas pump. I am saved.
The nice woman behind the counter asks if its humid enough for me. When I laugh and tell her I'm from Miami, where the humidity hardly ever drops down to two figures, she tells me of another guy from Miami who had recently tried to pass through, only to be seduced by the hills. He stayed for three days.
The highest point in the state of Florida is 345 feet high, up near the Alabama border near Florala. It's over 600 miles away from Coconut Grove. Disney World advertises 180-foot high Space Mountain as the third highest mountain in the state. Dade County has Mount Trashmore, our municipal dump, and a few two- and three-decker overpasses on I-95. When the ice cap melts, we'll all be there, up on the highway. I can understand my fellow traveler. Hills can make you goofy. As I head northwest on Arkansas 16, I was glad I'd seen some before.
I follow the top of a ridge. In the distance, on a parallel ridge, I see farm buildings. Low clouds scud past, shooting their shadows across the trees. The sun is bright on the budding leaves.
In Pettigrew, along the creek-like White River whose much larger limbs I had crossed yesterday east of Little Rock, is where Arkansas's dead cars and pick-ups come to their final rest. There are hundreds and hundreds of them, piled up in some mad test of biodegradability. This is the sort of experiment that is best done off the main highway, so that if it doesn't work, the evidence can stay hidden. It's the end of the road, where things are black or white. "He that is not with me is against me," says the sign at the White River Baptist Church, not a place of nuance.
St. Paul (population 198), the first town for a while big enough to have a population sign, leads on to the outskirts of Fayetteville. Soooieee pig!
The highway leads into the downtown square, the Old Post Office surrounded by banks and shops. It looks like a bit less precious version of Oxford, Mississippi. This is hill country, albeit near the northern edge. The dramatic Ozarks are behind me. Later, on my way out of town, I will pass through the University's agricultural facility and lands to the north. Farmlands stretch west, through the rolling hills of eastern Oklahoma and Kansas, and north into southwest Missouri.
The University of Arkansas sits on its own hill, white stone-faced buildings ranged behind red-brick Old Main. The cafeteria at the Student Union looks out to the surrounding hills. In a large gully dead ahead is Razorback Stadium, its red seats climbing three tiers to the bank of lights on top. Desperately sought salad in hand, I move to the outdoor balcony overlooking the ghosts of Razorbacks past, thumb pinning my greens in the wind.
Like the rest of the campus, the cafeteria is almost empty. It's still April, but perhaps school is already out. Sorely tempted by red plastic pigs, I leave the Union bookstore to stroll the campus. Concrete paths web the lawns, many with lists of names under the heading, "Class of 19xx." They don't seem to be long enough to be full graduation lists.
A white and red campus bus passes by, maybe on its way to Reagan Street and fraternity row, maybe to the student shops on the edge of campus. Every university I visit will have a transportation system. It's one of the things real universities do, rather than spend more money on administrators like my own school.
At the Greek Theater, down in a swale, a jazz band is practicing, or maybe playing a very informal concert. Musicians in tee-shirts, suspenders, running shoes. People sit here and there on the slopes in the early afternoon breeze. I strike up a conversation with a student who politely tries to "yes, sir," "no, sir" me to death. When I tell him about my baseball tour, he says, "Great! You'll love Hawgball."
I love universities, colleges, campuses. When I was a kid I decided that what I wanted to do in life was be a teacher, not because I was snowed by a role model, but because I thought it would keep me mentally alive to be surrounded by kids who were asking questions, trying to learn, growing, wondering. I figured out early that while it might be useful to be an adult--to have adult rights and responsibilities--it was not necessarily a good thing to be a grown-up.
My friends and classmates were going to be grown-ups--lawyers, doctors, bankers, businesspeople, serious mothers and fathers, just like their own parents. This looked to me pretty much like terminal boredom, mental death.
I was used to pretty constant change. My parents came from families that had been settled in the upper midwest for a few generations--Swedes from Minneapolis on my father's side, Norwegians from a Wisconsin Lake Wobegon on my mother's. They met at the University of Minnesota. Like everybody else in my family except my father and me, my mother dropped out of college before junior year.
These were two people looking to escape Scandinavian stolidity, cream-of-mushroom-soup sauces, and jello salad. As their firstborn, I was packed along on their outward climb--St. Paul, Kansas, Chicago, Greenwich Village, the Bronx, Long Island, Westchester County, and on into Fairfield County, Connecticut at the beginning of Jr. High. I was one year here, one year there, always the new kid in town.
While my friends wanted to stay where they were, perhaps commuting to New York, but maintaining their roots in the places where they were growing up, I was usually looking to move on. Later in life I would rue my lack of roots--leading a schizophrenic, often confusing life between Boston and Miami--but at the time, I was usually unencumbered by homesickness. This was especially the case when I went away to boarding school, where I watched classmates suffer from a separation in which I delighted. My major constant through these years was summer at Gramma's in Elmhurst, Illinois, just west of Chicago.
In college I found a world in which the flexibility and detachment I had learned along the way were prime tools. This was fun. This was interesting. After a wasted freshman year, I began, ever so slowly and inarticulately, to get a glimpse of what Gregory Bateson would later call the "Ecology of Mind." I could have imaginary conversations with smart dead people, like Socrates and Kafka. Even though I was at Yale, I was less interested in class mobility than I was in temporal or geographical mobility.
Unlike any of my buddies, I was going off to graduate school to be a teacher. Of what? I didn't care. Then, discovering anthropology on a lark, I found a way to run with my cultural alienation. I could travel around, looking at life with the odd eye of the anthropologist, write and talk about stuff, and get sort of paid for it. Now, years later, universities are my home.
I now know them as self-serving bureaucracies, often cruel in their institutional logic, filled with the full range of human pettiness. But they are also places where the possibility of that life-changing Batesonian connection exists. One can hear the good talk, revel in the "Eureka!" of young people, shout the "Aha!"s. It is bush school, initiation, the last big Hall Pass from adult life.
They are also, these universities, almost invariably beautiful--country schools, land grant schools, town schools, city schools. The last, even when their attraction is of a different order than a Stanford, say, or a University of Indiana, are usually impressive, architecturally stately, oases from the cities around them. Your Columbias, Penns, Universities of Chicago--pointing to Oxford, Paris, Bologna, and the other great European universities--are majestic.
In their tax-free status, American universities and colleges can afford their large lawns, their woods, their central and peripheral quads. There are no immediate pressures to develop the land for sale or rent. I stroll the paths, past the stately buildings of brick or stone, joined by students with notebooks and texts, faculty with briefcases. It is Spring, so couples sit on the lawn, laughing, touching lightly. On the outskirts are wooden fraternity buildings, sororities with frisbees tossed in front. A few blocks away is the campus commercial strip--caf‚s, copy centers, convenience stores, pizza parlors, book stores. Here I am, a visiting fireman, at home.
Somewhere, nearer the dorms than the classrooms, are the athletic fields, the football stadium, the basketball arena, the field house, the aquatic center. Here are the spirits of the university's mercenaries, its football heroes, its hoop legends. Here are the echoes of countless fans, future Rhodes scholars, neurosurgeons, senators, judges, gamblers, cooks and chief bottle washers, all together, yelling "Soooieee pig!"
* * * * *
Scott and Janis aside, no music pulls me north to Joplin. But I'm going to Kansas City (Kansas City, here I come), and Joplin's on the way. I drive north on U.S. 71, past farms, past signs describing something, maybe the road surface--here chip seal, there slurry--for highway engineers. In Bentonville, Arkansas, "1990 Volunteer Community of the Year," I pass Glasgow's Restaurant--serving Mexican-American food. Nearby is a Mexican import business. Perhaps this is part of the infrastructure servicing the Wal-Mart Company.
There are two Wal-Mart stores on the main highway, and an NCR Wal-Mart Support Center. I vaguely remember that the founder of Wal-Mart, the richest man in America, is always portrayed as a simple good old boy who still lives in Arkansas. I may be mistaken, but Bentonville rings that bell. Just up the pike is Buena Vista Village, a resort/retirement community whose golf courses flank the west side of the road for a while. Looks like the Wal-Marts aren't the only rich folks around here.
The Missouri border is lined with liquor stores, signalling to me that I am leaving the evangelical, dry-county south for the somewhat more rowdy west, spawning ground of Mark Twain, Harry Truman, the Pony Express, the James Boys.
I pass the Mustang Diner, Sherwood Forest Homes (a trailer park), a barbecue place advertising itself as "The Real Hatfield." How clever is America. Now I'm in Fredville. I'm afraid to ask. As things get strange, I start to call my microcassette recorder "Diane." How I hunger for a real cup of coffee and a piece of homemade cherry pie.
Joplin's endless franchise strip looks just like Kissimmee, Florida. There's even a Tropical Motel, with a neon palm tree. There's also a big concrete sculpture of hands in prayer here (actually in Webb City). It's about as big as the sculpture of Elvis in Memphis. It is early Spring here. For the first time, I notice bare limbs and the thinness of the leaf cover.
A sign at Lamar leads me off the road to Harry S. Truman's birthplace. Near another ideal type prairie town square--did Disney really build America?--Harry was born in a little two-story wood house in 1884. He was carried about its six dank rooms for eleven months, until his parents moved back to Kansas City. Somewhere along the line the house was owned by descendants of Wyatt Earp, from whom the United Auto Workers of America purchased it in 1957. The union donated it to the state, and it is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Maybe eleven months of mewling and puking by a future president was long enough to coat the house with mana. There's certainly enough official magical thinking around. What I think, though, is that we're doing propaganda here. Like Lincoln's birthplace, and Grant's, even Elvis's in Tupelo, this little house shouts "HUMBLE ORIGINS!!" This is, by god, a meritocratic democracy, where a simple guy, a failed haberdasher no less, can be elected to the greatest office on earth.
The guide is hoarse. She has just had to shout a tour at an unscheduled bus of Minnesotans. She walks me back past the little guard house/office to a bronze mask of Truman, set into a stone column. "People didn't think too much of Truman before Roosevelt died," she says. "It's about like how people think of Dan Quayle today. I don't worry so much. Maybe he'll turn out like Harry."
Now, here was a guy who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima, essentially after the war was over, and then dropped another one on Nagasaki. He wiped out hundreds of thousands of potential Elvis fans. He invented the Truman Doctrine, declaring the U.S. as King of the Global Hill. He started the Cold War, the Korean War, and fun and games with Joe McCarthy. So Quayle is supposed to be just as competent? Just give him a chance? Great!
Yet Truman was the hero of the common man--my grandfather's hero. One of my earliest radio memories is of the night of the 1948 presidential election. It was kindergarten year, and we were packed into my grandparents' house in Elmhurst, Illinois. Grampa Marshall was a tool-and-die man at a hub cap factory in Maywood. I think he had been downwardly mobile; for the story was that he was very smart, had gone to college in Indiana, played football. He had married my very middle-class grandmother. I think his temper was a factor; for he moved from job to job, spurred on by various fights with foremen. Some of this anger he took out on neighborhood trees, which he used to drive into at regular intervals, until they took his license away.
He was a strong man, maybe five foot eleven, but tough as nails. He would get me to hang from his outstretched arm until I got tired. He'd cuff me around in fun, bruising me once in a while, but never meaning to hurt. I was his first-born grandchild, his favorite, and he was ready to protect me from the madness of the rest of the world, with his fists if need be.
Gramps had thick black hair, almost a pompador, and a moustache. He looked tough, with his cracked hands and brusque manner--part Gable, part Stalin. Yet he was a deacon of the church, putting on his suit each Sunday and becoming gentle and at some peace.
Sometimes on the radio I'd hear people talking about the Marshall Plan. I had no idea what people meant when they said the Plan would put Yurrip back on its feet, since I didn't know what Yurrip was, but I was real proud of my Grampa for figuring out how to do it. Then, of course, my sister used to think God's name was Howard. You know, "Our Father who art in Heaven, Howard be thy name."
Later in life Grampa Marshall's innards began to fail. He had operation after operation, this taken out, then that. His last years in Sarasota, Florida, were spent stooped over, silently walking No‰l, his toy poodle, the love and companion of his failing life.
But that November night in 1948, as unexpected results came in at intervals over the big, klutzy Philco, my grandfather was a happy man. He was a union man and a Democrat. He had no use for Republicans, including my father, a rock-ribbed version-in-training. Harry was Grampa's kind of guy--a scrapper, ready to let the buck stop here. They could have been fellow deacons. I don't know what Grampa thought about the bomb, but he sure cackled later when Harry fired MacArthur. What a pisser!
I head back to the highway, north towards Kansas City, just like Harry's folks. I feel like the Ugly Duckling, the only sedan in a world of pick-up trucks. Many of them are Japanese; Detroit doesn't seem to have shown these people what they want. Past Camp Clark, near Nevada, Missouri, I see water towers, three of them in the near distance before me. Icons of my youthful summers, water towers signal the midwest to me. First Truman and Grampa, now the towers. I am getting closer to the bone.
The land here was once endless prairie, covered with waving wild grass tall as Kareem. Wildflowers splashed the open spaces in asymmetrical clumps. It's all gone now, farmed over, except for a patch here and there reclaimed and protected by groups like The Nature Conservancy. There is one such spot here, a little meadow down a dirt road, a mile or two off U.S. 71. The wind has whipped up as I stand there, a wind that will continue for the next few days, showing me how the constant prairie wind, the Santa Ana, the Mistral can drive people mad.
Abetted by the wind, the skies darken as I near Kansas City. This is my first major league game on a trip that is pretty risky. Each day I am to be in a different city, sometimes 400 miles away from the last. A rainout means hundreds of miles of thwarted driving. I can't wait around for a sunny day. Driven by the grand scheme, I must move on. The only game I know I'll see for certain is in the dome in Minneapolis.
There is weather, as they say on airplanes, near Kansas City. The game will be played, though, uninterrupted by the slight drizzle in the seventh inning. After the game, I will drive on toward Iowa and Minnesota--on my one overnight run--through a horrendous storm. Tomorrow I will learn that people died in Kansas when tornadoes touched down.
Now, however, I'm headed for the Harry S. Truman Sports Complex. There's not enough time to see much of Kansas City. I guess I blew the day in the Ozarks. Luckily, I've been here before. I do miss the barbecue, though.
Royals Stadium sits next to Arrowhead, where the Chiefs play, just up the hill off I-70, east of town. From the stands you can see the trucks pass by behind the scoreboard. I am an hour early for the game. This will give me time to walk around the stadium concourse, see the view from the upper deck and the box seats, if the ushers will let me, watch a little batting practice, and find the souvenir store to collect my coffee mug. This routine anchors me throughout the trip.
From the parking lot I can see the circles on top of the crown on the center field scoreboard. They are already lit, pointing into the glowering sky. A shiver runs down my back. I have seen the crown on televised games. Now I will see the fountains below it in real life. The trip is aimed as much at seeing the stadiums in person as it is at seeing the teams. I've seen many of the players--the American League ones, anyway--at Fenway. But the Royals Stadium fountains in person? Outstanding!
I get my box seat ticket, down the left field line, for ten bucks, the best deal in the majors. It's early in the season and the nights are still cold, so none of the games will be sold out. Two guys in front of me at the window say they're from Chicago. They just saw the new Comiskey and want to compare it to Royals Stadium. They come on like big travellers. Pikers, I think to myself in self-satisfaction.
The stadium is beautiful. Two levels of orange-red seats, separated by a band of yellow club boxes, slope down to the bright green artificial turf. This is my first turf. I hate it, but, under the lights, its intense green is a designer's delight.
In center is the scoreboard, topped by the crown and a bank of lights. It holds the giant monitor that will flash player pictures, statistics, and such. To the sides are small sloping lawns. During the changeovers, fountain heads will rise, spraying water onto the grass. The only real grass here is outside the playing field. Below the scoreboard, behind the playing field walls, are the famous fountains, water flowing down towards the field in wide, shallow steps, soothing the soul.
On the main concourse is the Royals' Hall of Fame, a display of shelves and lockers behind glass, with mememtos of the careers of Steve Busby, Cookie Rojas, Paul Splittorf, Amos Otis, Dick Houser, Dennis Leonard, Hal MacRae. Some odd choices, I think. Nice people, though, like the nice people in Kansas City, at the ticket booths, in the souvenir stores, at the food stalls.
There's lots of ballpark food here, at stands with TV monitors overhead so we don't miss any of the game. It's the Big Leagues; not just the usual hot dogs, bratwurst, pizza, popcorn, peanuts, but also barbecue, frozen yogurt, and non-alcoholic beer. This is the first time I've seen Sharps or O'Doul's at the ballpark. It's new for the concessionnaire workers as well. The brew is not on tap, so each can must be retrieved from a refrigerator in the back and individually opened, chopping up finger nails and knuckles.
The market for this "beer" has obviously grown quickly in the last few years, as the country has seen a growing campaign against alcohol and alcoholic behavior. Mothers Against Drunk Drivers, litigative politics concerning fetal alcohol syndrome, the call for "designated drivers," even by beer companies--obviously threatened by the potential of a public stampede against them--all these have built up some momentum. Many of the parks I will hit on this trip have designated driver programs themselves. One signs up, receiving an easily observable bracelet or other marking. In return for forgoing the opportunity to buy beer (or wine coolers, which are also sold now), participants receive free soft drinks.
I am delighted to see my first O'Doul's, though. What's a baseball game without at least the memory of beer? I'm afraid I'm part of this new wave (the only new wave I'm part of, I think). Before I quit drinking, I used to measure journeys in beer. There was no space-time continuum, only a space-beer continuum. It was a beer to the mall, a six-pack to mom's, three and a half cases to the Coast. I spent much of my life with a low-level buzz. I thought it was cool; but it was low-life irresponsible. I am most thankful that no one was ever physically hurt.
After a quick tour of the upper deck, where I get a hint of the vertigo that will strike me in Chicago, I take my seat down the left field line. The Royals are playing the Red Sox tonight, so this is the only time I will root against the home team. But, Sox fan that I am, I find rooting against the Royals hard to do. In the spirit of the trip, I want to join the home team fans in celebration. When they sing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" at the 7th inning stretch, I want to sing the home team's name, just like Harry Carey. I want to stand up with two outs in the top of the ninth, rooting for that last out.
In fact, I will be a good luck charm on this trip. The home teams will go 9-2 when I'm around. Winding down back home, I go to two Florida State League Class A games. The home teams win both. Maybe the anthropology has been useful. Maybe I've learned some good "medicine".
The Sox score first. After Tom Brunansky's home run in the third, it's 3-0. Mike Boddicker, who looks like he's going to be chased early, hangs in there. The Red Sox, in fact, are done. Greg Harris hits Kevin Seitzer, breaking a finger and putting him on the DL.
I watch Jim Eisenreich in left field. Intense man. Terrific line-drive hitter. Here's a man with Tourette's Syndrome, driven out of baseball before a good diagnosis led to corrective medication. Five years ago, who knew about this condition? Then Oliver Sacks wrote about it, Eisenreich and Chris Jackson of the Denver Nuggets went public, now LA Law has done a set of shows about it. The man's a hero.
Bit by bit the Royals catch up--1 in the third, 2 in the sixth. The turf gets greener under the lights, as the sky gets darker. Two women behind me talk about guys they have met at evening worship, apparently the local social service for singles. The 22,559 fans sit through a momentary drizzle in the seventh, which threatens with the storm to the west, but peters out almost immediately.
Unfortunately, I've got to go. It's almost ten o'clock and I must drive 440 miles to Minneapolis for a noon game tomorrow. I can see this one going into extra innings, causing me to miss a couple of precious hours of road sleep on the way north. Other than the frigid marathon in Milwaukee, this is the only game I will leave even a minute early.
Walking to my car in the parking lot, I hear a thunderous cheer. The crown flashes on and off. In the car I turn on the radio. Mike Macfarlane has doubled home two runs, putting the Royals ahead 5-3. The Sox threaten in the top of the ninth, but Jeff Montgomery shuts them down for his fifth save.
"What am I doing?" I ask myself, getting into my car for the long overnight haul north. "This is crazy."
In the thunder and lightening, the pounding night rain, the tornado roulette ahead, this evening and morning of the fourth day soon becomes quite mad.
DAY 5: Where all the children are above average.
It is not yet midnight. I plan to drive north for a while on I-35, into Iowa at least. The Twins and Seattle Mariners will tee it up at noon tomorrow, 440 miles to the north. I've got about thirteen hours to get there. If I move right along through the night, I should be able to sleep for three or four hours in the car somewhere along the way.
Minnesota was as far away from home as I would get. I was born there, in St. Paul, but was carted off at six weeks. I have only the vaguest memories of any trips back, trips to see my father's folks, who died when I was pretty young. I write "St. Paul" on forms, where it says "Place of Birth," but there is no resonance at all.
And there are no songs to pull me north. Minnesota's not the sort of place people write songs about, although songwriters--Dylan, Prince--have lived there. It's hard to write songs about the kind of nice, earnest people in Garrison Keillor's world, Norwegian bachelor farmers, or about gophers and moose, or Albert Lea and Duluth. There's no "Midnight Train to Minnesota," or "Hibbing Choo-Choo," or "I Left My Heart in Red Wing." A fella will just have to sing about other places.
So I'm drawn north by the Plan, to flirt a bit with death.
Short of Bethany, a line of thunderclouds joins me to the west. Lightning bursts explode in the sky, diffusing through the clouds to my left. Pulling into the parking lot at Royals Stadium, I had heard tornado warnings for Kansas and Oklahoma. The game had gone on virtually untouched. Now, scanning through local radio stations, I hear that funnels have touched down. Tomorrow I will learn that twenty-some people died outside Wichita when one ran through a trailer park.
On other journeys, I have driven through the night, lightly bathed by the dashboard lights, yellow, green, sometimes red. Reflections would shine back at me from the closed windows. Light beams passed along the road, picking up movements and shadows at the pavement's edge. Forms of trees lined the fields. Sometimes there would be hills topped by stars on a clear night, or snow-covered ponds in the moonlight. Once, in Nevada, I was joined by an honor guard of jackrabbits, standing sporadically at attention on the shoulder.
In the summer there would be the sounds of baseball, broadcast across the country from St. Louis or Chicago or Pittsburgh. With the sun's electromagnetics buried in the Indian Ocean, radio waves crossed the land, twisting it together in a skein of friendly voices--Ernie Harwell, Harry Carey, Bob Prince, even sometimes Vin Scully, from across the mountains. Skimming through space, my car radio would draw in the threads, time zone by time zone, until the game rested. Then, along with Camus's Merseault, L'Etranger, "gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars...I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe."
Like me, the storm is heading northeast, a bit ahead as far as I can tell. There are severe thunderstorm warnings and a tornado watch for northwest Missouri and southern Iowa. As the rain begins to hit, the voice on the radio starts naming the counties in danger. The night is black, lit up now and then by clusters of thunderless lightning strikes, some now flashing from sky to ground like one of those pictures of an Arizona observatory. I can imagine people sitting by their radios, perhaps in the dark, too, as they wait for the county list.
The news is not for people like me, strangers just driving through; it is for those who know what those names mean. I am in "county land" here in the midwest, where people locate themselves county by county. I have always lived either in states small enough to fill up all the psycho-geographical space in my head, or in cities big enough to make counties irrelevant. Now, as the rain beats harder, I hear these mystery names spoken laconically in the dark. I'd like to know where they are. Some are still under tornado watch. Some have had touchdown reports. I don't even know what state these counties are in--Iowa or Missouri. Anyone in range here is supposed to know these things. It's like Boston was before the Bicentennial, when they finally put up street signs for the tourists. Until then, it was assumed that you knew the name of any street you might be on, otherwise you oughtn't to have the temerity to be on it.
The rain gets worse as I cross into Iowa, weather reports sharing time with country music. I crawl along. I can barely see. It's like a tropical cloudburst at home, the world wiped out in an airborne flash flood. Lightning strobes the world--a monstrous bone-showing x-ray. It's the epicenter. Zeus is pissed. This is real dangerous. Why don't I stop, get off the road, find shelter?
How can a person terrified beyond human comprehension by the merest allusion to dentistry, one whose every twinge of indigestion signals HEART ATTACK, whose every cough means CANCER, drive through a night rainstorm whose accompanying tornadoes kill people? The more I think about it, now having come out the other end, the less I understand. There are an awful lot of variables.
It's not quite true to say, with the ineffable romance of self-pity, that my life had come to such a pass that I didn't care anymore one way or another. It had certainly been full of things that didn't work, dreams unmet, trails washed out and lost. Doing middle-age isn't all that much fun. Marriages fail. Careers stagnate. Children have hard times. Paths to the future, any future, are harder to find.
Depression about the big things is now a heavy load. All those goofy dreams about justice, kindness, respect, decency, equality, peace have now been pretty well tarnished by the consistent self-serving meanness of our elected officials, appointed overseers, CEOs, and other arbitragers of the human condition. People of good will burn out--to be denounced by the next generation as hypocrites.
Parents of friends--friends themselves--get sick and test death. Intimations, not just of mortality, but of loneliness and lack of grace, of incompetence and incontinence, gather at our side. There are moments, especially in winter, even a south Florida one, when life seems too bleak to endure.
But New Englanders say, "If you live through February, you'll live another year," and here I was, two months later, doing something life-affirming. Maybe I was just keeping the demons at bay for a while, but I was doing something that had a future tense in it.
Yet I was still trying to outrun tornadoes. Machismo? Disbelief that it could happen to me? Notion that I'm safer moving than standing still? Adherence to the Plan? The joy of mortal risk? Sense of challenge and control? Lack of immediate pain? Of clear vision of continuing and mortal pain? Or is it an actual death wish, joining other dangerous things I do in a subconscious attempt to place myself in harm's way? Perhaps it is all of these.
Perhaps it is also a test of freedom. After all, I am moving around, following my own muse, unencumbered by others and their own desires. I am doing something, seeing baseball games, about which I have a passion, without having to explain or apologize. I am doing it as low-fly as possible, relying on few material goods and creature comforts, sleeping in the car or out under the stars. I am even changing the Plan from time to time, discovering a game in Little Rock or wandering off the highway to see a piece of saved prairie. My mother thinks what I am doing is dangerous; but since I have been doing anthropological things for 25 years--sort of visiting my way through life--she has gotten a bit used to it.
At 12:32 A.M. I am in Iowa amid blinding lightening shots. I am at ground zero. The tornado is not; just me and the rest of the storm. As it lessens, so do I. I find the first rest stop in Iowa. I drive to the end of the line and pull in, as far out of the light as possible. The sign says I can only stay here for a few hours. OK, that's all I need. The rain has about stopped as I drop the seat down, set the alarm for 5 AM, and, so far a surviver, sleep.
In the morning I drive through the murk toward Des Moines. I'd like to stop here, but there isn't time. I've been here before. It's one of the country's civilized places, in the center of one of the country's civilized states. I spent a delightful afternoon once in a little downtown Korean restaurant. What a nice antidote that would be for the fury of the storm.
I get gas just off the I-35/I-80 Des Moines by-pass. The sun is starting to blue the sky. The Des Moines Register reports that tornadoes from the storm killed thirty people in Kansas and Oklahoma. This is pretty immediate. Later I will find out about the cyclone in Bangladesh--many deaths far away, another addition to the bursting list of horror and need.
I am in a time tunnel, connecting the dots. The world outside the tracks ahead disappears, off on its own trajectories. I am in one of many simultanaeous universes, vibrating strings from my own past as I climb the web. I pass space-time junctions, cruising the heartland. My present, my history weave in and out through the karasses of others, people loved, liked, and strange.
At Ames, I leave the highway to take a look at Iowa State University. It is an act of curiosity, but also, maybe, of a subtle form of solidarity. My future-ex, Mitzi, spent a small, but well-remembered, piece of childhood here. Her father was a mathematician whose politics led to a nomadic life of academic terminations and resignations, from the 1940s into the 1960s, when he and the family finally found some semblance of humane rationality in Corvallis, Oregon. Years later, William Least Heat Moon would sit in his van in the pouring rain in Corvallis, not far from my late father-in-law's house, and wonder why he was driving around his blue highways.
My wife's brother was in the same junior high class as Fred, who has become a friend and colleague. I thought of all of these people as I drove into town in the vaguely lifting crack-of-dawn gloom.
I sometimes think of people as silkworms. They move through life laying down a thread of invisible silk behind them as they go. As life goes on, a person's thread gets longer. It weaves around the globe, piling up in some places, thinning out in others, sown by the movements of living.
Sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I can see these threads of others, as they glow for just an instant. Every so often, I trip over one. I am caught up short, wondering whose path I have stumbled upon; for I am weaving my thread into theirs as I cross.
Human life is a kind of random walk in whole cloth. No large designs, only local ones. Yet the threads may come from far away and long ago to pass through the local patch on which I work. I need to "hear beyond the dotted line," as my friend Becky might say, and to be wary of men with shears.
Invisible threads draw me into Ames. From the distance the campus looks like a bunch of big concrete buildings. I pass the football stadium--these are the Iowa State Cyclones--pretty simple and functional, nothing like the one at Arkansas; but then neither is the team. There's Beach Street. The good citizens of Ames have either strange collective fantasies or a very wry sense of humor. Red brick residence houses climb up the hill. Away from the main drag, the campus is reasonably attractive--grass, trees, a little pond. The trees are pretty bare, though. It's early Spring here, this last Saturday in April. Mitzi's memories are mostly about cold, ice, wind, snow, cold, wind, cold. No Viking, she. Looking at the bare trees I sense the possibilities.
The campus is deceptively big once I get back into it--big enough for Cy-Ride, the campus bus service. Lots of agriculture here, greenhouses, hothouses, the National Soil Tilth Laboratory. I remember my earlier visit to Des Moines, watching a Punjabi agronomist broadcasting from Ames about corn weevils. I was in a pretty low-life dive, and it was prime time television. There were actually people watching.
There's a large, dark building on campus, with a tower that makes it look like an industrial establishment of some type. I think it's a grain processor, part of the aggie business training, until I go around back and see the "Hazardous Metals" sign and a pile of what looks like coal. Maybe it's the energy plant. I'll see its clone at the University of Indiana.
Ames, too, has its franchise strip, leading away from its prairie town center. Over the South Skunk River, I head by sheep houses to the interstate.
Past wildlife centers I go north, across the Iowa River. There's lots of water here, lakes and ponds. This is flyway country. It's Saturday morning. I'm very glad its not duck season.
Two miles off the road is the Dows State Welcome Center, in an old railroad station. The town is tiny and it's too early for the center to be open. I don't quite understand why it is here, out of the way as it is. Maybe this is the land of the intrepid traveler. Maybe there's something really interesting or kinky that happens here, and I just don't know about it.
Farms here seem relatively small. North of Dows, back on I-35, I can see six, seven, eight at a time, a few hundred yards apart. They are all plowed. Each has its granary, white farmhouse, barn. There's just no sense of plastic here. It's almost a heartland caricature.
Then at a rest stop just north of Clear Lake, I find water faucets that are run by sensor beam. When I put my hands under the faucet, the water turns on. When I move away, the water stops. It is very high-tech conservation. A fellow traveler in plaid shirt and suspenders tells me, "You know, a guy can sure lather up and get clean here. Hygienic, too."
I pass the Winnebago River in northern Iowa, and, 2147 miles into the trip, pull into the Minnesota Welcome Center. This, too, is prairie country--prairie and wind. Cumulus cloud puffs dot the northern blue sky. The clean air confuses my lungs, giving me a whiff of fresh air fever.
For the first time, near Albert Lea, I see Adopt-a-Highway folks, in orange safety vests, cleaning up trash. It's Saturday, of course, when people can get together and do this sort of thing. Then it's the Gopher Distributing Company--here's a gopher, there's a gopher, how about one for you? Then, rising out of the horizon, just like Little Rock, is the skyline of Minneapolis. It reminds me of driving east on U.S. 2, turning a corner in Belmont, and suddenly seeing downtown Boston spread out ahead.
Kansas City is as far west as I'm going to go. This--America's Budapest--is as far north. After the game I will turn southeast, toward the middle third of this journey, toward the broad shoulders of Chicago.
I drive between neo-rustic highway walls, brown wood slats stacked between concrete pillars, into the city center. There are new skyscrapers here, postmodern buildings, one in aqua and silver, another in gold vertical stripes. Right downtown, just off the interstate is the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, "the Homerdome," "The Great Trash Bag." An hour before game time I park and head into the stadium.
This is a functional, low-cost structure--a concrete form, filled with two levels of blue plastic seats and artificial turf, and covered with sailcloth. The ceiling has holes in it, either to help outfielders locate fly balls by giving the roof some contrast, or to parody postmodern ripped jeans clothing styles. During the game the indoor lights will be be turned up and down to simulate the passage of clouds in a real sky.
The concrete concourse surrounds the playing field, with simple, ample food stalls. Souvenirs are sold from spaces on the concourse floor, blocked off by ropes and stacked with stuff--no shops here. Pressure in the dome is artificially inflated, so moving through the entrance doors is like being in a wind tunnel.
Twins fans are pretty casual, laid back northern, woodsy. Lots of bluejeans here; it's hard to ferret out a pretention. The fans in Kansas City were a bit more stylish, more up to date. Maybe if all your men are strong, all your women are good-looking, and all your children are above average, you just don't need Gucci.
Most of the excitement in town at this point comes from the improbable rise of the North Stars up the Stanley Cup ladder. With a badly losing record at the end of the regular season, the North Stars have dispatched St. Louis, Chicago, and Edmonton, three of the very best teams in the league. Great though this is for the people of the Twin Cities, it'll only be more justification for a playoff system that eliminates only the Calcutta Mother Teresas from participation.
Today's Twins game itself reminds me of Tron. It is like an electronic arcade pinball game. I have a very hard time thinking that what I am seeing is real. Even the organist accompanies the action with synthesized special effects. Bouncing balls go "boing, boing, boing." As the Cardinals found out in the '87 Series, the sound system, circling upper deck, is loud. Combine yelling fans, an enclosed space, and the sound system, and you have pure aural torture.
The outfield walls, over which balls sail with some regularity, are lined with huge blue blown up rafts, laid on their ends to protect the outfielders. It makes players look like kids at a fair, jumping up and down on those big blown- up mattresses at the playhouse.
With only 16,247 people in the house, there are plenty of seats available. I finally settle once again down the left field line. The plastic seats here are set for football, aimed straight ahead; so that to see the infield I have to twist to the right and let the plastic dig into my butt. I am the only one in this section, hoping for a foul ball. I am tired and disoriented, and it feels like I am at a play, or a concert, or a big lecture, trying to stay awake. On the television screen over the stands in left Alex Trebeck is playing "Twins Jeopardy."
The game boings along. Kirby Puckett, the local hero, is announced as "KIRRRRRRBY PUCKETT," just like Truman's house said "HUMMMMMMBLE ORIGINS." Ken Griffey, Jr., hits one out in the top of the first. He is so graceful he looks like he's showing off, gliding into snap-catches in the outfield. No doubt, he is something special.
Kent Hrbek returns the favor in the bottom of the first, a two-run job that puts the Twins ahead to stay. The Twins win 7 to 2. Kirby goes 1 for 5, Brian Harper homers, Griffey, Jr., is 2 for 4. Kevin Tapani, a steal from the Mets (the Frank Viola trade), pitches 8 and gets the win.
But the whole thing seems unreal. Like leaving a movie theater after a matinee, I stumble through the artificial wind tunnel-exit into the real winds of Minneapolis, surprised by sun.
I cross the Mississippi to River Place, Minneapolis's Quincy Market. I had always pictured St. Paul across the river, but not yet. It's the boundary further downstream, below the University of Minnesota. I'm still in Minneapolis, driving back and forth across the Mississippi mindlessly as I try to find my way from East to West Campus.
This is a huge urban campus, spread out mostly on the east side of the river, swarming inland in block after block of university buildings. On the west side, not too far from the Metrodome, is the funky edge of the campus. Here's where the Ethiopian restaurants are, the caf‚s and saloons.
My parents met at the University of Minnesota. Dad was a musician as well as, maybe, a student. He played trombone and led a jazz band. They played "Big Band" music--Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey--in the late-1930s, early 1940s. The band made a couple of records before WWII distributed the members elsewhere. I remember the big 78 rpm records that Dad would play every so often to show me what real music was like.
When he was a teenager in Minneapolis, Dad and a friend had invented a wooden ocarina, made from carved strips of wood, laminated and glued together. They had ocarinas of all sizes, from big base ones to tiny sopranos. He and Ollie had put together a repertoire of songs that would lead them, after the War, to the Arthur Godfrey Show and on to Broadway. For a few months they would play "Dance to the Music of the Ocarina" in Call Me Madam.
Anyway, my folks met and got married. Mom dropped out of school, I was born, and Dad went off to Labrador to be a military weatherman, directing U.S. planes to Europe until the armistice. After the war it was showbiz and then various attempts at entrepreneurialism before he settled down as a resort hotel and airline agent in New York.
When I was a child, our relationship was pretty dicey. He helped my science fair projects, coached my Little League team, spun his 78s for me; but he was also pretty quick and random with the belt or whatever else was handy. I've repressed a bunch of stories that people have since told me about.
When I was eight, my parents split for a while. Mom and the kids went to Gramma's. Mom wasn't particularly together at the time. Within a span of about a week I developed both asthma and migraine headaches as my clever way of both speaking out and of setting escape routes into my darkened bedroom. Both syndromes lasted long enough after I left home to be medically documented; so they kept me out of Canada or jail during the Vietnam War.
Dad and I left home about a week apart when I was fourteen. I went off to school. He went to the other side of town. After a flurry of living together during my vacations, he and I went our separate ways, connecting only sporadically over the years until recently, when we have repaired some of the damage. Not best friends, we coexist reasonably cordially.
I leave the cafe and head for St. Paul; but it just doesn't resonate. Just across the line from Minneapolis, a tumbleweed blows down the street, momentarily caught by a USA Today dispenser. Driving University Avenue towards the state capital, I feel like I'm in Oakland, California. There are blocks of Asian restaurants--Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai, Hmong. The bluffs overlooking the river are stunning. On top, the beautiful houses of the beautiful people. Down below, in the flats, are homes of those of more modest means. It's just like the East Bay.
Now it's down U.S. 61, beginning the leg to Chicago. I've gone as far back in the progression of the seasons as I'm going to go. From now on, the trees will get greener again as I head toward the wet heat I left only days ago.
I'm aiming, more or less, for Madison. I'd like to begin the day tomorrow with a visit to the town where Gramma grew up, a bit south of the Wisconsin state capital. It's about 4:30 in the afternoon, so I have a few more hours of sunlight. I could head straight out of St. Paul on I-94, but I just drove through the storm and on into Minnesota on the interstate. Now I'd like to see something of the River.
The Mississippi has two sides. Down the spine of America, from Minnesota to Louisiana, roads along both river banks are designated part of the Great River Road. I can head south on the Minnesota side, through Hastings, Red Wing, and Winona to the I-90 bridge into LaCrosse, or I can cross into Wisconsin at some point and head south on Wisconsin 35.
On the map both roads have dots on them--the road atlas people think they're neat--but the Wisconsin ones look skinnier and closer to the river. I'll go as far as Red Wing, though, in my father's state. He was always going to Red Wing to visit some uncle.
Heading south from St. Paul, I am soon back into farmland. These heartland cities rise out of the prairie, get their job done, and quit while they're ahead. No lingering through the metastasized concrete, yellow-air jungles of northeast New Jersey or the San Bernadino Valley. They are a statement of pragmatic efficiency, capable of funtional simplicity in spite of the intermittent boosterism that would threaten their scale of life.
Red Wing, Red Deer, Red Bluffs, mysterious western names to me when I was a kid, none of them on either of the two Red Rivers. So here I was, once again wishing for more time; for Red Wing hinted that it was worth some. Downtown, under the bluffs and near the river, looked tastefully gentrified. Rustic wood store fronts would be lit at night by old-fashioned three-ball street lamps. There were restaurants, cafes. Looked like it might be a nice place to stay and write for a while, even at the risk of running into a Fjellman or two.
Now it was time to cross the aisle, to leave my father's state for my mother's (for her mother's, actually). I would pass down Lake Pepin, where the dammed Mississippi filled out for thirty miles, on the Wisconsin side. I thought, rationally, that the ride would be prettier. Later it would seem somewhat more of a decision of the heart. I wanted to leave Dad for Gramma. Her spirit was in Wisconsin.
This is pretty country. There are bluffs on both sides of the widening river. The road winds about, running through little towns in small print--Hager City, Bay City, Maiden Rock, Stockholm, Pepin, Nelson. I pass an intriguing country inn at Maiden Rock. Off the road, the historical marker tells of the Indian maiden who, forced to marry the wrong guy, jumped off the rock to her death. Another car has stopped here. Three generations of women are trying to keep an unromantic dog from peeing on the marker.
In Stockholm (pop. 104), big enough for two Swedish cafes, houses fly the Swedish flag. I wish my daughter, Melina, were here. We toured the other Stockholm once. Now she could get a comparison.
Another roadside marker sites Fort St. Antoine, where in 1689 Nicholas Perron "formally took possession of the entire region west of the Great Lakes, 'no matter how remote,' in the name of Louis the Fourteenth."
Pepin, no doubt a remote part of the region, is a veritable metropolis. It has 890 denizens at low tide. At the north end of town is a little red century-old railroad depot, now a museum, closed for the day. Next to it is Laura Ingalls Wilder Park. She was born somewhere around here, and the park commemorates her book, The Little House in the Big Woods, written about a house somewhere around here. I am reminded about Suwanee River Park in Florida--places famous for something that happened elsewhere.
Down by the river is a caf‚ where people have gathered outside at tables, with glasses of beer and white wine. They all look reasonably stylish here in what might pass for the middle of nowhere. Perhaps they are gathered to wait for the evening train to go by on the tracks in front of them, like people gather for the sunset at Mallory Square in Key West. This is the kind of scene about which I could spin lots of fantasies. I'd like to go back some day, have a Norsk.
Past the Chippewa River is "Historic" Alma, site of the No. 4 Dam that helps make Lake Pepin. Then, to the south is the Dairyland Power Cooperative, John P. Madgett Station--cooling towers, huge pile of coal. The revery is over.
With half an hour of sunlight left, I join I-90 at LaCrosse. Past Wisconsin Dells, floated, fortunately, on another trip, I drive southeast towards Madison. I've been on the road for five days, eightysomething pages, through death, baseball, and a bit of my past. It's time for a motel, a good long shower, maybe even a bath. Tom Bodette whispers in my ear, over and over, "We'll leave the light on for Ya'."
At the Motel 6 counter, I tell the nice lady that Bodette sent me. "He does that," she says. I can't sleep just yet. It's still too early. Trying to avoid television for a while, I drive into Madison. The capital--on a hill, eh?--is lit up, surrounded by one-way roads that are beyond my capabilities to understand. The university is back there somewhere, and there are some interesting streets, but I just do increasingly disjointed loops. Time to give up. I go home. The light is on.
It's the evening of the fifth day.