I did not regret my not having seen this before, since I now saw it under circumstances so favorable. I was in just the frame of mind to see something wonderful [that night], and this was a phenomenon adequate to my circumstances and expectation, and it put me on the alert to see more like it. I let science slide, and rejoiced in that light as if it had been a fellow-creature. I saw that it was excellent, and was very glad to know that it was so cheap. A scientific explanation, as it is called, would have been altogether out of place there. That is for pale daylight. Science with its retorts would have put me to sleep; it was the opportunity to be ignorant that I improved. It suggested to me that there was something to be seen if one had eyes. It made a believer of me more than before. I believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself any day — not an empty chamber in which chemistry was left to work alone, but an inhabited house — and for a few moments I enjoyed fellowship with them. Your so-called wise man goes trying to persuade himself that there is no entity there but himself and his traps, but it is a great deal easier to believe the truth. It suggested, too, that the same experience always gives birth to the same sort of belief or religion. One revelation has been made to the Indian, another to the white man. I have much to learn of the Indian, nothing of the missionary. I am not sure but all that would tempt me to teach the Indian my religion would be his promise to teach me his. Long enough I had heard of irrelevant things; now at length I was glad to make acquaintance with the light that dwells in rotten wood. Where is all your knowledge gone to? It evaporates completely, for it has no depth.
— Henry David Thoreau,
The Maine Woods,
1864
1
Apologia to Camerado Reader
NEVER, YOUNG AUTHORS, open your story with another writer’s words. I, being young only in comparison to mud or a Galápagos tortoise, have earned — at least in my own mind — the liberty of violating the axiom. Exceptions prove rules, so it’s said. Here’s my contravention, this from the eighteenth century, from Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman:
Of all the several ways of beginning a book which are now in practice throughout the known world, I am confident my own way of doing it is the best — I’m sure it is the most religious — for I begin with writing the first sentence — and trusting to Almighty God for the second.
And so can it be also with journeys where a traveler makes a first step, goes the first mile, takes up the first day, and thereafter more or less follows along as the Almighty Way-gods ordain.
The initial sentence of the next leg of the quest for quoz with Q — one expressing our first step, as you’ll soon see — is “Q knew of the Quadruplets and planetary Parcheesi long before we set out, so they weren’t in our road conversation as we headed for the Quapaw Ghost Light.” But before we get to those words, I must say a few preparatory things. (If you’ve ever dreamed you disembarked from some vehicle in some distant city and found yourself without luggage and clad in only your pajamas, then you know what arrival without preparation is like.) We both had long wanted to verify or debunk the Quapaw Ghost Light, and, happily, it lay more or less along our route to southern New Mexico; of course, for a circuitous traveler, any place is along the way.
The Almighty Something — I won’t lay it off on deity — did indeed give me the second sentence (the one actually opening this chapter), even though, as far as I could see initially, its connection to the original first words lacked reason and certainly didn’t rhyme. Almighties often work like that: mysterious if not mystical ordinations reach us so full of gaps and blanks we have to stumble along on our own and in so doing find our way and thereby reveal ourselves, expressing our lives for better or worse. In this manner, we write our autobiographies with wandering feet and the tracks they leave behind — despite many of those traces being blown to the winds before anyone else can pick them up.
Gus Kubitzki held that life is a cosmic board-game played against an invisible, invincible opponent who spends most of his time saying, “Your move,” then forcing your hand before you’re ready. The game, patently, isn’t to see whether you win or lose — loss is preordained — rather it’s to see the pattern of the traces you leave behind and where they lead others.
The first time Gus spoke of this — although it’s not original to him — he apologized for the apparent crypto-Christianity in his analogy before citing the Epistle of James: “Wilt thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead?” Gus then modulated the assertion of James: “By his tracks a man is justified.” This view is considerably less deterministic than Master Tristram’s and requires an effort greater than simply listening for cosmic directions. It is, Gus maintained, laying down tracks that puts the travail — the meaning — into travel. (An early American spelling of traveler was travailleur.) Indeed, tracks are one reason some people believe a pilgrimage — following in the steps of another — to be the highest expression of travel. We are all, Gus would say, whether we realize it or not, forever in the traces of others.
With pilgrimages and planetary Parcheesi in mind, able reader, here we go into the Southwest via the Quapaw Ghost Light, with an excursive run into Galatia, Kansas, circa 1920, and another into 1901 Joplin, Missouri, but only after I give you the third sentence some Almighty just gave me, apparently that Mightiness wanting you to have it at this point rather than at the top of this chapter:
The size of America challenges the plans of travelers as much as their comprehension, and for scribes of the road, it’s useful to answer to an organizing principle before setting out in search of edification, although simply going forth blindly is in itself an organizing principle, a common one that often translates into a wide-ranging circulation or occasionally into only a small rotation through a region. I’ve used both in my days on the two-lanes, even writing about the results a few times, but for these roads to quoz now in your hands, I want something looser, more serendipitous, more open to vagaries, more embracing the vagrant because that’s the way life works.
An ideal approach might be to go aloft in a balloon, a craft dependent on capricious winds for direction, and at some unappointed moment be pitched out of the basket to parachute into whatever territory lay below and, unbuckling, say, “Well, look where the hell I’ve landed this time.” Could we as newborns speak, many of us just might utter that very sentence with our first breath.
Given the impracticalities of such a course, I’ve resorted to selecting some hithers and thithers and striking out for them, the connecting roads (since I’ve already traveled many of them) of only intermittent relevance, usually the relevance coming simply from happenstance. It is the customary lack of significant happenstance along the way in rail travel, it seems to me, that’s the biggest drawback to it, especially with the limited coach trackage in America, where one knows exactly the route beforehand and even the posted hours of arrival and departure. (As for commercial airlines, I won’t deign to speak of them as travel, since they provide nothing more than movement: the passenger-victim, like a bit of eaten potato, is hapless in being moved from the point of entry to the place of exit.)
I don’t want percipient readers to feel the locales here are put before you willy-nilly, higgledy-piggledy, helter-skelter. I have no wish to set down a scrambled ramble, no matter that life on this planet often seems unarranged just so. I’m after an open structure rather than a metaphoric one. Why didn’t I tell you this sooner? Because in open structures, as in open travels, logic is something we come to discover once we set forth and only thereafter gainfully lay upon them, form reflecting content. (Anyone who plans out his life day by day on January 1 and works diligently to follow it till New Year’s Eve will not likely take to this approach. So, free-souled camerado, we’ll leave those suffering chaps to board Flight Double-Aught-Naught to Humdrumania.)
With that, I’ve set myself up to have to answer for my table of contents, with its orderly compass bearings. Let the
m not mislead you because, other than serving as simple directions to head off in, they’ve been added only after accomplishing the experiences behind them. Keep in mind a publishing writer must face an editor who exists to administer to your comprehension.
When I’m writing about America, I often summon up a mental map of the forty-eight states to help me shape my thinking. The map has many variations; one of them, the simplest, is the Quadruplets (there’s that seventeenth letter again) which rather neatly comprise the contiguous United States and the four central sections of this book. Four great rivers — the Potomac, the Ohio, and a short stretch each of the Mississippi and Missouri — laterally divide the eastern half of the country; if you attach that natural division to the more arbitrarily determined one of the northern borders of Kansas, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and California, you then have a three-thousand-mile, coast-to-coast dividing latitude. (If you prefer, shift that line a few miles southward to the thirty-eighth parallel, roughly marked out by U.S. Highway 50, and you have an even simpler division.) Now, take the western boundaries of five states — Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana — virtually the ninety-seventh meridian, and you have another useful line, this one border-to-border, clearly indicated on almost every map of the country. You can see the pattern in your head and always have it handy, even in your dreams.
Cross those two lines and — Shazam! — you have quadruplets of roughly similar area, provided we treat Texas and California as the lone stars they often wish to be. As I write these sentences, the center of American population is remarkably close to that intersection, lying this particular afternoon somewhere (depending on how many people moved into Phoenix yesterday morning) in the weeds along U.S. 50 in Missouri. When I was born, the center of population — that migratory mathematical spot recapitulating Euro-American historical movements as if it were itself a westering pioneer — was off in an Indiana cornfield. (As for Indians, depending on how rigidly you define them, their population center too has westered since the coming of whites, but their shift, of course, is one not of territorial expansion but of contraction.)
Also near that intersection are the places where I was born and where I grew up and from whence all these journeys for quoz have begun. My view now of my life as a board game played on this grand, quadrated map is that some Almighty Something placed me virtually at that crux of the Quadruplets to make sure I belonged no more to one region than to all of them; I see that placement as perhaps a celestial — or certainly a terrestrial — utterance: “Your move, sonny.”
Of my many answering moves over the years in this planetary Parcheesi, the earliest was my youthful goal to spend a month in each of the forty-eight states — four years of days and nights spread around each state. From it I hoped to come away with an idea of America and a knowledge of the best places for return visits. It’s taken longer to achieve than I imagined at age ten, and some states have gotten considerably more than their original share of tomcat prowlings and sleeps. A few years ago I raised the goal, despite lacking a month of nighttimes in Delaware. (An errant traveler has to work to keep from slipping out of the little First State; getting careless and driving on to the next town will readily put you somewhere else.)
Let me emphasize that this particular quadrate-topographic organization that you see in the table of contents has no more value to a journey than a file folder to its papers, a tin to its crackers. It’s a mere receptacle for stories — after serving as scarcely other than a gossamer suggestion of where a few might be found.
Now, at last, here comes that promised first sentence, ordinary though it is, in its proper location (as it turns out) in chapter 2.
2
That Batch from Down Behind Otis
QKNEW OF THE QUADRUPLETS and planetary Parcheesi long before we set out, so they weren’t in our road conversation as we headed for the Quapaw Ghost Light. What was there was an old, decaying, overturned outhouse — a donnicker, a privy, a classic wooden Chic Sale, as they were called in the 1930s — along Missouri Route 123 just south of Humansville (which Q thought a more accurate name than, say, most of the Springfields, virtually all of them no longer evincing a spring in a field; on learning the town was not named for the resident species but for its founder, James Human, she said, “Happy for those folks his surname wasn’t Mudd”).
Missouri has eight-thousand miles of federal and state highways, and I have been over all of them — most several times, several many times, and a few more than a thousand times (the reaper’s going to catch up with me before I can travel all the paved county-roads whose distance equals the planetary circumference). Across the years, that familiarity has turned certain objects along the routes into waymarks to direct my course or my attention. Like snapshots in an album, they visually bespeak moments in my life. To lose a photo is to lose a material connection, a mnemonic of what’s gone before. It’s hard to resist humanizing such waymarks into an old friend who says, “You remember me?”
On several recent trips, I’d watched that particular outhouse lean ever farther to the south until, when Q and I passed, it had gone to ground; it was end-of-an-era prostrate, at last ready to feed worms and centipedes. After a certain age, a fellow can find it difficult to keep from seeing in such change a forecast of his own days. When I said something along those lines to Q, she, comparable youth she is, said, “You see your life as an outhouse?” Well, not until now.
And that’s when I remembered Galatia, Kansas, circa 1920. (They pronounce it Gah-LAY-shah.) An uncle by marriage told me this story once so I could record it, and again later on the road to New Orleans where I took him at age seventy-six to fulfill his long wish of seeing Mardi Gras. For three days we walked the French Quarter, he holding to my arm nearly the entire time. The version I gave Q along Route 123 on the way to the Ghost Light, unlike the one coming up, was necessarily less detailed and more in my voice than in my uncle’s, he whom I’ll call Julian to save the living possible embarrassment and me from charges of invasion of privacy.
Galatia sits astride the ninety-ninth meridian, the one next to the longitude where any westbound traveler, no matter how numb or purblind, sees the American West unequivocally begin. From corner to corner, if you draw a big X across a map of the great rectangle of Kansas, then hop in an auto and, at the posted speed, drive westward from the center of that X for thirty minutes, you’ll be in Galatia, only eighty miles south of the geographic center of the forty-eight. For people who aren’t Kansans, and even for many who are, Galatia lies squarely in the heart of the Kansas of popular imagination: a landscape somewhat flat, rather arid, naturally treeless except along creek bottoms. In truth, it’s not entirely devoid of a rise or two (which out there can pass for hills), nor is it without moisture or trees. You can see all of those elements in Barton County — but not necessarily at the same time.
Because there was, to use the terminology of the era in question, a picture-show of sorts in Galatia, Saturday night-double-features could lure off the farms residents from miles around, sometimes almost as many as lived in the opolis itself. Julian’s parents were immigrants from the Volga Republic, Lutherans who probably carried some long-ago suppressed Jewish ancestry. They were a clan of braininess surpassing brawniness, not always an asset among boys, especially boys on the Great Plains where a perceived excess of intelligence (reading something other than Bible verses or letters on a can of beans) could turn daily life — like making it home from school without getting thumped — into a challenge. It mattered little that Julian’s speech was perfect Ike-Eisenhower Kansas: still, he understood the German spoken at the kitchen table, carried a German surname, and had to answer for World War I of which he knew almost nothing.
Within a few years, the family moved to Kansas City to run a theater on the Kansas side of town, and there they prospered. (Incidentally, it was through my uncle I met Gus Kubitzki, also a theater man.) Julian was a smallish, dark-eyed boy, one who would rather, said my father, make you chuckle with him than cuss at
him and, failing that, negotiate differences with his feet. (Here’s another story trying to overleap itself.)
At certain seasons of the year, when the almost unrelenting labor on a wheat farm could be briefly ignored, the beefy sons of those wheatmen liked to come rolling into town about sunset, ostensibly for a movie but in truth coming not for Tom Mix but to mix it up with the Galatia boys of commensurate age. Their unespoused goal — beyond the testosteronically driven gratification of fisticuffs — was to give to girls of both town and country evidence of the physical superiority of the back-of-beyond boys, commonly referred to as — no matter where they lived — “that batch from down behind Otis.” It’s unusual in America to find triple-linked prepositions carrying such social stigma, but the Teutonic community had learned its English pretty well by then.
Although this was the Kansas of Carry Nation Country and also the years of the Eighteenth Amendment, cheap malt beverage was often an ingredient raising and changing things as yeast does dough. Those encounters usually became unsanctioned athletic events offering track or pugilistics: in the words of Uncle Julian, “Run for your fuckin life, hurdle a fence, and jump for cover.” Or, make a stand with your fists up.
Such embarrassments, while never lethal, could prove to have regrettable longevity. Take Otto “Mudhead” Maschmeyer who lost his race to cover and got put to use as a human mop to swab up a miry spot in the middle of unpaved Steinert Street. Even after he became a locally successful something or the other, he was still Mudhead. The name stuck, and even his later move all the way down to Wichita couldn’t entirely wash it away. Those renamings were a kind of prevenient vengeance the slower-witted worked on males who one day might hold their mortgages or judge them in court or assess the value of their tractors.
Enough. Here’s the story from my uncle: