July 12, 2006: Kansas & Missouri

Alibene, Kansas, was the first of the "cow towns" at the northern end of the Chisholm Trail, where Texas cattle were traded and shipped east on the train. It's also the boyhood home of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the man who occupied the White House when I was born (he was actually born in Texas). His family residence, presidential museum and library, and "place of meditation" (an interesting euphemism for "grave") are incorporated into a large park here.

I should mention that, besides the Interstate Highway System, the Eisenhower Administration also started the People to People Student Ambassador Program, which is celebrating its fiftieth year. Thirty years ago, I participated in this program at the age of 18 (I'll let you do the math). My month-long tour of Europe included homestays in Holland and Austria. We're still good friends of the Dutch family with whom I stayed.

Abilene is a quiet town of tree-shaded streets and lovingly-preserved homes, but perhaps it's too quiet. The elderly gentlemen staffing the town's visitor center lamented how hard it has been to, as the popular songs goes, "keep 'em down on the farm." More and more young people have moved away to the big city, and the population has steadily declined. Before we left the visitor center, we sampled some sugar cookies baked using Mamie Eisenhower's recipe.

We checked out of the Diamond Motel, gassed up for $2.79 a gallon, and got back on the Dwight D. Eisenhower Freeway, the first stretch of interstate ever opened. It became a turnpike between Topeka and Kansas City, with a toll of just $2. We started seeing signs for Stuckey’s, a sure sign that we're in the Midwest.

Kansas City was exasperatingly humid ('Tain't the heat...), but Ben's neighborhood in Prarie Village, a southern suburb of KC, is green and leafy. We took Ben to lunch and talked to him about his politically-conscious hip-hop group, Proletariat Revolution, with whom he was planning to record this afternoon. His nom de guerre is StylEthic. We also conversed about the quirkiness of living in a city bisected by a state line. He and his mom Shelly live on the Kansas side, a few blocks from the road that marks the line. The road is called - can you guess? - State Line.

We spent the balance of the afternoon at home with Shelly, an artist and art teacher who is soon to be changing jobs from a Catholic to a public school, where the facilities aren't nearly as good but the salary and benefits are much better. Yes, teachers need to eat, too. We talked about a wide variety of things: family and kids, the embarrassment of living in a state where fundamentalist Christians constantly attempt to inject their religion into public education and government, and the fact that the massive old trees in her neighborhood tend to shed branches and cut off power to residents during winter ice storms.

I would have liked to stick around KC for some barbecue and jazz, but Debbie's a vegetarian and I had miles to go before I slept. We bought a few cups of lemonade from the girls across the street, gratefuly accepted the dinner that Shelly very kindly packed for us, and set off for St. Louis. We passed through Swope Park on the way out of town, a big green space with a zoo and pond and paths in the woods - not always the safest place, according to Shelly.

Now that we were in Missouri (which a lot of people here pronounce "Missoura"), Debbie popped an appropriate book on tape into the player: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Danny fell asleep soon after it started, and Tommy picked up Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (he's simultaneously reading Travel Light, a fantasy by Naomi Mitchison), so Debbie wondered whether Twain was beyond them at their ages. I said I thought there wasn't anything in the book they couldn't understand perfectly well, but that it was a wry, rambling, character-based story lacking the action and plot twists they so enjoy; it's very Southern in this regard.

Huck Finn is a delightfully naïve narrator who reveals so much about the American character, despite being well over 100 years old, for so many Americans are naïve - about religion, finance, law, politics, art, literature, and many other things - and yet wise, too, in a clever, creative, plainspoken way that often defies analysis.

Having been a schoolteacher, and having taught this novel, I'm intimately familiar with Huck's skepticism about the value of education and his suspicion toward the well-educated and their worldliness. A student once actually asked me, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" To which I replied, "I'm a damn sight richer than I would be if I weren't so smart." (As the bumpersticker puts it, "If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.")

So was Twain ridiculing the uneducated? Yes and no. He was an extremely well-educated and well-traveled man who suffered neither fools nor their foolishness gladly, yet he appreciated and had affection for the homespun qualities and innate goodness of middle America.

We gave thought to spending the night in Hannibal, Twain's hometown, but that would have taken us 75 miles out of the way. Instead, we checked in at the Quality Inn in another historic town, St. Charles, Missouri, just outside of St. Louis. More about St. Charles and St. Louis tomorrow.