July 13, 2006: St. Louis & Lexington

St. Charles, Missouri, was the jumping-off point for the Lewis and Clark Expedition. (As I’ve mentioned before, Meriwether Lewis is a relative of mine.) In December of 1803, the men arrived on the Illinois side of the Mississippi, across from St. Louis, where they camped for the winter. The Louisiana Territory was formally transferred from France to the US in a St. Louis ceremony on March 10, 1804. The Corps of Discovery then moved camp to St. Charles and departed on May 21 (my birthday), sailing up the Missouri River. A museum near the campsite contains reconstructions of the three boats they used, among other things.

St. Charles would later become the first capital of the Show Me State. This building in the old town is the one used for the purpose: the capitol was simply the rented second floor of a dry goods store.

The old town is a quaint district of 19th century buildings and 20th century recreations along the river, most of them now shops and restaurants. The main street has a bumpy redbrick surface and is illuminated at night by gas lamps, but it would feel and look far more authentic if it weren't crowded with vehicles. According to shopkeepers I spoke with, when the city tried banning cars from the street, business dropped precipitously.

By the time we got to downtown St. Louis, the combination of heat and humidity was killing. The boys complained vociferously. We parked at the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, a 40-acre park on the Mississippi River, and trudged to its centerpiece, the amazing, 630-foot Gateway Arch. The tallest monument in the United States and, after the Eiffel Tower, the tallest in the world, it stands as a symbol of St. Louis' role in the opening of the West. At 605 feet, Seattle's Space Needle would fit neatly under it.

There are 16 windows on each side of the observation deck at the top.

The view is wonderful:

to the east, the Mississippi and four bridges connecting Missouri to Illinois,

and to the west, the city of St. Louis. The building at front and center is the Old Courthouse, part of the memorial.

But the star of the show is the gleaming stainless-steel arch itself, a work of art from every angle.

It's also an engineering marvel, tapering from 54 feet across at the bottom of each leg to only 17 feet at the apex. Visitors enter below ground and board a unique, ingenious tram system that moves a vehicle through each leg to and from the observation deck. Each of the two vehicles consists of eight very cramped five-passenger cars suspended from a track, ascending and descending at four miles per hour.

The memorial had a long gestation. It was proposed in 1933 and proclaimed by FDR in 1935. From 1939 to 1942, land was cleared, and the design for the monument, by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, was chosen in 1948. Funds were raised, and Saarinen worked on a redesign from 1957 until his death in 1961. Construction finally started in 1963 and was finished in 1965. You can view an animated slideshow of its erection here.

At the base of the structure are theaters, shops, and the Museum of Westward Expansion, a rather dull, static affair of words and pictures, a few stuffed animals and bronze statues, and several stiff animatronic figures of historical note, such as Meriwether Lewis' partner William Clark, who is buried in St. Louis, and the Lakota Chief Red Cloud, whose figure speaks English with remarkable fluency.

Driving east over the Mississippi into Illinois, Debbie and the boys started a game of 20 questions, followed by an ongoing rereading of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, followed by a new computer game with the strangest name I've ever encountered: "Cactus Bruce and the Corporate Monkeys." We soon entered southern Indiana, where we passed the town of Santa Claus. Established in 1846, it features one of the world's first theme parks, opened in 1946. One guess as to its theme.

Approaching Louisville, Kentucky, we entered the Eastern Time Zone and set our clocks ahead one hour. We also ran into the first significant hills in a thousand miles. After we crossed the broad Ohio River into the Bluegrass State, the terrain began undulating in earnest, and I remarked that in a single day we had crossed America's longest river and it's two mightiest tributaries. In addition, we'd driven in four states, the first time we'd been able to do this, owing to the decreasing size of states as we move eastward. This feels strange to Westerners like us, whereas Easterners think nothing of it.

Debbie's sister Meryl welcomed us to Lexington, "Horse Capital of the World," which is about an hour east of Louisville. Meryl has nothing to do with horses, though, being a carpenter and avid kayaker. Her boyfriend Dale shares her passion; he's out of town for the week, kayaking some of the many whitewater rapids on the Ocoee River in Tennessee.

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.