a reflection on my lifelong relationship
with the state of Missouri.
Although I was born and raised in Indiana and never lived in Missouri except for a recent three-and-a-half-year interval, I’ve had a connection with Missouri that’s endured for most of my life. My mother was born and raised there, in Saline County, near Marshall. She and my dad moved to Indiana when they were married in 1930. My dad was originally from southwestern Indiana, but moved to Missouri as a young man, where he worked as a hired farmhand. When he and Mom were married, they moved to Gary, Indiana, where Dad worked for United States Steel. Although they lived in Indiana for thirty years, Mom always spoke of Missouri as “home,” and I think Dad called it “home,” too. We traveled to Missouri every year on my dad’s vacation to visit my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and other relatives and friends. “Going home” is what Mom called it. I probably made that trip for the first time when I was about six months old. The rhythm of tires on pavement got into my system at an early age, and traveling has been my favorite activity ever since.
During my childhood, the trip to Missouri was the high point of every year. I loved the traveling itself more than anything, and the main highlight was the big rivers—the Illinois, Mississippi, and Missouri—and the bridges across them. I also loved the visits with relatives at my grandparents’ farm, which became my uncles’ farm after my grandparents retired and moved to a house closer to Marshall. I was fascinated by the farm machinery (which seems odd in retrospect, since I went on to become a mechanical moron). I loved riding to town on errands with my Uncle Lawrence, and was elated any time there was a chance for a longer trip—to the stockyards in Kansas City, for example. I enjoyed walks in the hills and woods at the back of the farm, having been taken there by my Great Aunt Mary, who lived with my grandparents at the time, or tagging along after my grandfather. There was almost always a special day with my dad, traveling to Arrow Rock and Boonville to stop and chat with old friends of his. If I was truly fortunate, we'd make a little trip to the Ozarks or go for a drive to see the latest flood damage in areas closer to the Missouri River.
I was a shy kid and a loner. There were other kids around my age in our neighborhood, and we had good times together, but, for me, it was always nice to get away. I recall that I had a fictitious friend with a funny name, which I no longer remember. But I do recall realizing—at a time when I still remembered the name—that it was probably a child’s confused or imaginative rendering of “Missouri.” In my play world, I would go to visit that friend, and I now believe that those make-believe visits were the equivalent of escaping to Missouri. Sometimes, when the neighbor kids and I had quarrels, my dad would say, “Forget about it. In a few weeks, we’ll go to Missouri, and you won’t have to worry about them.”
As I grew older, I began to want more than the annual trips to Missouri. I wanted to travel longer distances to places we hadn’t seen. When I was ten years old and we were at my grandparents' house, my mom woke me early one morning. A trip to the Ozarks had been planned, but sometime after I went to bed a decision had been made to extend the trip to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. I was in heaven. Over the next few years, my grandfather seemed to have decided that he needed to see more of the country before he got too old. He provided the car, my dad drove, and the five of us—my grandparents, my parents, and I—traveled to the Black Hills and Rocky Mountain National Park when I was twelve and to Colorado Springs when I was thirteen. When I was sixteen, Mom and Dad and two cousins and I made a trip to the Smokies. But, more often, I was frustrated. I owned a View Master and collected pictures of the national parks and other scenic attractions, and I wanted badly to go see them. Dad usually said, “We can’t afford it,” and I suppose that was true, although it seemed to me that we afforded other things that we couldn’t afford.
After Dad retired, he and Mom moved back to Missouri. “Back home.” They sold my grandparents’ house, which Mom inherited, and bought a house in Sweet Springs, a small town southwest of Marshall, not far from the farm of Mom’s sister and her husband. By that time, I was in graduate school at Indiana University and married to Betty, my first wife. For me, Missouri had grown less interesting. I loved Mom and Dad and enjoyed visiting them, but I also wanted to travel elsewhere. Time spent visiting Mom and Dad was time not available to see other parts of the country. I had made a trip to New York City with three college friends when I was an undergraduate. Betty and I spent a summer in New York City and traveled through New England for a few days. On another occasion, we visited Florida with a mutual friend. After Betty ended our marriage, I decided to console myself with a trip to the West Coast, and a friend joined me for that one. A few months later, I met Laurie. The first thing she and I talked about was traveling, and we’ve been going ever since. We made countless weekend trips from Ithaca and chose a different destination for every summer’s month-long vacation. Québec. Colorado. Kentucky. Florida. Michigan. Texas. New Mexico. California. The Southern Appalachians. Nevada. New England. Oregon and Washington. Hawaii. Alaska. Newfoundland. Wyoming.
Throughout all those years, from college to retirement, we—Betty and I, Laurie and I, or I alone—visited Mom and Dad—and Mom alone after Dad died in 1968. The visits were almost always good, but Missouri was not where I wanted to be. Just recently—in May of a recent year—I was walking a trail at Knob Noster State Park. I looked down from an earthen dam into a summery woods that was completely ordinary, and a realization swept into my mind that I was looking at a synopsis of all those disappointing years in Missouri. In my mind’s eye were countless occasions where I yearned desperately for something of unusual interest, but there was nothing to see but cropland and ordinary oak-hickory woods. No canyons. No deserts. No mountains. No unusual rock formations. No waterfalls. No wildflowers except ones I had seen many times before.
In fairness, I have to say it wasn’t all disappointing. In April of 1989, Laurie and I visited Mom, and it must have been the first time I had ever been in Missouri in April. In any case, it was like a place I had never seen before. Woodlands and pastures were exquisitely green with the freshness of spring, and wildflowers were plentiful. Moreover, they weren’t the familiar flowers of summer fields and roadsides. In addition to spring beauties, Dutchman’s breeches, and other blossoms we knew in New York, there were flowers we had never seen before, such as blue-eyed Marys, and others, like blue phlox, that we had never seen in such abundance. Prairies were blue and red with birdfoot violets and Indian paintbrushes. In subsequent years, Missouri’s prairies became a focus of increasing fascination. They had a distinct flora, different from the old familiar field and roadside flowers, and every year the flowers bloomed in continually evolving waves, so that we found something different on each visit. Paintbrush Prairie, about forty miles from Mom’s, became a favorite place, needing to be checked out on each visit to Missouri.
What we were seeing, I believe, was the result of work by the state government and nonprofit organizations to acquire and restore native prairies. Around the same time, Missouri’s state park system seemed inspired with the goal of restoring and protecting natural features such as prairies, glades, and wetlands. Parks that used to be relatively ho-hum combinations of woods and artificial lakes became places to go and see something special. There were savannahs at Knob Noster State Park, river bottom wetlands at Van Meter, and glades at Graham Cave. Visitor centers appeared to interpret the Indian mounds at Van Meter and the karst landscape at Ha Ha Tonka. One day at Arrow Rock, Mom and I discovered a new museum at the state historic site. I became enthralled by the exhibits. They took a region that I had known since I was a baby, and whose history I had learned only in random bits and pieces, and connected the story of that region with larger themes in American history. Lewis and Clark and other explorers of the American West had passed through there. The Santa Fe Trail began there. Pioneers on their way to Oregon and California set off from there. The Civil War was fought there.
In spite of this, the rest of the country continued to beckon. Rather than visit Mom in Missouri, I wanted her to visit us. Laurie and I preferred to use our vacation time to travel elsewhere. Even when Mom and the two of us were together, we looked for chances to go somewhere else. When Mom visited in New York, we went to the Adirondacks, Niagara Falls, or the mountains of Pennsylvania. When we were in Missouri, we made trips to Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge or the Ozarks. We relished Mom’s visits during sabbatical years in New Mexico, Oregon, and Arizona, so the three of us could see new country together.
Into her eighties, Mom was a willing traveler and hiker. But time eventually took its toll, and she quit hiking with us and lost her interest in traveling. When she was ninety, we spent a year in Asheville, North Carolina, and she declined to come and visit even though I knew she would have loved the wildflowers and scenery in that part of the country. After I retired and Laurie and I took to the road full-time, visits with Mom in Sweet Springs grew increasingly ambiguous. For several years, she still liked to go for rides, provided we didn’t stay overnight. That meant that trips had to be shorter, so it was harder to see something new. At the same time, the walks that we could do together grew shorter and ended completely. Although I loved Mom and wanted to be with her, I felt increasingly trapped in the car or in her house. I couldn’t go for a walk without leaving her at home or having her wait in the car, and neither option made much sense since the main point of each visit was to be with her. Being retired, I had the potential advantage of being able to visit Missouri in a variety of different seasons, but my experience of the state became more and more confined to views through the windshield or through the windows of Mom’s house.
All of this was further aggravated by Mom’s disintegrating memory. I loved her, and, heaven knows, she loved me. How could I not visit and spend time with her? But she wasn’t very happy, and the pleasure of our visits was dimmed by the impression that she wasn’t enjoying much of anything. I think her failing memory bothered her the most, but she also couldn’t see very well, couldn't hear very well, was unsteady on her feet, and complained about a bitter taste. Even when it seemed obvious that she enjoyed something—brightly colored maples on a street in a nearby town or a flock of nearly twenty egrets that flew up from a swamp near Sweet Springs—she wouldn’t remember it five minutes later. Each visit ended on the same melancholy note. “I’ll see you again,” I’d say before driving away in my rental car, thankful to be back on the road but feeling terrible for feeling that way.
By 2003, it was clear that Laurie and I needed to quit our full-time traveling and settle down for a while in Missouri. For one thing, we needed to see Mom more often, and thirty short visits each year would be better than three long ones. We also needed to be available to back up my aunt—Mom’s younger sister—who lived a mile away and was the first line of defense in case of emergencies. We chose Columbia for our new home. As a middle-sized university town, it promised to be a sufficiently interesting place to live. And, being an hour’s drive from Sweet Springs, it seemed close enough that we could visit Mom frequently and get there reasonably fast if something serious came up. We moved into an apartment in Columbia in January 2004.
During our three and a half years in Columbia, my relationship with Missouri made another evolution. Laurie and I loved Columbia. We had a comfortable apartment in a very quiet apartment complex. Best of all, an access trail led to a spur of the Katy Trail on which we could walk beside a creek and through woods to downtown Columbia in one direction and out to fields, woods, and wetlands in the other. The University of Missouri provided a library, art and anthropology museums, a handsome campus, and classical music concerts. There were restaurants, coffeehouses, and brewpubs. There was an old-time music community (a great love of ours) that rivaled Asheville, North Carolina. The countryside around Columbia was hilly and lovely; the Missouri River was only a few miles away; and a rich variety of wild places was available for walking. Rock Bridge State Park was a few miles south of town—with woods, creeks, caves, and sinkholes. The Three Creeks Conservation Area was more remote and less visited. Pinnacles Park contained a remarkable rock wall, pierced by windows, with creeks on both sides. The main stem of the Katy Trail followed a former railroad grade for two hundred miles across the state, with many miles of it bounded by the Missouri River on one side and big limestone cliffs on the other.
Farther afield, Laurie and I made trips to various corners of the state. Springtime was woodland wildflower time, and each spring was as good as that surprising April in 1989. Then came the prairies with their successive waves of flowers from birdfoot violets and Indian paintbrushes through spiderworts and penstemons, coneflowers and coreopsis, sunflowers and gentians. We sought and found prairie fringed orchids, purple fringeless orchids, Fremont’s leatherflowers, and other rare wildflowers. We listened to old-time music at festivals in Hillsboro and Boonville. We learned about the state’s fascinating history: the French fur traders, Lewis and Clark, the exploration and settlement of the West, the nineteenth-century immigrants from Germany who included my ancestors, the Civil War which tore the state apart, the artists George Caleb Bingham and Thomas Hart Benton, Scott Joplin and the origin of ragtime music. We visited art and history museums in Saint Louis and Kansas City. We traveled roads with light traffic and paid the lowest prices in the country for gasoline. Saint Louis Cardinals games were on TV every day. (Although I grew up in Chicago Cubs territory, I inherited the Cardinals from my dad. I swear it's genetic.) We also marveled at the friendliness of people, especially in Sweet Springs. The town's old brick buildings were collapsing, but its residents were so kind and generous and friendly that they nearly brought tears to our eyes. Nowhere that we lived—not even in Ithaca, where we spent thirty years—did so many people know us by name. Missouri's summers were hot and humid, and Christian virtue was a little too aggressive, but both of us were surprised at how thoroughly we enjoyed Missouri.
All in all, however, those three and a half years were the epitome of mixed emotions. At the same time that Missouri was surprising us with pleasure and interest, Mom’s condition and situation grew worse. She was, as Laurie and I acknowledged to one another, an accident waiting to happen. She loved her house in Sweet Springs and wanted more than anything to stay there. It was clear to us that she’d be better off in an assisted living facility. Laurie’s mom had moved to one, and we wished that my mom would do the same, but she was adamant. Laurie and I soon conceded that moving her against her will might be worse than letting her stay at home and accepting the risk. Mom complained about homemaker aides that we hired, saying she didn’t need their help, even though it was clear to us that she hadn’t been eating well. She failed to hear the telephone ring, putting my aunt in a panic when she’d call to see if Mom was okay. She’d forget to take her medicine (or forget that she had taken it). And she failed to smell gas on a day when a man delivering Meals on Wheels found the house filled with the odor of it.
Our own visits with Mom were never very satisfying. She always wanted to see us, but often failed to remember that we had been there. She complained about her knees, eyes, and tongue, but visits to doctors never resolved any of the problems. Her faulty memory made it difficult to follow up on any medical advice or prescriptions. It was clear that she liked to see us, but awfully hard to see that she enjoyed anything while we were there. From a selfish perspective, our visits were never very satisfying. We couldn’t not go there, but we never drove back to Columbia with a feeling that either we or Mom had had a good time. It was much more enjoyable to go for a walk at Rock Bridge or Three Creeks, but Mom and the impossibility of making things better for her were never far from our minds. I felt like the character in L’il Abner who always had a black cloud over his head.
On the morning of December 18, 2005, the phone rang, and I could soon tell from Laurie’s voice that something was wrong. It was Officer Taber from the Sweet Springs police. Mom was in the hospital. She had fallen. We made a faster trip than usual to Sweet Springs. A couple from church bringing communion to Mom had found her. She was unconscious and evidently had been lying on her living room floor all night. Worse, she had set the thermostat at fifty-five degrees. It wasn’t clear that she would survive, but she did. Her hip was broken. She was moved to a hospital in Columbia for surgery, and again it wasn’t clear if she’d survive, but she did. Here was a woman who, for ten years or more, had wondered why she was alive and prayed to the Good Lord to take her. To be brutally honest, neither Laurie nor I was certain it was good news when her doctor told us the surgery went well.
Months earlier, we had already checked out nursing homes in Columbia—“just in case”—and Mom was moved to our #1 choice when she left the hospital. This had long been Mom’s nightmare, and it soon became ours as well. Her confusion grew worse. At various times, she thought the nursing home was a school, a restaurant, or a railroad station. She hated the place and wanted to go home. She was in pain, though it wasn’t always clear whether the pain was physical or mental. She recited the Lord’s Prayer a million times. She yelled and cried out at night, keeping people awake, and called repeatedly for me even though Laurie was consistently more helpful. She prayed to the Lord to take her (and at least once, according to the nurses, prayed to me). Completely out of character, she became angry with other residents and shoved tables and chairs at them. Always, she wanted to go home, although we noticed that the meaning of “home” gradually changed. It was her house, it was Sweet Springs, and, more and more, it was heaven.
At least one of us visited every day. Some days were not bad. Some were terrible. Always she wanted me. It was like visiting her when she was still at home, only worse. Our visits never seemed to make anything better. She always loved us, and she remembered who we were (although she called me her husband once and her brother another time). On February 6, 2006, we celebrated her one-hundredth birthday, and, after a bad start, she had a pretty good time. A month later, she quit eating and refused to take her medicine. When a week-long flu outbreak hit the nursing home, visiting was discouraged. We stayed away, and, when we returned, Mom had declined significantly. Laurie couldn’t stand the thought that she was in pain and wasn’t taking medication. We got Hospice involved (something that we should have done earlier). They gave her morphine, and the morphine appeared to allow her to relax, and that in turn allowed her to let go.
The nursing home called on the morning of March 14, but Mom died before we got there. She was in bed, on her back, eyes closed. Peace at last. We sat beside her—touched her shoulder, her arm, her hands—Laurie kissed her head and talked to her. Tears welled up in my eyes. I sat in a chair beside Mom’s bed. Numb. Letting the tears run down my checks. “She’s been gone a long time,” I thought, and said it aloud. Until now, other emotions had been mixed in: worry, anger, frustration, uncertainty. Now all of those feelings were gone, and sadness flooded into the void. Not sadness that she was gone. That was okay for all of us, and most especially for her. It was simply that now there was nothing else to complicate the sorrow. Chickadees and finches came to a bird feeder that Laurie and I had put up outside the window. “They’ve come for Mom,” Laurie said. “But they didn’t do their job,” I replied. “They were supposed to have brought her some happiness.” Laurie made the necessary phone calls to relatives. Each time I heard her say, “She’s gone,” tears welled up again. When Laurie left the room for a while, I sat alone, my mind drifting to images from random parts of the past. Going for rides. My favorite meal of chicken and noodles, which Mom used to make every time I visited. Walks in East Gary, where we lived until I was three. The house in Portage. Mom and Dad’s pride at my high school and college graduations. Mom visiting me every day for six weeks in a hospital in Indianapolis where I recovered from a car accident when I was 22. Mom and Laurie and I traveling together. When Laurie returned to the room and asked what I wanted to do, I didn’t know. She was already thinking about funeral arrangements and about removing Mom’s things from the room. Her way of coping.
In our minds, our move to Columbia had been open-ended. We knew we wanted either to go back on the road or to live somewhere in the West. Neither of us liked to think we’d live in Missouri for more than a few years, but it was certain that we wouldn’t leave as long as Mom was still alive. Now that she was gone, our situation had changed again. We decided to stay another year. For one thing, there was a good deal of unpleasant work yet to do. I inherited Mom’s house, and we needed to move things out of it and sell it. We needed to settle with Medicaid, which claimed compensation from the sale of the house. We needed to replace our eleven-year-old camper van with a new one. And we needed to figure out what to do in the next phase of our lives. Should we go back to traveling full-time or choose a new home base? And, if the latter, where? In addition, we had belongings stored in Trumansburg, New York, and Mesa, Arizona, which required some decisions.
The selling of Mom’s house was a mixed affair. In some ways, it was made easier, because we had earlier learned of “friends of friends” who needed a temporary place to live. We allowed them to move into Mom’s house, and they decided they wanted to buy it. So far, so good. But the appraisal came in much lower than expected, and, even then, finalization of the sale dragged on for an inordinately long time. Moreover, Medicaid took half the proceeds. As to the question of whether to travel full-time or choose a home base, we weighed a large number of possibilities and changed our minds frequently. In the end, we decided to settle in a place with abundant traveling opportunities around it. Our choice was Grand Junction, Colorado. We also agreed to take a three-month trip to Alabama and New York in the spring. In Alabama, we’d finish a several-times-delayed project of finding and photographing all of the North American trilliums. In New York, we’d visit friends and get our belongings in Trumansburg ready for the move to Colorado.
In the meantime, dogged by these and other chores, we resumed our explorations of Missouri. Even while Mom was in the nursing home, Missouri had helped. We enjoyed music at Columbia’s First Night celebration on New Year’s Eve and took a long walk around Little Dixie Lake on a warm January day. But now we were free once again to leave home for more than a day or two at a time, no longer needing to come back to see Mom. In addition to walks in the parks around Columbia, we traveled twice to the Ozarks in spring wildflower time. We made two prairie trips to southwest Missouri to find the rare Mead’s milkweed and other wildflowers. I traveled to the Ozarks south of Saint Louis to find and photograph American columbos in bloom. We enjoyed another Big Muddy Folk Festival in Boonville, continued to take walks in the parks around Columbia, and found comfort in the warmth of friends and relatives.
But the new freedom was compromised. For one thing, Mom was still on our minds: not so much a sadness that she had died, but sadness that her last years had been so unhappy. There was also the inability to forget the unpleasant things we still needed to do: the house, Medicaid, the new van, the logistics of moving to Colorado. And beneath it all was the way Mom’s death reminded us of our own mortality. We were the next generation. I found myself perturbed by Laurie’s comment one day that I was wasting my talent. She was talking about to my failure to get my photos and written work in forms that other people could see or read. It surprised me the way her words haunted me, and I’m sure it was because of my suddenly heightened sense of mortality. I noticed, too, that Laurie was longing more than ever to return to her earlier vocation of weaving. In the meantime, other matters were annoyingly more pressing. I slumped on the couch one day, and Laurie wanted to know what was wrong. “Everything is second rate,” I said. “Life is second rate.” Laurie said she felt the same way. For her, chronic physical ailments were another part of the problem.
In September, we traveled to Winfield, Kansas, for the Walnut Valley Music Festival and continued from there to Grand Junction to make sure it looked like the right place to settle. Back in Missouri, in October, we encountered one of the most beautiful autumns we could remember. We walked at Gans Creek, and the colors were superb. At Eagle Bluffs, I found Indian mounds that I hadn’t known about. On a trip to the Ozarks, we enjoyed fall-color hikes at Clifty Hollow, the Kaintuck Natural Tunnel, Montauk Springs, Slabtown, and the Piney River Narrows. An all-day hike to a natural tunnel at Bennett Springs State Park was especially enjoyable. On our way home, we passed sensational color along the Katy Trail near Jefferson City and returned there the next day for another hike. A woods of beautiful trees in the Hart Creek Conservation Area was solid orange along a trail we had never walked before. Day after day, beautiful weather and gorgeous colors persisted. We walked at Bear Creek, the Davisdale Conservation Area, the Katy Trail, and through a section of the Three Creeks Conservation Area that we hadn’t seen before.
A strange thing was happening. My ties to Missouri had become looser than ever. Relatives whom I loved still lived there, but I no longer had parents for whom Missouri was home. At the same time, however, while my ties to the state were loosening, I found myself liking Missouri better than ever. I felt halfway guilty for thinking of leaving. Day after day, the glorious fall went on and on. “What more do I have to do to get you to stay?” the state seemed to saying. The Cardinals even won the World Series. “That settles it,” I said to Laurie when Adam Wainwright struck out Brandon Inge for the final out. “We’re staying in Missouri!” I was kidding, of course, but the mixed feelings were real.
The succeeding winter was a brutal one of snow and prolonged cold. Between March and May, we took our planned trip to Alabama and New York. Three weeks later, we moved to Grand Junction. Our last few weeks in Missouri were so filled with packing, and with deadlines for meeting movers picking up our belongings in Columbia and meeting them again three days later in Grand Junction, that there was no time for emotion. No happiness. No sadness. No sentimentality or nostalgia. The last serious emotion that I felt was at the Mississippi River bridge in Louisiana, Missouri, on our way back to Columbia from New York. The bridge was the same one that Mom and Dad and I had crossed frequently all those years ago on trips between Indiana and Missouri. Laurie and I drove up to Riverview Park, and I photographed the bridge, partly because I feared that it might soon be replaced by a new one. It suddenly seemed awfully long ago that I had traveled those roads with Mom and Dad. Mom had been a living link to those old times, and, now that she was gone, they seemed vastly more ancient. It felt as if I was looking back along a trail to distant places where I had been, and there was now another yawning canyon between here and there.
PHOTO: Sunset near Sweet Springs, MO 4/89
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