Missouri Trip, Part 1 (14 July, 15 July)

My family is from the midwest. Mom, Brother and I used to visit  every summer (Dad less frequently), but I haven't been for a visit in at least 12 years. I want to see my grandma again, see her new home in Missouri, visit with my grandpa and any other family that will make the trip to meet us in the middle of the country.

My flight out of Seattle is at 5:00 am, so I have to get up at 2:30 to get to SeaTac on time. Even so early in the morning, Seattle has traffic on the road. Security hasn't even opened yet, and a group of us queue up in a blobby mob. My gate is all the way at the end of the terminals, and I use the moving walkways some of the time. If I step on, I lurch forward and almost fall, so I take them at a sprint to keep forward momentum. I think I look like my kid when he runs bent over with his arms flying behind him. There's a solitary, anachronistic rocking chair near my gate and I claim it, looking like a cranky granny.

I meet up with Mama in the Denver airport, and I love that we pick each other out of a crowd so immediately. I only had a 50 minute layover, so we go right from gate to gate. On this leg of the journey, the ground is a brown patchwork quilt. When we land in Missiouri and they open the plane door we already can feel the oppressive heat and humidity. I haven't breathed this air for over a decade.

A dad and daughter hold hands across the moving walkways

Field quilt

Grandma (mom's mom) and Grandpa (mom's stepdad) pull up in Gram's red minivan. Gram is beautiful as ever, she doesn't look 80 years old to me. I'll compliment her skin later and she'll laugh and say she used to be an avid sunbather so her skin is better than it has any right to be. Mama always gets told she looks much younger than she is, and it's something I hope I inherit. I can see Granpa's older: he's more lined and more stooped, but the lines are from daily work in the sun and I think the stoop might be an affectation so you don't take him as seriously.

We drive from the Springfield, Missiouri airport to their home in the small town of Carthage, Missouri. Sometimes the frontage road that parallels the freeway is part of the original Route 66, and we'll drive sections several times before I leave. I like weird roadside attractions, so we stop at Ozarkland, billed as both a "general store" and the "famous bargain center." Really it's a collection of bad souvenirs and good fudge. It shares a parking lot with a mish-mash of trash and buildings that claim to be the Cimarron Antique Mall & Native American Museum. A skinny, matted Saint Bernard dog wanders up to me in the parking lot. He must be a stray, or else someone dumped him. He's so sweet, and I start to cry because I can't take him home with us.

Ozarkland

There's outright hostile racism here, but it's the causal racism that seems more shocking to me, somehow

Gram has a rangy Aussie shepherd of her own, Lucky, and an assortment of cats. When they moved in, she started to feed the few feral cats that wandered the perimeters of her property. They spay and neuter as they can, but there are to many that wander up from all over the countryside to keep kittens from happening. Right now, a spiderwebed cat family rules the yard and surrounding forest. Three kittens from one of the first litters they had at the property are here: Silver, the indoor female, and BB, the indoor male. Tippy, named for the white tip on his tail, is otherwise physically indistinguishable from his brother, BB. Well, other than his testicles: he hasn't been neutered. Tippy mated with a shy grey cat with a white blaze on her nose. Now she has two or three daughters who look like her, but black instead of grey. From their markings, I'd say Tippy fathered the two recent litters: one with mama grey and one with her (and presumably his) daughter. Tippy is affectionate, and mama grey wants to trust people, but the other cats and kittens are too skittish and scared to be around people. They watch from the porch, though, and will play with fingers through the glass. They wait for Gram to feed them every night. I don't know why, but I'm deeply interested in the cats the whole time I'm here.  

Welcome

King Tippy

Mama grey, with kittens and Tippy watching

Mama grey's mama daughter and kittens

Lucky, who looks like the Human Faced Dogs that used to live next to Selina

I'm sleeping in the basement bedroom, all antiques and no windows. It's pitch-black when you turn out the overhead light, so Gram bought a nightlight at Ozarkland for me. I don't know who thought up this design, but I know several people had to approve it before it went to production and I'm not sure how that happened.

Sock monkey-turned-nightlight

Friday, we get up and go to a cemetery in a nearby county. The Luthers are here: Grandma's mother's parents. Next to them is their infant daughter, Betty Devon. For being an unusual name, we all wonder why Dee Dee (grandma's mom) and her sister Big-Big never mentioned to any of us they had a sister who shared my name. My middle name is for my dad's sister who died as a toddler. I think a lot about these ghosts who share my name.

We drive around the cemetery, which is ringed by an old stone wall. I hop the wall to pee, and realize too late that I'm surrounded by plastic bags full of animal skeletons. Of the skeletons I see, I think they're cats. They're bleached white and picked clean. I'm already unnerved, and a sound from the woods head of me spooks me. I think it's just a bird breaking cover.

It's easy to cross borders here: we're right by Oklahoma and Kansas both. We drive to Galena, Kansas, to an old house that supposedly used to be a bordello, but is now an antique store. A lot of places' claim to fame around here is a notorious history, or that they're haunted, and Bordello Antiques claims both. Some historians have contested the bordello history. All I know is that they had a Victorian settee, chair, and lounge covered with moss-green velvet and only wanted $350 for the whole set. I wonder if I can justify buying it and then renting a U-Haul to bring it back to Seattle.

Welcome to Galena, Kansas

"Stained glass" window in Bordello Antiques

Boarded up old building across from Bordello Antiques

Juvenile

I think we're in Oklahoma, now, near Quapaw tribal land. We're looking for a chat pile, which I always hear as chad pile, left over from the area's mining operations. They dug lead and other minerals out of the ground here, and the left-over gravel has been dumped in huge mounds. In some places the piles look like southwestern rock formations. The chat can be poisonous, but we rock hound anyway. We're looking for selenite, or maybe what we're finding is the harder calcite. Mom points out fossils she and her brothers used to find called crinoids. I thought they were lily fossils, but apparently crinoids are marine creatures that just resemble lilies. I find a few pieces of calcite and some fossils, and Mama finds a big chunk of rock with a dozen fossils and imprints. A blue and black butterfly is so bright that it looks fake.

Small chat pile, about 3 stories high 

Near the top of the pile

From the top looking down into a field

Rock with crystals and fossils (look for the circles and clam shell imprints)

Rock with calcite structure

Blue and black butterfly

Looking in to Oklahoma

A different chat pile, this time looking like a Southwest rock formation

We drive on to Pitcher, Oklahoma. A great-great grandma and grandpa were known as the 'Mom & Dad of Pitcher": she was one of the first women in town, and together they ran a grocery store. They're listed in the Baxter Springs museum's Pitcher section, and Gram donated a photo of them in their mercantile for the collection. We stop at Pitcher's high school mascot, this old concrete gorilla statue. He's been there a long time, and Gram loves him. We pass boarded up buildings and collapsing houses. A huge tornado came through a few years ago and devastated the area, which accounts for some of the ruin. Assholes account for their fair share, too: an old bank-turned-museum burned to the ground thanks to an arsonist. The chimney and original vault remain, but not much else.

Pitcher, Oklahoma

We check out Baxter Springs' museum. It's a labor of love, these small town museums. Most appear to be run by a coalition of strong-willed housewives, all of them hopped up on Starbucks and civic pride. They're doing great things, preserving their community history as best they can on shoe-string budgets. They might not be following museum best practices (acid-free tissue paper is expensive, climate-control display cases are tens of thousands of dollars), but they're preserving and presenting their artifacts, sharing their stories with anyone who stops to look. My favorite thing in the Baxter Springs Museum is a wall in the basement, made with bricks from local foundries stacked so you can see the makers' marks.

Baxter Springs Museum

Makers' marks

Our family's store was the top one: Luther Grocery

We stop at a roadside produce stand on the way home: a folding table and the bed of a pickup truck. Everything but the peaches are local (meaning the peaches are a county or two over, still local in my book). We get corn and tomatoes and a watermelon.