I walk the breeze of the late Missouri morning as grasshoppers coax out the last drops of summer’s embrace and offer up their final tales – buzzing and clicking like dry grasses rubbing against each other in a hot wind.
In fact, I am looking at one now. He has placed himself upon the lower step, on the edge of the crumbling concrete, and is waiting for me to continue. Unlike the others, no wind stirs his antenna. No sound comes from his wings. At all times, he is ready to jump.
I know how he feels.
I left my crying mother this morning (Always good for the guilt. Try it sometime) and drove into the West. All it took was one leap, one clenching of will and spirit and then the release of surrender. It was the hardest thing I have ever done. I am still not sure it was the right thing to do. It was just the only thing to do.
With my mother’s face retreating in the rearview mirror, I launched my unwieldy barge of a car along the suburban streets of my hometown and then turned onto the highway, getting worried glances from neighbors and slow-moving Ohioans out mowing their yards in mid-September – and with very good reason.
Atop this traveling circus rests my car-top carrier, a “Water Resistant” (this will come back to haunt me later) canvas bag that is strapped, taped, bungied, and tied to the slippery roof of my vehicle. It contains, quite ironically, everything I could have left behind. The car is so weighed down that I am carving a Tempo-sized ditch with every mile I drive.
Why is it there? Obviously it’s there to give me something new to worry about. It’s heft produces a noticeable, unbalancing waddle to my drive as my car bumps and shakes along the open road, looking like something out of an old Popeye cartoon.
With my new friend in tow, I left Ohio and drove to Missouri through endless fields of corn. That’s pretty much all that stands between Columbus and Kansas City, loads of corn fields and prairies with St. Louis oddly placed in the path. The color of the day was yellow. It was like looking at the world through a big pair of Blue Blockers. Yellow road. Yellow corn. Yellow sky. That ill-fated canvass bag also became smeared in yellow (sorry), with two thousand insects plastered across its front, each one struck down suddenly by a cataclysmic event that will be whispered about in bug mythology to come.
I traveled 70 West through Ohio, Indiana and Illinois before stopping at Cahokia Mounds in Cahokia, Illinois, just across from St. Louis. Cahokia is world renowned as being the largest mound complex north of Mexico with the tallest and widest single mound in all of the United States. To walk the trails is to step back to the early 13th century when the area was the chief urban core for the Mississippian Native Americans and served as the central hub in a trade route that stretched up and down the entire length of the Mississippi river itself.
It is breathtaking.
Amidst the lush green carpeting of the mounds, under the feather caress of butterflies that kept landing with their blessings upon my shoulder, I meditated on leaving Columbus behind me, and throwing myself into the arms of fate, of the big unknown.
When I opened my eyes, a middle-aged man was standing next to me, the only human besides me who was stupid enough to fight the swamplike heat of a late Illinois summer. He asked what I was doing and I told him the whole story. He smiled and told me that he had grown up in Spokane, Washington and had spent a great deal of time in Seattle as a child.
He then said to me, simply, “Keep going.”
And so I did. After a brief stop at the Mississippian’s sun circle called Woodhenge, a wooden version of Stonehenge used by early Mississippian Native Americans to mark out the seasons – I found myself in beautiful Kansas City with old friends. After a night of jazz, laughter and fine Guinness, here I am in the morning glow with nothing ahead of me but the unknown.
As I look around now, I notice that my grasshopper has grown tired of my ramblings and jumped away. It’s only too soon when I will again be clenched and ready for flight. For now, Kansas City calls for me to explore it and friendships yearn to be restoked. I think I’ll stay here for a few days and soak up the reality of my departure and come to terms with just what future might lie ahead of me
After all, where else do I really have to be?
(Special thanks to the Bob and Tom show on 102.9, Ohio’s WING for much laughter at a moment where there had only been tears before)
(Note: Missouri is odd in the fact that it has lettered routes instead of numbered routes. You could, for instance, choose between U and VV while traveling, D or FF, or you could just settle on Q. (I hear Q is quite nice). Missouri, therefore, becomes the only place I know of where you can actually travel from A to B.)
Route: 70W straight from Columbus, Ohio to Kansas City, Missouri.