I walk the breeze of the morning as tardy crickets offer up their fleeting stories. The onset of a Missouri sun, relentless but coy, has not quenched their desire to sing. The night can not contain their finest harpings.
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. No wind stirs his antenna. No sound comes from his wings. And yet, at all times, he is ready to jump.
I know how he feels.
This morning I left my crying mother (Always good for the guilt. Try it sometime). All it took was one jump, 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.
I drove from Columbus through 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 colour of the day was yellow. It was like looking at the world through a big pair of Blue Blockers. After the first few hours, it started to lose its novelty and just became another corn field (or occasionally wheat), that spread out on either side of me.
The car is so weighed down that I am steadily carving a Tempo-sized ditch with every mile I drive. Atop this traveling barge is my car-top carrier, a “Water Resistant” (this will come back to haunt me later) canvas bag that is strapped, taped, bungied, tied to the slippery roof of my vehicle. It contains, quite honestly, everything I could have left behind. Why is it there? To provide a nice waddle to my drive, as my car bumps and shakes along mountain roads, looking like something out of the old Popeye cartoons. There is no other reason I can find to take such a thing with me other than to have something to actually worry about.
Right now, that canvass bag has two thousand insects plastered across its front, struck down innocently by a cataclysmic event that will be whispered about in bug mythology to come.
I traveled 70 West from Columbus, OH through Ohio, Indiana and Illinois before stopping at Cahokia Indian 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 center for the “Mississippian” Indians 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 mounds and the ever-present grasshoppers, under the caress of butterflies that kept landing with their blessings upon my shoulder, I meditated and placed my first spiritual anchor point, leaving Columbus behind me, and throwing myself into the arms of fate.
Speaking of fate, when I opened my eyes, a man was standing next to me, the only human besides me who was fighting the swamplike heat of a Missouri summer to walk the complex. He asked what I was doing and I told him the whole story of where I was going. He smiled and told me that he had grown up in Spokaine, Washington and had spent a great deal of time in Seattle as a child. He then urged me to keep going.
And so I was off to Woodhenge, the Mississippian’s sun circle that was built entirely from wooden posts and was used to mark out the seasons, much in the same way as Stongehenge. Brief visit, really. Nothing much to see as the area is modernized and the circle reconstructed, so it lost much of it’s spiritual and sacred energy for me.
And thus, I find myself in the beautiful city of Kansas City, Missouri1 after a night of jazz, laughter and fine Guinness.
My grasshopper has grown tired of my ramblings and jumped away. It’s only too soon when I will be clenching again at the onset of flight. For now, Kansas City calls for me to explore it and old friendships yearn to be restoked. I think I’ll stay here for a few days and soak up the reality of my departure, test my faith through the firmness of my position and my belief, and come to terms with just what future might lie ahead of me
After all, where else do I really have to be?
All I own is in my car. I have no job or place to live. I have no destination or deadlines. Liberating? You bet. Terrifying? You can’t even imagine it. The journey west for me is sure to be comprised of the duality of peace and panic, faith and fear.
(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)
Route: 70W straight from Columbus, Ohio to Kansas City, Missouri.
- 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. ↩︎