Long Way Home (14 page)

ONCE A BUM
always a bum, Steinbeck wrote, referring to his incurable urge to be someplace else, and I was just as fickle, leaving the highway again for a look at Carlyle Lake, the biggest in Illinois, where I hoped to put my pitiful angling experience in Olney behind me.

A dam on the Kaskaskia River, built to control floods, impounds 26,000 acres of water to form the lake. It holds almost any freshwater fish you can name—bass, pike, sauger, catfish, crappies, the list goes on. Even an ill-equipped angler ought to catch something, or so ran my wishful thinking.

Henkel's Bait & Tackle was stuffed to the gills, as it were, with gear and clothing. As ever, I felt foolish to be soliciting some advice. It's a character flaw in those who fish. Blindly faithful, we throw ourselves on the mercy of clerks at sporting goods stores, believing they're not as crass or venal as ordinary mortals. Instead we view them as higher beings honor-bound to divulge hot tips to absolute strangers.

The clerk at Henkel's seemed honest, but they all do. There's an element of therapy in the transaction. While you formulate your questions, the clerk folds his arms or scratches an ear and mumbles, “Mmm-hmm.” Tackle shops should provide a couch and a box of tissues for their customers, who only crave a kind word and the assurance that they're not as gullible or desperate as they appear to be.

I related the tale of East Fork Lake and my crappy rod, sparing him the neurotic backstory, and when he didn't steer me toward a rack of expensive Fenwicks, I dropped my defenses. The guy was okay. He was on my side.

“They've been doin' real good on the white bass.” He paused for effect. “You got a boat?”

“Nope.”

“It's tough without a boat. Below the dam by the Kaskaskia, you might do all right in there. Ever fished a curly tail?”

He laid some soft plastic grubs on the counter. They came in psychedelic colors like chartreuse and banana yellow, as if the fish had ingested LSD. I bought a bag of curly tails, but I couldn't fathom his convoluted instructions and refused to further debase myself by asking him to repeat them.

No matter. When I pulled into Mariner's Village and saw Carlyle Lake, I gave up on fishing. The lake looked as broad as an inland ocean, and not one angler was casting from shore. I might have been crestfallen, except the evening was so beautiful. A mild, cool, soothing breeze blew in from the water, and sailboats rocked on the ripples at a marina, their bells lightly clanging.

For the first time in days, a sense of calm washed over me. I hadn't realized how tense I'd become, in fact, until the tension began to abate. The lake and the space around it, eleven thousand acres of lushly landscaped park, worked on me like a massage. My motel stood by itself, not pinched in among clones. Instead of traffic noise, I heard the tide lapping at a sandy beach.

I took a long shower, slept as well as I had in a while, and woke to a gray morning. The clouds sat low over the water, clamped to it like a lid. A storm was brewing if you trusted the gulls' mad cries. I'd had so much sunshine and heat I almost welcomed a change.

After breakfast, I walked along the shore, where a few diehards were camped in folding chairs in hopes that a bottom-feeder would bump into their bait by accident. They were destined to be disappointed, but hope in and of itself is never an entirely bad thing.

At a far end of the lake, I came to a station set aside for cleaning fish. Chester Stogner, deep in thought, stood there with a white bass in hand. He'd landed thirty of them the day before and had stowed them in a plastic bucket. The bass were bright and silvery, and weighed just under a pound apiece.

I watched in envy as Chester worked happily away, a one-man assembly line. He picked up a bass, slit its belly, rinsed out the blood and guts at a sink, and placed it on a wooden board, where he cut off the head and tail, stripped the skin, and removed the filets. Fast and skillful, he finished off a bass per minute. If they held tournaments for cleaning fish, he'd be sure to win a trophy.

“You've got the makings of a fish fry there,” I said.

Chester glanced up, startled. It took him a beat to return from wherever he'd been in his head. He had an open, unaffected face, a dimpled chin, and blue eyes behind an oversize pair of specs. His easygoing manner reflected his upbringing in the bayous of Louisiana.

“Uh-uh, no more frying,” he told me. “I've got issues with the cholesterol.”

“How will you cook them?”

“Brush 'em with olive oil, then put 'em on the grill for fifteen minutes.”

He and his wife had just returned from a visit to the Missouri wine country, so they'd split a bottle with their dinner—a sugary wine because Chester has a sweet tooth. They often cross over to drive along Highway 94, the old river road from Augusta to Hermann, and he suggested I try it.

October was a fine time of year for white bass, the angler's last chance before the cold of November put them off the bite. “When it's cold, you can fish all day and never get nothin',” Chester said. “You have to keep an eye out for the duck hunters, too, or else you might get shot.”

A stringy fellow in a bolo tie stopped to kibitz. He'd been fishing from shore for three hours without any luck.

“Nice mess of bass,” he began, much as I'd done.

“Thank you.” Chester kept right at it, never losing his rhythm.

“I didn't have no boat.”

“Gotta have a boat, really.”

“If I
had
a boat, what would I do?”

“What you'd do is bump a Rapala along the bottom in about seven feet of water. Curly tails are good, too.”

“I've got some curly tails you can have,” I said. I fetched them from the car and gave them to the man. It might have been the first gift he'd ever been given by the appreciative way he reacted.

“Well, thank
you
!” he repeated several times before he wandered off.

Chester was down to his last three bass. A military lifer, he planned to retire in Carlyle in a year or two. He'd joined up in the midst of the Vietnam War, and soon fell in love with the woman who ultimately became his wife. His buddies warned him not to get married, because the brass would ship him overseas, but Chester went ahead with the wedding anyhow and, sure enough, they dispatched him to Ben Wah two months later.

“I remember thinkin', ‘Whoa, this ain't good at all!,' ” he laughed.

He served in Cam Ranh Bay and Phuket, too, but he made it home safely, and his subsequent tours of duty abroad were less harrowing and much more fulfilling—three years in Germany, for instance, and a year in the boondocks of Turkey. Soldiers got a raw deal now, he thought, roped into two or even three tours in Iraq or Afghanistan.

“But the army's paying hefty bonuses for some careers,” he added. “ 'Course, they might not be the careers you'd choose for yourself.”

“What'll you do when you retire?”

“Enjoy life. Go fishing.” Both excellent answers.

“Do you feel secure about your future?”

“Oh, my goodness, I don't!” he exclaimed. “It's kinda scary. We need to do something. Will there be anything left for us down the line?”

“Any thoughts on the election?”

Chester started on his last bass. “My lips are sealed. It's between me and the voting booth. You have a kitchen at your motel?”

“Not even a microwave,” I said, recalling Bill Eason's corn.

“That's too bad. I'd like to give you some fish.”

“Another time, maybe.”

“All right, then. Another time.”

I stayed in Carlyle one more night, unable to tear myself away. It was like being retired, really. I understood why Chester had settled on the town, pretty and still built to human scale. I relaxed, read a mystery novel, ate a steak dinner at Schleichers, and let my belt out a notch. In bed by ten o'clock, listening to the lap of the tide, I calculated I'd be in San Francisco to meet Imelda in fewer than three weeks. That was a treat worth hanging on to as I drifted off to sleep.

T
HE HIGHWAY THROUGH
St. Louis terrified me. After all those small, flat country towns, I'd lost my urban edge and struggled to keep up. Drivers whizzed by as I clung to the right lane. Even the city looked intimidating and vaguely threatening, an image borrowed from Ginsberg's
Howl
. The windows were malevolent eyes, the off-ramps led to Hades, and the signs were an exercise in deliberate misdirection.

“A great surf of traffic engulfed me, waves of station wagons, rip tides of roaring trucks …” That was Steinbeck battling to stay afloat in Minnesota.

Ahead, a detour—the last thing I needed. U.S. 50 had been broken apart, shuffled, and rejiggered. Quite soon I developed a strong and unpleasant sensation I'd missed a crucial turn and was on my way to Arkansas, maybe to Cave City or Marmaduke. There are worse fates, I told myself, but that was a lie, at least in the moment.

The massive aggression on the interstate contributed to my misery. I wanted to roll down a window and shout, “What's wrong with you people? Count me out of your death wish!” If you consider the aggression an indicator of relative unhappiness, the folks around St. Louis were very, very unhappy. Perhaps it's the old time-equals-money formula in action. The faster you drive, the more quickly you'll get rich, the speeders must believe.

I recalled a pertinent scene from Henry King's
Jesse James
, released in 1939. After looting a bank, Jesse (Tyrone Power) and his gang flee on horseback with a posse on their tail. It looks like curtains until Jesse grabs some stolen money from a saddlebag and scatters the bills to the wind, causing his pursuers to dismount and pick up the cash. If you threw a wad of dollars on the highway, you might achieve the same result.

Outside Ballwin, to my great relief, I connected with Highway 94, Chester Stogner's river road. It's also known as the Weinstrasse because it traverses the Missouri Rhineland, a swath of vineyards and wineries in the river valley where the soil isn't good for growing much except grapes.

Gottfried Duden's
Report of a Journey to the Western States of North America
(1829), a classic of emigrant literature, is responsible for the region's German flavor. Such tales of the New World were immensely popular in Germany, where more than 150 were published in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Duden, a lawyer by trade, cast the book in the form of friendly letters. He heaped praise on the valley and its pioneers, compared the Missouri favorably to the Rhine, and bought a farm for himself in Dutzow. A large number of his fellow Germans soon joined him, and they began making wine in the traditional style in Hermann in about 1837.

The Italians followed the Germans, and Missouri was producing ten thousand gallons of wine per year by the 1850s. The figure increased to two million gallons in the 1880s, second only to California. Prohibition shut off the juice, and the industry didn't revive until the 1960s. The state has almost ninety wineries now, most oriented toward tourists.

The Weinstrasse starts near Defiance, not far from Daniel Boone's last home. He left his beloved Kentucky in 1800, or so I'd read, after losing his shirt as a land speculator. Apparently, he lacked a killer instinct in business. The Spanish still owned the Missouri territory and appointed Boone the commandant of Femme Osage Creek Valley District. He received a grant of 850 acres, but he lost that, too, when Missouri became a state after the Louisiana Purchase.

Boone built a house next on his son Daniel Morgan's spread in Matson. Almost seventy, he continued to hunt regularly and would do so into his eighties. Though often lauded for his survival skills, he counted himself plain lucky to “have miraculously escaped many perils.”

The perils didn't stop with old age. In 1802, at age sixty-eight, the Osage captured Boone during a spring hunt on the Niangua River; in 1803 he was injured in a trapping accident and hid in a cave for twenty days to escape from the Indians; in 1808 the Osage robbed him; and in 1814, at age eighty, his canoe capsized on the Missouri and drowned his autobiography, written by hand, and all his family papers.

Boone required no autobiography to cement his fame. Long before Walt Disney introduced Fess Parker, still in the coonskin cap he wore while playing Davy Crockett, as TV's Daniel Boone in 1964—tall as a mountain, brave, fearless, and eagle-eyed, with Ed Ames as his sidekick Mingo, the least credible white redskin ever—he'd already ascended into myth due to John Filson's artfully embellished
The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone
(1784).

Filson's was the first of many efforts to capitalize on Boone's celebrity. They ranged from Daniel Bryan's 250-page epic poem
The Mountain Muse
(1813) to Republic Pictures'
Daniel Boone, Trailblazer
starring Lon Chaney Jr. and Faron Young. Lord Byron celebrated Boone, as well, in the eighth canto of
Don Juan
. One stanza goes,

'Tis true he shrank from men even of his nation
When they built up into his darling trees —

He moved some hundred miles off, for a station
Where there were fewer houses and more ease;

The inconvenience of civilization
Is, that you neither can be pleased nor please;

But when he met the individual man,
He showed himself as kind as mortal can

I took Highway F to see Boone's house in St. Charles County, Missouri's wealthiest. The side trip posed several problems. To begin with, the house didn't belong to Boone. It belonged to his son Nathan. He died there, to be fair, but the property did not then include the Hope School House from St. Paul, Missouri, or the Peace Chapel from New Melle, Missouri. They'd been imported in recent years to be part of Boonesfield Village, a little theme park.

The park charged admission. That was another problem. Worse, you had to sit through a video before taking a
guided
tour. Worse still, the guides wore costumes. And worst of all, a fence enclosed Boonesfield Village so completely that you couldn't catch the tiniest glimpse of the house without binoculars—this as a tribute to a heroic frontiersman who capsized on the Missouri at age eighty.

Lord Byron got it right. “The inconvenience of civilization …”

ALONG THE WEINSTRASSE
I drove, with the river to the south and the woods of Osage Ridge to the north. Some farms hugged the bottomland, but the grapes were usually planted high up in the rich loess soil that glaciers deposited aeons ago. The varietals were different from those I knew in California—Catawba and Seyval, for example, rather than Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon.

In my days as a vineyard dweller, I learned a bit about viticulture and the wine business. Most grape growers thought of themselves as farmers, not impresarios, thirty years ago, and their tasting rooms in Sonoma County were often quite humble, just a barn swept clean of cobwebs. Even in the Napa Valley, already more advanced in terms of promoting itself, the accent was on the product and not the package. Some vintners were testy enough to deny boorish customers a taste of anything.

The industry became afflicted with gigantism, though, and turned into a juggernaut. The wineries got bigger, more corporate and elaborate, and devoted to squeezing a profit from every inch of floor space. Things rarely shrink in America. We equate smallness with death and obsolescence. If you have a chance to expand and refuse it, you're considered a fool. Scale is what counts, the larger the better.

So the wineries expanded. The buildings grew to the size of warehouses, and a fleet of architects were unleashed on them. The architects had a fondness for folly. One saw turrets, moats, drawbridges, and funiculars.

Tasting rooms acquired a suburban patina and were stocked with knickknacks for sale—glassware, coffee mugs, T-shirts, aprons, bad primitive paintings, even Hummel figurines. Gimmicks to attract visitors abounded—llamas, exotic gardens, petting zoos.

With only 1,350 acres bearing grapes, Missouri's output is still modest, so I hoped the wineries would convey a rustic charm. Amazingly, every state in the Union has at least one winery at present. The idea of an Alaskan white or a Florida red sounds far-fetched, but they're available. California remains the kingpin, however, and sells 89 percent of the wine in the United States, trailed very distantly by Washington, Oregon, and New York.

The Weinstrasse, amply bedeviled with twists and hairpin turns, could wreak havoc on an incautious taster. As a veteran, I understood the pitfalls of overimbibing and how to avoid them. Swirl the wine in your mouth, then spit it out—that was a good rule of thumb, albeit impossible to follow. Don't feel you must try every wine they're pouring, another hilarious bromide.

The road to Montelle Winery was very steep. It led to a bluff with a painterly view of the Missouri through the trees. The owners had obviously studied the California model, incorporating a gift shop and a restaurant with a deck overlooking the valley. In temperate weather they offered live music on the weekends.

Inside, a jolly crew of tasters had convened around a long, octagonal bar paneled in wood to work their way through the seven or eight wines to be sampled, all crafted from grapes unfamiliar to me—not only Catawba and Seyval but Chardonel, Concord, Chancellor, and St. Vincent. Montelle also makes wine from fruit—strawberry, raspberry, blackberry—and semisweet reds and whites.

I skipped the sugary stuff—too much like soda pop, plus I lacked Chester Stogner's sweet tooth. As awful as it is to admit, if you've been raised on good California wines, it's difficult to settle for less. Against your will, you become a snob. Only Montelle's Cynthiana, a dry, full-bodied red, impressed me.

In spite of Cynthiana's twenty-dollar price tag, it's the first varietal to sell out. The grape, a native American cultivar, also is called Norton, after Dr. D. N. Norton, the Virginian who developed it. A Norton from Missouri won the gold medal for the Best Wine of All Nations at the Vienna World Exposition of 1873. Often billed as the Cabernet of the Ozarks, Cynthiana ages well.

I visited two more wineries, both similar in style to Montelle, and broke for supper in Hermann, still heavily Teutonic. Browsing in Blanche's on East First Street was like a quick trip to Düsseldorf, what with all the cuckoo clocks, nutcrackers in lederhosen, and beer steins for sale. Hermannhoff Winery, housed in an old stone building, had the sort of simplicity I'd been seeking, so I paid twenty dollars for a Cynthiana, unable to resist temptation the second time around.

“THE NEXT PASSAGE
in my journey is a love affair,” John Steinbeck swooned over Montana, but it was Jefferson City, Missouri, that stole my heart. Almost everything about Jeff City, as the locals affectionately call it, satisfied me from the moment I laid eyes on it. Clean and orderly, it gripped you like a firm handshake. You can count on me, it seemed to be saying. Nobody here will do you any harm.

Daniel Morgan Boone laid out Jeff City, population forty thousand or so. In spite of its size, it felt neighborly and wanted to befriend you. The streets were wide and light-filled, and the parks were verdant and beautifully kept. Shoppers and government workers, bustling with energy and purpose, crowded the sidewalks. The citizens were particularly well educated, with fully a third in possession of a college degree.

When I checked into a motel, a mirror ambushed me again. It reflected the unsavory fact that I looked like a drifter. One tends to let the grooming basics slide on the road, but I decided I'd better get a haircut before they picked me up for vagrancy. Kenny's on Madison Street was the first barbershop I saw, with a classic barber pole outside and three chairs inside.

The only barber on duty wore a blue nylon jacket and crisp trousers. His shoes were polished to a high gloss, and some combs stuck out of a pocket. He looked to be seventy for certain and possibly seventy-five, but he stood solidly on his own two feet like Jeff City and gave me a practiced, professional smile to put me at ease, as a doctor might.

“I bet you're Kenny,” I said.

“Well, you'd be wrong. I'm Larry.” He pointed to a wall plaque that read L. L. Horstdaniel. “Larry Horstdaniel.”

“What happened to Kenny?”

“He died a long time ago. I bought him out. I used to have two other barbers, but they died, too.”

Larry ushered me to the first chair, covered me with a smock, and wrapped a paper collar around my neck. If he'd given me a
Police Gazette
or an
Argosy
next, I wouldn't have been surprised. This was a barbershop from my childhood.

“Just a trim?” he inquired.

“That'll do fine. You've been in business a while, I take it.”

“Fifty-five years. I'm eighty years old, and just celebrated my fiftieth wedding anniversary,” he said. “I'm not about to hang it up. I might be in a box like Kenny in six months.”

Larry began to snip very deliberately and carefully, a master barber of the old school. He wouldn't be rushed into a mistake.

“Where are you from, Larry?” I asked.

“Osage County originally.”

“How'd you get into this line of work?”

“Well, that's an interesting story. After high school, I trained to be a mortician. I just thought I'd like it, you know?”

“Sure,” I replied, as if everybody dreamed of a mortuary future.

“Then the Korean War came along, and I was sent over there from 1951 to 1953, and when I came back, I changed over to barber college. The college placed me with Kenny. There were thirty-six barbers downtown, but I'm the only one left.”

“Where do people go for a cut?”

“The strip malls in the suburbs. I'm just a block from the governor's mansion, you know. The governor used to stroll over here, then go for coffee with his cronies.”

“Not anymore?”