Long Way Home (16 page)

Wherever the soldier landed, he couldn't predict how he'd be received. The American G.I. wasn't universally respected as a defender of the common good anymore. When I was a boy, most fathers on our block had served during World War II and took pride in their commitment, even loaning medals to their sons for our interminable war games. The nature of the sacrifice was crystal clear, but those days are gone forever—gone since Vietnam, if not earlier.

The just cause is frequently compromised now, and our recent wars have not always been fought on the high moral ground. For the skinny soldier, the army was a business decision and a gamble. If he lasted through his tour without incident, he'd return home with a marketable skill—as an information technology specialist, in this case—but there was no guarantee he'd return at all.

HIGHWAY 54 RUNS
southwest from Jeff City to the Lake of the Ozarks, an hour's drive or so. On summer weekends, the highway is a parking lot, but I had a free ride through Brazito, Hickory Hill, and Rocky Mount, an appealing stretch of country marred only by a gruesome Church of Christ billboard. It pictured a hand, presumably belonging to Jesus, impaled on an iron spike beneath the legend “Body Piercing Has Been Around For 2,000 Years.”

The billboard had me jabbering to myself all the way to Osage Beach, a resort with 110 premium outlet stores, 5 other malls, and 50 antiques shops, enough mercantile overkill to prevent me from leaving the car. Lake of the Ozarks spells recreation with a capital “R,” and the numbers keep coming at you—92 miles long, 1,150 acres of shoreline, 17 championship golf courses, untold multitudes of largemouth bass, and 77,000 hotel and motel rooms.

Bagnell Dam, a hydro facility, impounded the Osage River in 1931 to form the lake, once known as Benton Lake, after Thomas Hart. You need a boat to properly explore it, and it was far too cold to swim or sunbathe, so I figured I'd be better off in Jeff City for another night and reversed course on Route 5 through Sunrise Beach and Gravois Mills.

At Versailles, another Ver-sales, I turned onto Route C, quieter and more picturesque. High Point and Russellville were Old Order Amish settlements. If any farm can be described as spotless, theirs deserved to be.

Horses and buggies began to pass by. In the first rode a buoyant teen couple, the lad in a new straw hat and his girlfriend in gingham; a grumpy mother wrestled with two unruly children in the second; and in the third, a sour-looking elder frowned and flicked his switch. I felt as if I'd just sat through a History Channel documentary on the Ages of Man.

Early in the morning, I left for Kansas and beyond, but California, Missouri, west of Jeff City, caught me up short and demanded an inspection. Legend has it that California Wilson bribed the town's officials to name it after him in 1846 with two gallons of whiskey. The famed bandit Cole Younger once delivered a lecture called “Why Crime Does Not Pay” at the Finke Opera House after his release from prison. Lately Hispanics have arrived to take jobs in manufacturing and sometimes indulge in games of eight ball at Charlie's Pool Hall, where the following are forbidden:

NO DRUGS

NO ALCOHOL

NO DRUNKS

NO WAR

Tipton, Otterville, Smithtown, and then Sedalia, elevation 909 feet. I'd embarked on the long, slow ascent of the Great Plains, a gentle grade of five hundred miles or so climbing toward the Rockies. Scott Joplin, born in Texas, landed in Sedalia in 1894 and stayed for six or seven years, playing piano at the bordellos of Lottie Wright and Nellie Hall, and also at the Maple Leaf Club and the Black 400, hangouts for classy African Americans.

The clubs enraged the black clergy. They were “a loafing place for many of our girls and boys, where they drink, play cards, dance, and, we have been informed, carry on other immoral practices too disgraceful to mention,” the clergy charged in a letter, begging the town fathers to take some action—unlikely, really, when there were fifteen whorehouses on the main drag.

Joplin studied music at George R. Smith College, boarding with families. He composed “Maple Leaf Rag” in 1899, and cut a deal with John Stark, a local publisher of sheet music. For every copy sold, he earned a one-cent royalty, and when “Maple Leaf Rag” became a big hit, he moved to St. Louis with his new bride, Belle.

George Graham Vest practiced law in Sedalia for a while. A skillful orator, Vest was a Confederate congressman and later a U.S. senator. He displayed his verbal talent most brilliantly when representing the owner of Old Drum, a fox hound shot for trespassing on a sheep ranch in 1870. The owner wanted to be compensated for his loss, and Vest insisted he merited it.

“If I don't win the case, I'll apologize to every dog in Missouri,” he swore.

In his closing argument, Vest didn't bother to rebut any testimony or argue over the facts. Instead he waxed poetical about the special bond between man and dog.

“The one unselfish friend that a man can have in this selfish world, the one that never deserts him and the one that never proves ungrateful or treacherous is his dog,” he rhapsodized. A dog guards against dangers, fights against enemies, and mourns his master's passing with “his head between his paws, faithful and true even to death.”

Vest was spared an apology. He won the case and fifty dollars for the owner, and gave birth, via his speech, to the phrase “man's best friend.” A statue of Old Drum stands in front of the Johnson County courthouse, with Vest's immortal words inscribed on a stone below it.

T
HE GRANDEST BUILDING
in Ottawa, Kansas, the seat of Franklin County, is also a courthouse, this one designed by George P. Washburn in 1891. It's another example of the Romanesque Revival style so popular at the time, with semicircular arches and an epic solidarity that suggests the heft of justice itself. A statue called
Buffalo Woman
, probably an Ottawa Indian, stands outside, while the Dietrich log cabin, a relic of the frontier, has been preserved in a nearby park.

My motel clerk, another Patel, guaranteed me a restful night. They rolled up the streets at about nine o'clock, he warned, so I went looking for somewhere to have dinner right away. Sad to say, I'd given up on the illusion that every small town has a mom-and-pop café serving terrific homemade food. Instead of wasting hours on a fruitless search, I made a few exploratory passes and resigned myself to Applebee's Neighborhood Grill—generally the least offensive franchise, to damn it with faint praise.

On the food front, America had taken me prisoner. I wished I could mount a rebellion, but I seemed to be a lone dissenter. Applebee's is a true crowd pleaser. Dine Equity, its parent corporation, owns about thirty-three hundred “casual dining units”—IHOP is its other major brand—and is in the business of treating its loyal customers to the “cravables” that sometimes contribute to their gross obesity.

Applebee's has cornered 95 percent of the world's supply of fatty riblets, for instance, a signature dish basted in various sauces. Its deep-fried mozzarella sticks are a calorific classic, and so, too, is the Three Cheese Chicken Penne—mozzarella, provolone, and Parmesan melted over some chicken and bruschetta, then doused with a creamy Alfredo sauce.

IHOP works the sugary angle. For breakfast, there's Rooty Tooty Fresh 'N Fruity, which consists of eggs, bacon, pork sausages, and two buttermilk pancakes with cool strawberry and whipped topping. For dessert you can indulge in Crispy Banana Caramel Cheesecake quick-fried in a flaky pastry tortilla and crowned with caramel, cinnamon, and more bananas and whipped topping.

“We can't seem to make things sweet enough,” a Dine Equity PR man once told the
New York Times
, as if his clientele consisted exclusively of children.

The motel clerk's prediction came true. I enjoyed a restful sleep and woke refreshed. Ottawa looked peppier by day and not so desolate. It had gained a sense of purpose. I did some banking, bought a new notebook, and experienced everywhere the fabled politeness and decency of Kansans. A teenage gas station attendant managed to call me “sir” three times in two minutes.

There was so much space in town nobody jostled for elbow room. The space brought a kind of relief. It created a stillness that encouraged a decorous reticence. Folks were reluctant to disturb it with an unnecessary remark. Their speech had flattened out, too, and the slight southern inflection I still noticed in areas of Missouri was gone.

From Ottawa, I crossed the Marais des Cygnes River on Route 31. It used to flood regularly, cresting as high as forty feet, until the Corps of Engineers stepped in with pumps and levees. Ahead lay Osage City and Council Grove, two Wild West towns frequently invoked in the old cowboy movies. The names conjured up visions of gunfights and saloons with swinging doors, trail drives and a shy but steely lawman who pines for a widow or a schoolmarm.

Osage City was once Indian Territory, the ancestral home of the Osage. “Few [men] are less than six feet in stature,” marveled the great painter of Native Americans George Catlin, “and very many of them six and a half, and others seven feet.” Though the Osage were excellent buffalo hunters, they also grew squash, maize, and other crops. General Custer employed them as scouts because of their military prowess and knowledge of the terrain.

There aren't any saloons in Osage City now. No general store, either, or ladies in calico. Jimmy Stewart didn't edit the
Osage News
, and Lee Marvin hadn't raised a ruckus the night before. The town could have been an AARP retreat, with its many handy services for seniors. Almost no one between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four lived there anymore. The young fled at the earliest opportunity unless they were tied to a farm or a job.

Religion and prayer figured prominently in the life of Osage City. The Methodists, Presbyterians, and Catholics had substantial, smartly landscaped churches within a one-block radius. It was a quiet, pleasant place, yet it seemed to be fading away, although so unhurriedly and by such tiny increments only an outsider might notice.

Kansas is among the slowest-growing states, in fact, a victim of the exodus that occurs when machines replace men in the fields. It's also riddled with ghost towns, more than six thousand by some estimates. All that space, though a comfort in one sense, has a tendency to undermine any marginal attempt to inhabit it. You'd need the raw grit of a pioneer to survive in such minuscule satellites of Osage City as Vassar or Admire.

I switched to Highway 56 and climbed a gentle rise past enormous cattle ranches. The sky was broad and blue and flocked with pillowy clouds, a harbinger of the West. Rather than a courthouse, the landmark in Council Grove was the Farmers and Drovers Bank. Along yet another Main Street were some old brick buildings and the Ritz Theater, where the marquee declared “Coming Soon.” Exactly what might be coming was left to the imagination.

In 1825, the Osage forged a pact with some pioneers at the “council” of Council Grove, agreeing to let them travel through their territory unharmed. The grove itself referred to a copse where the wagons gathered to martial forces, outfit themselves, and do some repairs before they tackled the rest of the Santa Fe Trail, still a dangerous journey, since no other Indians had offered them safe passage.

A path on the Neosho River has signs and plaques that recount the tale, of course. I walked it at a brisk clip and overtook a man and his golden retriever on their evening promenade. The dog was a beauty and so friendly I knelt to pet it, thinking maybe I'd been foolish not to bring along Beanie even if I had to change his clothes twice a day. A fellow could use some company on the prairie.

“Where's a good place to eat around here?” I asked the man, hoping to outfox the franchises for once.

“Depends on what you're in the market for,” he replied reasonably.

“Something that wasn't packaged in Wichita.”

“There's Mexican. They're local people. Or the Saddlerock Café.”

“Where would you go?”

“The Hays House, I 'spose, if I wanted the whole hog.”

“That's what I want. The whole hog.”

You couldn't miss the Hays House, once the general store of Seth Hays, Council Grove's founder, who was Daniel Boone's great-grandson and a cousin of Kit Carson. Hays first built a log cabin to trade with the pioneers and the Kaw, or Kanza, Indians, close relatives of the Osage for whom the state was named. In 1857 he upgraded to the clapboard building that's now the oldest continuously operating restaurant west of the Mississippi.

At Hays House you can order spicy chili by the cup or bowl. The soup and bread are made from scratch on the premises. Nobody mumbles into a headset, as the floor managers do at Applebee's. On weekends, the restaurant opens at six in the morning to accommodate the ranchers and farmers. The beef is purebred black Angus, but I chose Beaulah's Ham marinated in wine and fruit juice, a steal at $11.95.

America was on the comeback trail.

STRONG CITY, SOUTH
of Council Grove, is rodeo country, host to bronc busters, calf ropers, buckle bunnies, and some fifteen thousand fans every June. Otherwise it sleeps through the year. It was taking a nap when I passed by, but I spotted a wonderful mural at the fairgrounds and stopped for a closer look.

The mural featured Technicolor portraits of three beaming cowboys and a sunny cowgirl with daisies in her hair. Rodeo stars, I figured, although one cowboy had a touch of Hollywood glitter. Maybe movie stars, then, of the lesser variety that only video store employees steeped in esoteric film lore can identify.

I got so involved in conjecture and snapping photos I didn't hear the pickup until it braked to a halt five feet away. The rancher at the wheel smiled at me, an elbow poking out a window. He wore a short-sleeved shirt, had a left forearm as dark as mahogany, and tipped back his Stetson in greeting.

“You're a long way from home, New York.”

“Don't I know it.”

“Any idea who you're taking pictures of?”

I pointed to the cowgirl. “That's not Dale Evans, is it?” A stab in the dark, but she could be a Kansan for all I knew.

The rancher roared. “Roy Rogers' wife? Nah, that's Margie Roberts. She was a champion bronc rider.”

“And this guy?”

“Her brother Ken. He rode bulls. Next is Gerald, another brother. All-around cowboy champion a couple of times.”

“The older man?”

“E. C. Roberts, their daddy. He started the rodeo here.”

“Nice hat,” I said, nodding toward E. C.'s, and I meant it.

“You ought to get yourself one.”

“I'm more the ballcap kinda guy.”

“Don't be so sure.” With a wave, the rancher was off to Cottonwood Falls, or maybe Antelope or Bazaar.

Strong City is in the Flint Hills, a residue of limestone, shale, and chert, or flint, left behind when an inland sea that once covered much of Kansas receded. The hills are tough on the plow and not very hospitable to any growing thing except the tallgrasses of the prairie. When the Colorado cattleman Stephen F. Jones rode through the area in 1878, he saw miles of lush bluestem pasture so rich in nutrients that a foraging steer could put on two pounds in a single day.

Jones set about buying up property, first 160 acres along Fox Creek and later a larger parcel from the railroad. Eventually he owned 7,000 acres and enclosed them with 30 miles of 5-foot-high fence, a backbreaking job on account of the rocks. The fence posts were often sunk in chunks of limestone instead of hammered into the ground.

Jones named his spread Spring Hill Farm and Stock Ranch after the many streams that sluiced it, but he was far from finished. In 1880, he undertook construction of a three-story limestone mansion in the Second Empire style, a home for his wife, Louisa, and their five children, one of whom—the unlucky Samuel—died from the bite of a rabid skunk.

On his land, Jones ran Hereford, Polled Angus, Galloway, and Durham cattle. He added a three-story limestone barn to store hay, grain, and equipment, and also shelter his stock. By 1885 he kept two hundred pigs, thirty horses, eight milk cows, and four mules. He built a scratch shed for his chickens and let them range freely in bad weather—it made them more fertile—and a three-holer outhouse, two for adults and one for a child, all of limestone.

As you approach Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, Jones's mansion is the first thing you see. It still stands where it's always been, on a hill with a view over the valley. The image it presents is romantic, yet disconcerting. Laura Ingalls Wilder comes to mind, as do Willa Cather and John Ford.

The mansion may pose as a bucolic homestead, but it also suggests a fortress and maybe a prison. Probably the Jones family experienced both extremes. They lasted only nine and a half years at Spring Hill.

There's no admission fee at the preserve. You can explore it at your leisure. All the original outbuildings have survived—limestone doesn't crumble readily to time's injunctions. A nature trail winds by the barn and an icehouse, then ascends through some shade trees to an overlook at the edge of the prairie. Once the grasses blanketed 140 million acres of North America and supported the great bison herds that the Osage, Kaw, and others hunted, but only 4 percent of the prairie remains, another diminution.

Cattle still graze at the preserve from May through July. The bluestem, Indiangrass, and switchgrass reach a height of five or six feet, and they sway and quiver and dance—a living, breathing entity. Like the desert, the prairie demands close attention. It doesn't yield its secrets easily. I waited fifteen minutes before a meadowlark decided to show itself.

From the overlook, the trail descends and crosses Fox Creek to a two-acre plot, where Jones built a limestone schoolhouse. His schoolmarm would have been a paragon of virtue. She'd have to avoid men, of course—some contracts explicitly forbade marriage. A teachers' magazine of 1915 advised schoomarms to wear at least two petticoats in the classroom, and resist the temptation to dye their hair. Under no circumstances should they be caught loitering near an ice-cream parlor, where unspoken dangers lurked.

AFTER THE GLORIES
of the prairie and the fine meal at Hays House, I began to feel in command again. If my luck held, I could eat anywhere with alacrity, or so I thought until Florence, Kansas, taught me otherwise. There was no alacrity to be found in Florence.

Along the city's fringes, wheat grew and cattle roamed. At the junction of U.S. 50 and Highway 77 stood an old stone tower erected in 1887 and inscribed with the legend “99.96% Pure Spring Water.” The water comes from a well dug on the east side of the Cottonwood River, and a pump, once steam-powered, delivers it to the tower, still in use today.

Florence claims the tower as its landmark, but I'd nominate the monumental flag downtown. It's painted across the entire side of a building, the work of a feverish artist who's seen fit to embellish Old Glory. From a ragged hole in the Stars and Stripes, a fierce-looking eagle bursts forth, ready to kick some ass. You wonder what sort of imaginary threat prompted the belligerent stance. With seven hundred or so residents, Florence scarcely qualifies as a strategic target for our enemies.

The eagle scared me a little. So did the ramshackle Out Post bar, thankfully closed at the moment, but the Chuck Wagon appeared innocent enough. Every farmer and rancher in Marion County had squeezed inside for lunch, it seemed. The room rocked with chatter and suffocated under clouds of cigarette smoke. I froze in the doorway—the old deer-in-the-headlights number.