Postcards: Impressions from Life on the Road

Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas

Once upon a time, there were white squirrels in Olney. White squirrels with pink eyes. There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, and they were everywhere, just like the ubiquitous gray ones we see in our own parks and back yards, and not too far from Olney. But, there in Olney, though you may search both hither and yon for hours, about the only white squirrels you will see are those pictured on the sides of municipal park trucks, or on the sleeve patches of the constabulary. There is also a street called "White Squirrel Lane". I drove along the Lane for a mile or so with nary a glimpse of any kind of squirrel, let alone one with pink eyes. Finally, I stopped and asked a native.

"What'taya wanna see them for?" he asked.

"They're interesting creatures, I think. And we don't have any where I come from."

"Huh... Well we ain't got 'em here, neither. Not no more."

He (and the white squirrel) leaves our story here.

***

Missouri has the most exhortations to follow Jesus that I can remember ever seeing anywhere else. Also, hundreds of billboards with messages personally endorsed by God. And crosses, everywhere. To be properly God fearing and trusting in the Lord seems also to require at least one high-powered rifle and lots of ammo in Missouri. Ammo stores abound. As do the other billboards advertising the latest cures for despair and cheerful deterrents to suicide.

As it was too hot to sleep in the van, I stayed at a motel. In the morning, as I was packing up, a lady came through the parking lot handing out pamphlets. She put one into my outstretched, waiting hand. The cartoon image of Jesus was a little silly (Jesus himself would probably have thought so, too) but the message was something about making the world a better place, so I took what was offered and said, "Thank you. Let me share something with you, along the same lines." I pointed to my bumper sticker and its quote from C.G. Jung:

"The best antidote to the menace of the times lies in the 

cultivation of a more comprehensive consciousness."

The lady had been friendly enough, with a cheery smile, so it seemed possible we might have a moment of conversation. Instead, she scowled and grabbed the proffered pamphlet out of my hand before hurrying away with a muttered, "Have a nice day!"

***

Kansas had fewer gun shops and crosses, but many more grain elevators. Actually, I like grain silos and elevators. Their altogether inventive and practical architecture is a wonder of functional design. There was even a time when I might have enjoyed working in a grain elevator as much as I would have enjoyed being a movie projectionist or flying a zeppelin. But when you are driving along mile after mile of unceasingly flat countryside, and the next town (like the last) is mostly boarded up cafes and gift shops, the sense of déjà vu provoked by yet another grain elevator on the outskirts of another ghost(ly) town is eerily dreamlike and hypnotic. Taking a self-guided tour of one such town, with a wide avenue of cobblestones over which a lone 4x4 rattled along flying the Stars and Stripes, I saw that even the local Senior Recreation Center was closed. A sign read, "No more bingo." Had the last of the senior citizens passed into the celestial realms? I tried to imagine living here. Even living in a grain elevator, even before bingo was no more. Easier to imagine dying, going off to war in anyplace but here.

***

Glad to cross the Kansas border I headed westward in search of Colorado's mountains. While I could see them indicated on the pages of my Rand McNally atlas, I was still a long way from them in real time and space. I had first to pass through the urban desolation of places like Pueblo and Denver, lost for hours in labyrinths of suburban streets, industrial parks, shopping malls and broad avenues of down and out young people who wandered in a drug-induced trance, begging for food, for money, for a way out. And all around these impoverished scenes of dystopian life rose the glittering corporate palaces, the financial institutions offering "Everything you could ever want, and more. More!" The illusions of prosperity. I thought of the one billboard I had seen in Missouri that asked the essential question: "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"

Stuck in mid-week-mid-morning traffic and driving the incomprehensible loops and circles of  Great and Greater Denver I finally stopped and refused to go any further until a knowledgeable guidance, divine or mundane, could direct me to the mountain route. Even my GPS Lady was lost. I called 911 and told the lady that I was an elderly man with a dog, far from my homeland, with an unreasonable aversion to Interstate highways, which I call "The Devil's Racecourse", and that I needed her expert navigational help. I actually said all that. She asked me where I was. I replied that I had no idea. As it happened, her shift had just ended. Nonetheless, this Lady of Perpetual Help stayed on the phone with me and became as my personal navigator, guiding me street by street and turn by turn until I could just make out what appeared to be distant mountains through the haze of exhaust fumes. I was free again.

***

Driving along less traveled roads through the mountains of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming is like visiting another planet. Except in the photographs of Ansel Adams, or the landscape paintings of Thomas Cole, for example, I cannot recall ever seeing such extraordinary scenic vistas. Spaciousness gives way to spaciousness, amid ever changing combinations of light and shadow on rock and plain. And in such an environment of vast spaces, thought too, takes wing like a bird released from caged confinement. 

I said I had never seen anything like this, yet there is something like an ancestral memory, like the Alpine vistas of the Harz Mountains and the Schwarzwald... a vision or memory from the collective unconscious. I think it is so. 

O Tannenbaum, O Tannenbaum,

wie treu sind deine Blätter!

***

Today I am in Idaho, somewhere still among the mountains, the pine forests, the cold mountain air. The place is called Swan Valley. As yet, I have seen no swans. But I may see one. Perhaps, one day, the Swan of Kala-Hamsa. Who knows? In any case, there are ravens here, and they are calling me out into the day.