Day 3

The next day, we left from Columbia, Missouri and got through St. Louis, after a stop for Cameron to clean up some cat poop in her car. Then, coming out of the gas station where we had stopped, I took a wrong turn that took us to the Departure drop-off lanes at Lambert Airport.  After getting back on the highway, we were headed for southern Illinois.  I noticed some neat farm compounds, often white and highlighted with red, nestled among the crops and a stand of forest, reminding me of Margaret Fuller’s hope that settlers could live in harmony with nature. But after these glimpses of farm homes, much of the rest of the drive to Kennesaw, Georgia was down freeways lined with trees, preventing a view of the life of the land and its people except for rare breaks in the trees.  While the green lushness was refreshing, it was also monotonous, causing Cameron and me to feel hypnotized by the road. Did we fall asleep at the wheel? We stopped at a roadside rest area near Paducah, Kentucky, and walked around a bit, Lucy got to stretch her legs some.  We crossed the Ohio River to get to Paducah; I was surprised at how wide it is, never having seen it before.  I thought of Eliza running on the ice floes across the Ohio to freedom in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. While that is a dangerous enough feat, I had always imagined a much more manageable width to cross than it was at our easy bridge crossing.

Finally made it Brad’s house in Kennesaw after another 10-12 hour driving day. Exhausted. 

I tried to keep family and friends posted about our trip by posting pictures on Facebook and emailing some pictures to the family.  My brother James replied by reminding me of a book I published, Women, America, and Movement: Narratives of Relocation, with the University of Missouri Press in Columbia, where we had spent the night.  While I was focused on thinking about what my view from the windshield told me about the landscape, about the pieces of America we whizzed through, I should have also thought about the story of women and relocation that Cameron and I were re-enacting.  Moves across the country are part of our families’ stories as my parents and Cameron’s grandparents on both sides, moved to follow new dreams.  That is just what she is doing, has done in her several moves across the country to go to graduate school and then to find a location for her dream, her boutique. It is fitting that this was a mother-daughter journey of relocation, a woman’s story of daring and dreams, and long days on the road. In many ways her dream is also my dream, the chance to really do what you want to do, to really have a chance to follow your dream.

Day 2

The next day, our first full day of driving, took us out of eastern Colorado and through northern Kansas. At first, the landscape looked much like that we had whizzed by the day before; islands or oases of habitation dot the rolling, wide landscape bare of much except grass, crops, and cows.  You could see a town, marked by a circle or line of trees to provide shade or a wind/snow break from the weather, a church whose steeple pointed to the sky, and various grain elevators and cylindrical metal storage tanks, part of the agricultural complex.  I saw the sign to Grinnell University, one of the best private colleges in the US, but from the highway, the city of Grinnell looked no different from the other momentary green spaces on the vast plains. What a town like Grinnell had to offer its students and faculty we could only guess as we sped by at 70 to 75 miles an hour. The other things I noticed were the signs along the road. Lots of signs mark the northern the road through Kansas, as if the advertised attractions could compensate for the seeming monotony of the landscape.  It seems that the Kansas tourist board has made a concerted effort to promote this large, agricultural land as a place for curious travelers to stop and spend a little money in rural Kansas.  It seems that in the mid-region of northern Kansas, the Catholic church has a strong hold, as evidenced by the multiple anti-abortion signs, signs noting the Catholic church in the town ahead, which you could see from the freeway, sometimes a white steeple, German style, or a more solid brick edifice with squared off turrets.  Signs featuring Jesus with his halo/aura in the white robe, right hand extended upward in benediction, the left hand placed upon his heart appeared at regular intervals along the highway as reminders of the religious affiliation of the region.  Alternately, signs for attractions and museums competed for the attention of those who were not racing to Georgia, those who could stop and enjoy the historical and cultural significance of the region. A sampling includes the Old Soddies Museum, the Czeck museum with the largest Czech Egg in the world, the Buffalo Soldiers Museum and Vietnam Vets Museum advertised on the same sign, the Train Orphan Museum, the Kansas Motorcycle Museum, the Kansas Speedway Museum, the Greyhound Museum, and a commemoration of the first chunk of interstate near Dwight Eisenhower’s hometown of Abilene.  Given the number of signs advertising quilts and yarn, we must have been on the Quilting Trail. The quirky yarn and wool signs put me in mind of my friend Rebekah who posts Facebook notices about what she is crocheting.  The freeway was also marked by historical notices from Kit Carson to Eisenhower, Robert Dole, and Harry Truman, three astronauts from Kansas, reminders of the old cowboy days and the cattle trails to Abilene, Kansas.  Lawrence, Kansas touted itself as the birthplace of the civil war, as the place where John Brown’s violent campaign entangled the mid-western states in the issue of slavery.  Of course, you could not go through Kansas without reminders of The Wizard of Oz; on one of the many signs for the Oz Museum a sign for Toto’s Tacoz was appended, a modern update to a classic Kansas story.

Reading the signs along the road not only provides much-needed diversion for the harried traveler, intent on putting in as many miles as possible in a day.  The road signs also give a sense of the state and its idea of itself.  Northern Kansas seemed to say that there is not much naturally of interest for the traveler and so the need for attractions. In contrast, there were few signs for museums in Missouri, with the exception of the promise of a tour of the Missouri State Prison.  As we went further east and into areas adorned with trees and lush vegetation, the need to post notices of attractions seemed to vanish.

After a long day, we rolled in to Columbia, Missouri.  From home, my husband had found a room for us at a pet-friendly motel. When we finally made it to the motel, the night desk clerk told us that we had to pay a pet deposit in cash and then said that they did not allow cats.  Cameron and I were too tired and not in any mood for that kind of nonsense.  He backed off when Cameron gave him twenty dollars in cash to let us bring the cats in.  What a mess! Some teen aged girls who roamed the motel halls, evidently in town for a soccer game reminded us of our past soccer days—athletic girls, the smell of sweat, cheap motels.  Once settled in, and after some chugs of wine, Cameron got some soup and salad for us from a nearby Olive Garden. 

Day 1

This time I am moving Cameron across country from Colorado to Georgia, to Alpharetta where she will re-open her store, Magnolia Moon.  Perhaps, hopefully, a better fit for the Southern market.  I flew from Corpus Christi to Denver, then took the shuttle to Fort Collins.  At Cameron’s we spent the rest of the Friday of Labor Day weekend packing and then most of Saturday getting things in the U-Haul and her car.  Luckily we had some hired hands to load the U-Haul, a thin fellow with a great arm span—he could lift and carry so many things just by himself.  He was late arriving by an hour or so—his partner had to be taken to the hospital because he got some pesticide in his eye.  So, the mover apparently recruited the help of his girlfriend who huffed and sweated profusely as she carried bins and other items down the stairs to him. He would then load and position the stuff into the truck. It always amuses me that the men let the women do a lot of the hauling while they put things in place.  I must give this guy credit, because he crammed and stuffed Cameron’s things, at least most of it, into the 20-foot van.  After he had left, we found the bed frame and the nightstand still upstairs.  Cameron and I tried to find a place for the nightstand, but after all of the pet kennels and cat boxes, there just was not room. So, we left the nightstand and frame, plus a vintage turquoise chair and a pile of junk on the back deck, and finally got on the road. Quite a bit later and a lot more tired than we had planned. We contemplated disassembling the bed frame, but our mutual reaction was, “Fuck it.  Let’s just go.”

At 5:30 we finally left the house.  I am driving the U-Haul, a 20-foot truck.  I am 68 years old, 5 feet, two inches.  Most of the people I told about our adventure were dubious about my driving a big U-Haul, but I have done this before, moving Cameron and some of Brad’s belongs across country on two other occasions. It’s not so bad if you can figure out how to use the mirrors and avoid backing up.  Cameron takes the lead in her car, a black Hyundai Santa Fe with an Auburn University sticker on the back window, loaded with two cats and Lucy, the dog.  Cameron has the route on her GPS, and I just have to follow her.  Out of Fort Collins and on to the freeway going south to Denver and then east on I-70.  Our goal was Limon, pronounced “Lime un” in Colorado, a few hours from the condo and a start on the trek.  It was sad leaving the mountains and I stole glances of them off to the left and then behind me, the layers of ranges highlighted by the rays of the sun as it progressively set behind them. Jagged lines of shadow, with streaks of sun, cloud banks of white, then golden and pink, suggesting the mysterious interior of the Rockies.

Once headed east, the country opened up, reminding me of the hymn to America, golden grains of wheat with purple mountains majesty in the rear.  I don’t know if it was actually wheat, but the great, open land was colored golden yellow, the land gently rolling.  Dotting the gold were the black forms of cattle grazing in the evening.  The scene made me think of those great buffalo herds that must have changed the scene from yellow to black, their great hulks moving across the land.  We passed a sign for a town named Kiowa, which put me in mind of Scott Momaday’s comment about the Kiowa who had so much space, so much sun in which to imagine themselves. I also thought of adventurers like Francis Parkman, who loved the buffalo chase, but could get separated from the rest of his group on the rolling plains without much in the way of landscape markers to orient himself. Melville’s Pip also comes to mind, the boy lost in the great sea and losing his mind in the vastness of the same “nothingness.”

Then as we would come up to a small town, Strasburg for one, I could see the white steeple of a church pointing heavenward from out of the mass of trees and houses that mark a town on the plains from the view of the freeway.  Grain elevators, their stubby fingers of concrete the other edifice rising from the land, two symbols of the country, the church and agricultural commerce, the predominant structures and ideologies that shaped the West.

As we continued east, the color of the sky, the orange and pinks of the elapsing day and the purple, dark blue of clouds filled with rain.  The view from the truck was immense, the land largely uninterrupted by human makings, I could watch the sky, the changing color, the blue-grey veils of rain falling from over laden clouds in the distance, the occasional flash of lightning emerging through the veil of rain or a flare of pink light illuminating, momentarily, the dark blue of the storm clouds ahead.  And then as we drove into the night we drove into the rain, not too bad, just enough to wash the dust from the windshield.  One of the momentary challenges in driving a new vehicle is finding its various functions, like the windshield wipers.  I managed to turn on the left and right turn blinkers before I found the wipers, and then the lights for driving in the dark. Arrived at the motel, unloaded the pets and their supplies, our supplies for the night in a quick dash through the chilly rain, and then some wine to help unwind from a long day, our wine in a box.  Dinner, two power salads from Taco Bell that we ate in the room.