Day 12: Eldon, MO to Cape Girardeau, MO

It was another great night of sleep.  Insomnia seems to be taking a holiday in Missouri.  I suppose the humidity is just too much for it. Mom sleeps in her bed as we ready ourselves for another long day of driving.  My sister fluffs her hair and paints her face between mirrors that we aren't using.  I pack the car... kinda loud.  Even though mom is sick, I wanna wake her so I can spend as much time as possible with her.  We need to leave by 10am at the latest, it's a long windy road today with lots of stops for pictures.

Mom finally wakes up.  I hug her good morning.  We are both sad... we try to hide it but it's as clear as fireflies that we are.  She goes to the kitchen to take her morning cocktail of a dozen pills or so.  I follow. She blurts out unexpectedly "I am so sorry that I was never the mother that you needed.  I wish I could take it back."  My heart pounds as it sneaks its way into my throat.  "Oh mom", I say in almost a whisper, " you were a kid!  I'm not gonna lie, you weren't the best mother in the world, but you were just a kid.  You had a terrible life that had nothing to do with me.  You did what you could".  I see tears welling up in her eyes.  I give her a hug.  The little needles in the bags under my eyes begin to vibrate.  Tears form in the corners of my eyes.  I ask her if she wants me to read what I wrote about coming here.  She replies in the affirmative.  So I read the blog entry from a couple of days ago out loud.  My voice noticeably quivering as I read it. My heart now thumping in my throat.  I feel like a little boy, afraid to let his mom know that he was hurt, still wanting to impress her as I did at 8.  I finish.  Tears are rolling down her face.  I hurt like a triple trailer just ran over my heart and then backed up and ran over it again.  I have a hard time breathing.  She looks right in my eyes and says "That was beautiful".  We hug again and say no more.  It's all I needed.  It's all I wanted.  I didn't want her to feel bad, nor should she.  I just wanted to say what I needed to say and it was like a warm bath after a long day of work on the farm.  I knew sleep would be good again.

10am was approaching fast.  The bags were loaded into the car.  Everybody was ready except my mom and I.  She kept bargaining for a few more minutes... each time I accepted the bargain.  I wanted to end the road trip right there.  I wanted to just stay right there.  I wanted a stick of butter in every meal from then on out.  We finally pull away from each other and sobbing I walk what seemed like 12 miles to the car.  Snot running onto my lip,  the cloth on my shoulder wiping it away.  Tears rolling off my cheek onto my chest, I step into the car.  I try to take deep breaths but breaths don't come easily. I can hardly see as I back out the car.  Mom sits on the porch alone.  It's all I can do to pull out of the driveway waving, blowing snot filled kisses, crying out loud like a 4 year old being left at day care for the first time.

Finally we are out of sight.

Grateful that my best friend is with me... she cries too.  We hold each others hands as I drive.  The tears still flow, but talking, saying anything, makes the knot unwind.  I say "that was fucking hard!".  Willow agrees.  Mom thanked her for taking such good care of me.  I think Willow felt sad for the anger she has felt towards mom.  She feels sad for how sad I am.  She feels sad for how sad mom was.  It took a good half hour for us to calm down.  It's just a sad fucking morning... not quite the saddest I can remember, but right up there.  

Somehow we made it to the restaurant recommended to us by my sister, The Silver Dollar.  We  sit down.  The waitress asks how we are.  Our eyes are bloodshot and our voices sound like they should after such a sob.  I let her know that it's not her that is making us so sad, "We just said goodbye to Mom."

By the time we finish picking at our food, we're ok. We pull ourselves back into the car and head for the heart of the Ozarks and beyond to those beautiful nieces in Cape Girardeau.

The first stop we make is in a little town called Tuscumbia, Missouri.  Now, I don't mean to continue this sad sap bullshit about mom or anything, but Tuscumbia is important to the story line.  When I was about 8 we went to visit my grandpa and my aunt in Tuscumbia.  They lived together in a quaint little single wide trailer.  We went up on a summer Saturday afternoon some 4 hours or so from St. Louis.  We spent the night as we had before.  On Sunday morning we got up and had breakfast with sweet tea like so many other normal Sunday mornings.  This Sunday was to be a bit different though.  The bag that was packed for me held more than just enough clothes for the night.  My parents left Tuscumbia.  I stayed for the next 14 months or so.  Nobody ever told me I was staying.  When my parents left, in similar tears described above I was told they would be back the following weekend.  They didn't come back.   I enrolled in school.  I tried to wrap my tiny little brain the best I could around what had happened, but I never could.  This was beyond the neglect that I had suffered my entire short life.  This was abandonment.  This was like taking a beaten puppy and dropping him off at the park at the edge of town.  It sucked.  But here I am.

Tuscumbia is a little town of about 80 people.  When I lived here I spent a lot of my time playing outside of the bar that is now burnt to the ground.  I have a deep scar on the inside of my left hand that reminds me of this place and it's loneliness, it's trade of money to a poverty stricken aunt and grandfather in return for "watching over" a child nobody wanted.  The main road was nestled between that old bar and the beautiful lazy Osage River.  The Osage River is damned and is the source of the Lake of the Ozarks.  It's much more beautiful than I remember it.  I wish I could have seen how beautiful when I lived here.  This is the place of a few happy memories too.  It was my first kiss.  She was beautiful and a grade older.  Her name was Misty.  It's telling that I can remember the kiss, where I stood, what her lips on mine felt like, exactly the shape of her eyes.  I can remember what her breath felt like on my chin and in my mouth. So many other memories have permanently been banished, but this one remains strongly in tact.

I spoke with a guy that owned the place next to the scarred foundation that used to house that bar.  He was nice. He was an executive chef and owned much of the river front property in Tuscumbia. He wants to turn it into a vacation destination.  I wish him success, but I wouldn't mind if the rest of the town burnt down along with that bar.

Away we go....

We wind our way deep into the Ozark Mountains.  The road twists and turns.  The ups and downs leave us with our stomachs in our chests.  They were fun roads.  They were beautiful roads. The forests were thick.  The hills they call mountains provided a few stunning vistas.

We come across Meramec State Park.  We pay our $5 entry fee, mostly so Willow can use their restroom.  We are pleasantly surprised by the beauty here.  There is a spring that bubbles up some 100 million gallons per day of Blue Berry Blast Kool-Aid at the bottom of a large granite cliff.

We stretch our legs walking around this beautiful space.  We hold hands.  We kiss and flirt with each other like we do.  We remind ourselves how fucking lucky we are. Willow feeds the very hungry fish.

We head down the road.  It's been almost 5 hours on the road.  We're not making very good time.  We don't much care.  Up and down.... round and round... stomach still in knots and the views still amazing.

 We stop for a great lunch at the adorable Bixby Country Store in Bixby, MO.

Although it is getting pretty late, and now we ARE panicking a little, we stop at the Johnson Shut-Ins State Park. We literally run for about 3/4 of a mile to get to the actual shut-ins.  We don't really care by this time... all we really care about is getting a couple of pictures.  Although it wasn't as beautiful - at least not as worthy as all of the giant forest center buildings with explanations of the geology of the shut-ins - as we thought it was gonna be, it was worth stopping at.  My rushed pictures don't do the average beauty justice.

It's getting late by the time we leave Johnson Shut-Ins. We still have 90 miles to go and we haven't stopped by the Patton House.

The Patton House is a house in Patton, MO.  Patton is in Bollinger County, MO.  My great great grandfather built this house in 1900.  His name was Russel Bollinger.  My great Grandfather, his son, Russel Junior and Granny Rose lived here. Their daughter Jane Bollinger married my Grandpa Dan Joseph.  They lived here.  My Dad, the son of Grandma Jane and Grandpa Dan, grew up here.  I lived in this house briefly with my parents.  I may have some of the early names wrong but the point is it has been in the family since it was built.   It is located in a giant county that bears my family name.  My grandma, needing assistance with her retirement, was better off with the house NOT in her name so she signed it over to my sister and then Grandma moved to Arizona. My sister ran into some legal trouble a few years back and sold the house for I am sure a paltry sum.  The house that had been in the family for 110 years was gone.  The first house in the county with electricity was no longer ours.  The first house in the county with indoor plumbing... gone!  I pull up on the house willing to knock on the new owner's door to let them know who I am, and to ask permission to take some pictures.

What do I see?  BANK OWNED!

I am just about as excited as I could possibly be.  Could I get this amazing piece of history back in the family?  What would I do with it?  I am not willing to move here.  Could it be a bed-n-breakfast? Could I rent it out?  It's only 20-25 minutes from Cape Girardeau.  Somebody could work in the city and live on 2 acres in an amazing community in an amazing house.  I called the next day and found out that the asking price was $54,900.  Somebody had made an offer of $50,000.  I was heart-broken.  $50,000 for a giant chunk of my family's history.  Some strange person... could own this big beautiful house for a 1/3 of what I make in a year!!  I told the agent to call me if the deal fell through.  We'll see what happens.

On our way out of Patton I tell stories to Willow of the great blizzard when my parents were in Acapulco, Mexico and as a young boy I was in the local paper for walking to every house during that record-breaking blizzard to ask older people what they needed from the store.  There was no electricity, there was little heat, and there was feet of snow.  My dog, Benji, and I went to eveyr single door, 50 or so.  The owner of the store that is no longer there opened just for me as I took my orders and made my deliveries.

We stopped by my great (great?) Aunt Irene's now long abandoned house.  This was a very humble farm house built around 1900 sometime... maybe before.  Built from river rocks from the creek on the property some 1/2 a mile away, it housed a similarly tough woman.  Aunt Irene was old when I was little.  I don't know how old, but I know she died at about 100 years old long before I moved to Portland some 21+ years ago.  I know she tended to her cows, to her garden, and to all the needs of the farm until the day she died.  The floor in her house was barely there... it was mostly dirt.  Every time I would visit, and that was often.  She would send me back to the Patton House with a bucket of homemade chocolate chip cookies.  They were amazing.

 Off to Cape we go.

It's been 12 years since we have seen my sister's kids.  They came to Portland to spend part of a summer with us.  We had an amazing time with them.  We took them to the Mountain, to the Gorge, to Seaside and Cannon Beach.  We took them to the Nehalem River where many of you heard the stories of Emily floating next to me in the river gazing at my Oregon lily white (ok.. ok.. more like ash gray) legs.  She says in a southern drawl that is only made more cute by it's 6 year old delivery vessel "Uncle Rob.... why do your legs look like a dead person has been floating in the river for a week?"  That same weekend, 9 year old Sarah scratched the bejeebus out of me for trying to throw her while we were in the pool.  She was tough then... she's tough now.

Sarah has the cutest and happiest and hammiest little girl in the world (well... my kids are the only exception).  Her name is Leelah.  She is my great niece.

 
 Sarah and her boyfriend,  leave..  it was time to put Leelah to bed.

Emily and her very sweet fiance Justin stick around.  We talk until 1am.

I love love love love those kids.

Tomorrow we will walk around Cape some and then get back together with the girls after work.

Until then....


Our route today: http://g.co/maps/akxhm