Blue Highways: Tell City, Indiana

Click on Thumbnail for MapUnfolding the Map

I just saw a comic strip the other day with William Tell as its subject.  He seems to come up a lot in the comics as I've seen a few strips with him as the subject.  The reason I mention this?  William Least-Heat Moon drives through his namesake Tell City along blue highways.  Follow us by clicking on the map.

Book Quote

"At the Huntingburg exit, I turned off and headed for the Ohio River.  Indiana 66, a road so crooked it could run for the legislature, took me into the hilly fields of CHEW MAIL POUCH barns, past Christ-of-the-Ohio Catholic Church, through the Swiss town of Tell City with its statue of William and his crossbow and nervous son."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 5

Barn advertising Mail Pouch tobacco in Ohio

Tell City, Indiana

I never chewed.  While friends around me would pull out their cans of chew, grab a pinch, and stuff it their cheeks until it looked like they had some kind of growth on their face, I would simply watch.  We'd talk, and they'd take a second to hold up a can or a bottle near their lips, spit the juice into the the can, and then put the can down to continue talking.  This was especially dangerous at parties, where if a person put his or her can of beer down, momentarily forgot where it was, and reached for the can at hand, an unpleasant surprise might await with a healthy swig.  Speaking of that, here's a good song by Robert Earl Keen titled Copenhagen.  It extolls the pleasures and pain of chewing that particular brand.

Of course, most of my friends weren't chewing Mail Pouch tobacco.  I think I would have actually thought that was pretty cool if they did.  That would have been way too retro for my friends.  Instead they were chewing the cheap and popular stuff.  The lightweights were chewing Skoal, which I remember had a minty smell to it.  The harder core kids chewed Copenhagen.  You were a real wimp if you used the packets that looked like little teabags with the pre-measured amounts of tobacco.  The only guys I saw chewing tobacco from a pouch were older men, and the tobacco looked a lot different, more stringy and leafy.

One of the great pleasures of traveling back roads of America, which Least-Heat Moon (LHM) captures in this quote, is driving through small towns and through pastoral settings where you can still find gliimpses of old highway advertisements painted on the sides of buildings, like the Mail Pouch ads on the sides of barns.  It brings to life old time advertising, before television and radio were big, and in a more picturesque way than the lines of billboards that we have lining the interstates today.  The old ads conveyed a simpler time, when people and life traveled much more slowly.  There was even room for creativity, as the old Burma-Shave signs on the side of the road that spelled out complete ads a few words at a time as you traveled down the road.

And then, the towns, where ads were strategically painted on the sides of buildings, and often outlived the companies whose products they advertised.  Occasionally, on a walk through my hometown, or in the city where I now live, I'll come upon one of those ads and be momentarily transported back to the time when the ad truly meant something to the people who saw it.

The other thing that LHM, in his eye for detail, focuses briefly on is the statue.  Every town has a statue or a monument to something, and these are often interesting to look at especially if they are a little out of the ordinary.  In Tell City's case, as it was named for William Tell, it has a statue depicting the legend of William Tell shooting the apple off of his son's head with an arrow.  In my hometown it was a section cut out of a huge redwood log with markers at rings representing significant years in human history.

My wife and I were once traveling in Florida, and stopped off in Kissimmee to see the Monument of States.  Basically, this was a pylon of rocks cemented together.  Each rock was contributed by a state in the United States, and therefore it represented the geologic variety of the whole country.  It sat forlornly, off on a side street near the water, and I had the distinct feeling that not many people went there.

Just before the passage I quote above, LHM writes:  "Life doesn't happen along interstates.  It's against the law."  If you are going to see some of these relics of earlier times, you have to cut down your speed and drive the smaller roads.

If you want to know more about Tell City

City of Tell City
Flood Wall Mural
Perry County (Tell City) News (newspaper)
Tell City Historical Museum
Tell City Pretzel Company
Wikipedia: Tell City
William Tell and son statue

Next up:  Cannelton, Indiana

Blue Highways: Grayville, Illinois

Click on Thumbnail for MapUnfolding the Map

William Least-Heat Moon stays a night in Grayville, and makes an impression on a farmer in Well's Restaurant at morning breakfast.  Click on the map to locate Grayville, and don't be fooled by the map.  The horseshoe in the river doesn't exist anymore - you can see the actual course of the river in the satellite view.

Book Quote

"[The man] adjusted his cap.  'So what's your line?'

"'Don't have one.'

"'How's that work?'

"'It doesn't and isn't.'

"He grunted and went back to his coffee.  The man took me for a bindlestiff.  Next time I'd say I sold ventilated aluminum awnings or repaired long-rinse cycles on Whirlpools.  Now my presence disturbed him.  After the third tilt of his empty cup, he tried to make sense of me by asking where I was from and why I was so far from home.  I hadn't traveled even three hundred miles yet.  I told him I planned to drive around the country on the smallest roads I could find.

"'Goddamn,' he said, 'if screwball things don't happen every day even in this town.  The country's all alike now.'  On that second day of the new season, I guess I was his screwball thing."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 5

Hard Times Fish Market in Grayville, Illinois

Grayville, Illinois

Have you ever been looked at as odd by someone, or by a group?  You might be doing something, standing out from the crowd in some way, and you're seen as being different, and different not in an interesting way but in a way that is slightly disturbing?

It's kind of interesting how, when we challenge someone's notion of what is normal versus what they think of as abnormal behavior, that we get that reaction.

Clearly Least-Heat Moon's (LHM) venture around the country on small roads qualifies as being weird, perhaps abnormal, to this farmer he encounters.  Because we don't have much of a backstory on this farmer, it is hard to say what his life was like and whether he did anything that went against the grain in Grayville.  Probably not.  He probably was born and raised to be a farmer.  Perhaps he had his exciting and different moment when he served in the military.  Perhaps that was in World War II or the Korean War, or, if he is young enough, maybe even in Vietnam.  But that was not something that was out of the ordinary, it was expected of a young man of the time.  If he hadn't had that experience, he might have never left Grayville except for the odd trip to St. Louis, which would have made him feel out of place and uncomfortable and therefore he only went once or twice and never went again.

I've not been really wild and crazy, but I have done some things that have been seen as going against the grain, or different.  Right out of college, I joined a volunteer program called JVC.  It was under the auspices of the Jesuits, a Catholic order of priests and brothers, and I left California and went to Milwaukee where I lived with three women and another man in what we called a "community."  We all worked, for what amounted to $75 a month personal spending money, in social service organizations.  I lived in the middle of the inner-city, taught at a school in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods, and suffered through property crime in our house and watched a couple of my housemates get beaten on the street.  As I related these stories to my family and friends, their reactions typically were "and you're doing this because...?"  I was doing it at first because after college, I didn't feel like I had any other options (English majors are great until you need to find a job).  I later did it because I felt like I was doing something socially worthwhile that would help those who were poor.  I finally learned that the end result gave me more than the people I supposedly were helping, but who had more street smarts and common sense than I did.  The kids I taught had grown up before their time, and they were streetwise and in many ways smarter than me.  The end result was I rejoined for another year, and lived for eight years beyond my volunteer experience in the inner-city and continued to work in service positions.  My extended family shook their heads at times, but I came to love it and found a group of like-minded people that I could count on and who could count on me.

In 1998, I went to Bangladesh, where a different manifestation of being different and odd enough to attract attention happened to me.  In a month-long visit, I learned that being whiter and taller than everyone else made me an object of curiousity.  My clothes were different.  I spoke a different language.  I traveled in areas where the appearance of people like me might come once in a generation.  In the town of Rajshahi, a crowd followed me as I looked in store windows, watching me window shop.  Everywhere in Bangladesh that I stopped in a restaurant outside of the capital of Dhaka, crowds would gather to watch me and my Anglo companion eat.  When we stopped to take in the sight of the Bangabandhu Bridge across the Jamuna River, the 5th longest bridge in South Asia, people stood near us to watch us look at the bridge.  It was strange, to say the least, to be such an alien object that just my very presence made me worth watching.  I didn't have to do anything but just stand there, and I was an attraction.  It was both an ego-boost and an unnerving experience.

I think LHM describes a bit of both in this passage.  He is an object of curiousity to the farmer, who recognizes that he is not local, and a bit odd because of what he is planning to do.  LHM finds it unnerving enough to think about saying something that will make him seem more "normal" in the future, as he doesn't want to be a "screwball thing."  But sometimes, we just don't have that option.  I had a choice to go back to whatever a normal life is when I lived in Milwaukee, but in Bangladesh, there was no way I would ever be normal in that society.  We do what what we can with what we have, and live with whatever people think of us otherwise.

If you want to know more about Grayville

City of Grayville
Topix.com/Grayville
Wikipedia: Grayville

Next up: Tell City, Indiana

Blue Highways: Lebanon, Illinois

Click on Thumbnail for MapUnfolding the Map

Heading into Illinois, we follow William Least-Heat Moon and Ghost Dancing as they continue their 13,000 mile trek around America.  As always, Littourati, your comments are welcome!  Click the map to check our progress - we've got a long way to go!

Book Quote

"In the approaching car beams, raindrops spattering the road became little beacons.  I bent over the wheel to steer along divider stripes.  A frog, long-leggedy and green, belly flopped across the road to the side where the puddles would be better.  The land, still cold and wintery, was alive with creatures that trusted in the coming of spring.

"On through Lebanon, a brick-street village where Charles Dickens spent a night in the Mermaid Inn; on down the Illinois roads - roads that leave you ill and annoyed, the joke went - all the way dodging chuckholes that Time magazine said Americans would spend 626 million dollars in extra fuel swerving around."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 4

Street in Lebanon, Illinois

Lebanon, Illinois

When I was young, some of my most vivid memories occurred when we had to drive on rainy nights.  I grew up on the North Coast of California, and rainy nights were always very wet, very aromatic of the redwoods, firs and pines of the area, and particularly on a stretch of Pudding Creek Road which headed toward my house, full of frogs.

On rainy nights, there were hundreds of them, jumping across the road to get from one side to the other.  There wasn't a lot of traffic on Pudding Creek Road, but the occasional car would cause a veritable frog massacre.  The next morning, all kinds of crushed frogs lay bloody and eviscerated on the road.  It looked pretty cool when I was a kid, but now as an older and environmentally conscious and conscientious adult, I hate to think how much we contributed to the planet's steadily eroding population of frogs and other amphibians by driving over so many of them.

Least-Heat Moon's (LHM) vivid picture of the frog really brings that memory back to me, along with his description of the raindrops on the road.  In really hard rains, the raindrops splashed on the road and at night, in the car headlights, it is a virtual explosion of light on the dark surface.  When the rain was coming down hard, and I've had more than a few experiences of these kinds, I've had to bend my body into all kinds of contortions to be able to see center divider stripes, or side stripes marking the blacktop boundary of the road, to be able to steer effectively.

I also remember riding over roads that would put LHM's saying about Illinois roads to shame.  In our car, every time we went on a trip we had to take "the can."  The can was dreaded by all of us.  If we could get through a trip without having to resort to the can, we were all happy.  The can was basically a Folgers or some other coffee can, lined with a plastic baggy and covered with a plastic lid, which sat at the ready.  The roads out of my town were all windy, twisty, up and down affairs.  The can was for us kids, who got carsick a lot.  One of us might get carsick and vomit in the bag in the can, and then the plastic lid would cover it and it would stay in the car for the rest of the ride until we got where we were going and the gastric contents could be put in the trash or dumped in the toilet.  Usually our car had a nasty, vomity smell in it for a while when we were on these trips.  If someone else got sick, then the can would be used again...in which case the newly sick person would be staring into and getting a whiff of the previous sick person's puke.  Needless to say, that usually helped the newly sick person let loose his or her own load of puke.  I don't know why we just couldn't pull over and let people puke on the side of the road, like everyone else.  What can I say?  Our trips were kind of disgusting at times.  One issue for my youngest sister in her therapy as an adult revolved around traveling on windy roads precisely for this reason, and both she and I have not vomited in decades because of our disgust of it.

Mermaid House Hotel: Lebanon, Illinois

Enough about puke.  I'd like to know how the Mermaid Inn in Lebanon became so called, because it is nowhere near a body of water where a mermaid might be.  Charles Dickens did stay there a night and used the opportunity to visit the Looking Glass Prairie, and legend has it he might have based A Christmas Carol on his stay, though I would find that hard to believe given that to me, A Christmas Carol is decidedly English.  If he based it on an American stay, wouldn't he have set the story in the United States?  He did have his character Martin Chuzzlewit from the novel of the same name come to America, so he did use material in America for his novels, but I just can't see it in The Christmas Carol.  I hope in his carriage and wagon rides through the United States, he brought a can for the twisty sections of the trail.

If you want to learn more about Lebanon

Chamber of Commerce: Lebanon
Fezziwig's Market
Historic Lebanon
Language of Landscape: Looking Glass Prairie
McKendree University (oldest university in Illinois)
Mermaid House Hotel
Wikipedia: Lebanon

Next up: Grayville, Illinois

Blue Highways: St. Louis, Missouri

Click on Thumbnail for MapUnfolding the Map

Heading east with William Least-Heat Moon, we cross the Missouri, then the Mississippi at St. Louis.  We also have a cross-reference (I'll call it an intersection) with Jack Kerouac.  If you want to see where we are, click on the map.

Book Quote

"Eighty miles out, rain started popping the windshield, and the road became blobby headlights and green interstate signs for this exit, that exit.  LAST EXIT TO ELSEWHERE.  I crossed the Missouri River not far upstream from where Lewis and Clark on another wet spring afternoon set out for Mr. Jefferson's 'terra incognita.'  Then, to the southeast under a glowing skull-cap of fouled sky, lay St. Louis.  I crossed the Mississippi as it carried its forty hourly tons of topsoil to the Louisiana delta."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 4

Littourati Intersection

On the Road: St. Louis, Missouri

St. Louis, Missouri

In my last post on St. Louis, I focused on the Gateway Arch, which wasn't built when Jack Kerouac went through, but was by the time Least-Heat Moon heads through town.  But Least-Heat Moon's (I'm going to refer to him as LHM for short now) passage about St. Louis is very similar to Kerouac's.  Both were heading in the same direction - east.  Both remark on the air above St. Louis.  For Kerouac, it was "great clouds of afternoon overtopping...".  But LHM describes it more ominously, giving us more of modern, polluted big city feel when he writes of St. Louis with a "glowing skull-cap of a fouled sky."  Both authors also point out the Mississippi River.  Kerouac writes of logs carried down the current from Montana past steamboats, mud and rats, while LHM makes reference to the tremendous amounts of topsoil that washes into the Mississippi and is carried its length to fan out into the Gulf.

Electricity Building at 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis

One interesting aspect of St. Louis, besides the Arch, is the fact that it was once home of a huge World's Fair, the grounds of which are still open as a park, and its Catholic cathedral has some amazing mosaic work throughout its edifice.  Kerouac didn't stop to take the sights in St. Louis, so focused was he on getting back to the East Coast, and I assume that LHM was probably familiar with all these aspects of St. Louis.  But both of these attractions were for me extremely interesting.  The Fair evidently popularized a lot of American food staples that we think of as essential American food today: ice cream cones, hamburgers, hot dogs, peanut butter, ice tea, and cotton candy, to name a few.  A number of buildings from the Fair still exist on the Washington University of St. Louis campus.  Many of the buildings were eye-poppers for their day.  One building was devoted entirely to electricity, still a novelty in many areas, and was lit up with thousands of electric lights at night.  The Fair was dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the Louisiana Purchase, the "terra incognita" that LHM cites above, and which Kerouac alludes to in On the Road when he mentions the logs floating down the river connected with our "continental dream."  The Fair is also somewhat infamous for its "human zoos" in which aboriginal peoples from newly conquered American territories in the Philippines and Guam, as well as some Native Americans, were on display for the public to gawk at their "primitive" nature.

The Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis made a huge impression on me when I visited.  The mosaics were started in 1912, not long after the cathedral was built, and not finished until 1988.  The mosaics were designed by Albert Oerken and, on the sides, Tiffany Studios.  They cover the entire cathedral and depict the life of King Louis the IX of France, the namesake of St. Louis, events in the archdiocese, and Old and New Testament stories.  It is one of the largest collections of mosaics in the world.  I like mosaics because the idea of taking bits of colored glass which by themselves are unremarkable and assembling them into something beautiful that tells a story is so symbolic.  Our entire existences are really mosaics.  Individual, unremarkable stars coalesce to form galaxies, which themselves, coalesce within the universe.  Individual cells, each performing one function on its own, combines with other cells doing each doing their own duties to create a living being, and individual atoms combine in a mosaic to form those cells.  Each individual person combines his or her actions and lives with others and forms a civilization.  The words I write here, each individual in itself, combine to create this blog post in a mosaic of ideas.  Finally, individual parts of us, including our strengths and flaws, combine in a mosaic to make us the people we are.

If you want to know more about St. Louis, the 1904 World's Fair, or the Cathedral Basilica

1904 World's Fair
1904 World's Fair Society
1904 World's Fair Virtual Tour
Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis
Explore St. Louis
Terry Laupp's 1904 World's Fair Page
Wikipedia: Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis
Wikipedia: Louisiana Purchase Exposition
Wikipedia: St. Louis

Next up: Lebanon, Illinois

Blue Highways: High Hill, Missouri

Click on Thumbnail for MapUnfolding the Map

William Least-Heat Moon sets out in his Ford Econoline van, which he has named Ghost Dancing, on a 13,000 mile trip around America.  We are following along, right to High Hill, Missouri.  Click on the map to follow our progress.  And, Littourati, comments are always welcome if you have things to share.

Book Quote

"At High Hill, two boys were flying gaudy butterfly kites that pulled hard against their leashes.  No strings, no flight.  A town of surprising flatness on a single main street of turn-of-the-century buildings paralleling the interstate, High Hill sat golden in a piece of sunlight that broke through.  No one moved along the street, and things held so still and old, the town looked like a museum diorama."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 4

A street view of High Hill, Missouri, from Hilary's (curioush) photostream on Flickr.

High Hill, Missouri

I like town names that are descriptive, like High Hill.  I can't decide whether it shows a lack of imagination to name a town based on its feature, or whether the description is essential to the place, but there's something in a descriptive name that says something to me more than a name like Lincoln, or another place that is named for someone.  My hometown, Fort Bragg, gives absolutely no clue as to its features, and is even misleading.  There isn't even a fort there (there used to be) and because of that we often get mistaken for Fort Bragg, North Carolina, which is an actual military base.

The exception to this is exotic names.  Jack Kerouac traveled through Salome, Arizona and I find that exotic, mysterious and almost dangerous.  But you don't find many exotic names of towns or cities around America.  We either have named our towns and cities after older models in Europe (New York, New Orleans, etc.), after people in our history, or after physical features in the area around.

And it sounds like, from the description in the quote, that High Hill is misleading too, as it has "surprising" flatness.  The image of kite-flying boys is very evocative of my failed Cub Scout years.  I shouldn't say "failed" but I only got to Webelos, which was a step up from Cub Scout but not quite to Boy Scout.  In hindsight, I can't say that I lose much sleep about it, as I think my values today and those of the Scouts are not quite in synch.  But I remember one activity, a kite flying contest for Scouts from all over the region, that I participated in.  We had to make and fly our own kites.  Mine didn't work very well, and we couldn't really get it in the air.  My dad was probably more frustrated than I was, because he spent a good amount of time making the kite.  The contest took place in a grassy meadow along the bluffs overlooking the ocean in Mendocino, California.  A few people got their kites way up in the air, and I think they got some kind of badge or something for it.  Mine just wouldn't go.

I grew up in a town like High Hill (not on flat plains but next to the ocean), and I associate them with these types of activities -- kite flying, kids riding bikes everywhere, hanging out in nature and exploring the natural wonder.  All the businesses in such towns seem to be small businesses catering specifically and personally to the needs of the townspeople.  At night, the town sits empty and quiet after business hours are over and people are at home.  It's a romantic vision, and one that ignores the alcoholism, the drug use, and the dysfunction that I also experienced in my home town and which often occurs in these isolated pockets of America.  But sometimes, I need such bucolic memories.

If you want to know more about High Hill

It's a really small town, so there's not many links to share.

Tinsley's Amusements: Ferris Wheel picture
Wikipedia: High Hill

Next up: St. Louis, Missouri