The Beginning of the End

In The Great Railway Bazaar, Paul Theroux uses 350 pages to describe his journey from England to Japan. The return home on the Trans Siberian Railway is conveyed in about twenty-five pages. Theroux is tired and ready for his trip to end, and his prose carries his feelings of loneliness and exhaustion. At the risk of comparing my writing to his or my relatively short jaunt to his months long adventure, I think I'm kind of in the same place. I'm ready to go home.

I rose early from my very ordinary campsite, packed without making breakfast, and hit the road for the short trip down to Jefferson City, one of our lesser-known state capitals, I would wager. The domed building sits atop a hill guarding the Missouri River. I don't have much to say about it—they are all starting to look the same—but it is probably too big. States like Texas, California, and New Jersey deserve big, grand capital buildings. Missouri's okay, but it's no New Jersey.

I gassed up and re-iced the cooler in Fulton, Missouri, famous for being the site of Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech in March 1946. There's a Winston Churchill Memorial and Library in town. It's got a big hunk of the Berlin Wall on display, I'm told, but who doesn't have that these days? I skipped it.

I drove into and out of St. Louis without thinking of even slowing. I came across my favorite Christian radio broadcast of all so far, so even if I hadn't been through the Gateway to the West a week and a half ago, I wasn't about to miss a minute of "The Messianic Voice," a Jews for Jesus show that encourages its listeners to get others, especially Jews, to come along for the fun. Next up was a Christian financial advising show hosted by Dan Celia. Over the next sixty minutes or so, Dan taught me a little about how to protect in a properly Christian way the blessings that God had bestowed upon me; it's all His money, after all, and I'm just the steward. Additionally, he railed about the Obama administration's "unending attacks on American corporations," on the importance of low tax rates for the wealthy, and on the evils of socialized medicine. I'm not a Christian, and I haven't spent much time in church, but I don't remember ever hearing about Jesus telling the rich to protect their investments in safe tax shelters, or that God rewards his followers with gold, or that the saintly way is the corporate way. I think I remember reading something about camels going through the eyes of needles though, don't I? And wasn't there something about Lazarus and the rich man?

I drove across Illinois and Indiana without stopping; corn can be amply admired at seventy-five miles per hour. Just past Louisville, Kentucky, I stopped for gas, a handful of groceries, and Starbucks wifi service. I still don't much like Starbucks coffee, but Starbucks employees are uniformly smiling and nice. On this day, the freshly scrubbed guy gave me coffee for free because there wasn't enough Pike Place Roast for my venti, so he blended it with something else and picked up the tab.

I was caught off guard by the southern accents I encountered in Fulton, Louisville, and, later, Frankfort. I didn't really see this trip as taking me through Dixie, but it felt that way for most of the day. Missouri and Kentucky remained with the Union, didn't they?

I pulled off I-64 for a look at Kentucky's capitol building. After circling the parking lot twice for a spot, I hopped out of the car with my PowerShot SD20 in hand, and I started thinking, "This is so stupid. Nobody (except maybe Marshall) cares about my pictures and thoughts on capitols; just because I have a 'virtual collection' of austere buildings doesn't mean that others want to know about it. Why don't I just drive by and see what there is to see without stopping." I almost returned to my Mazda to keep my forward momentum, and then I began to see the tops of tents, and I heard an amplified speech-giving voice.

I wandered onto the expansive lawn in front of the marble steps and found myself surrounded by people sweltering in the heat, sitting in lawn chairs and on blankets with their dinners (a lot of McDonald's) laid out in front of them. A politician was rousing the crowd with fiery rhetoric, and folks under foldout canopies looked toward the speaker, ignoring potential business. Three little kids ran past in their bright yellow "Don't Tread on Me!" tee shirts. The blue haired woman woman to my right hollered, "Yes, Rand!"

I had stumbled into the Kentucky Freedom Festival, a rally put together by various Bluegrass State Tea Partiers. "The Next Senator from Kentucky" Rand Paul, son of Libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul, whipped the crowd into a patriotic frenzy. Rand recently found himself in a little bit of hot water for suggesting that perhaps the 1964 Civil Rights Act was an overextension of government and, ironically, a violation of civil rights. Rand also believes that a Canada to Mexico superhighway is coming soon to blur national borders and identities. When he left the podium, I considered asking for a picture with Mr. Paul, but I was unshaven and dirty, and Rand's beefy guys flanking him scared me a little; I settled for a handshake. (By the way, my right hand has clasped those of Dan Quayle, Rev. Al Sharpton, Paul Volcker, and now Rand Paul. Not too shabby, huh?)

The next speaker was a veteran of some branch of the armed services who attacked Bill and Hillary, Barack Hussein Obama, the Liberal Mainstream Media, and General Motors, as well as Socialists, Marxists, Leninists, Stalinists, and Maoists. He also assured us again and again that he wasn't a racist. He, in fact, liked immigrants as long as they are legal, are able to completely support themselves without aid, are conversant in English, and have memorized the Pledge of Allegience. I didn't hear much from the guy who took the microphone as I was leaving, but he also made damn sure that I understood that he wasn't a racist. I think my favorite moment of the rally came when a portly geriatric closed her eyes, raised her hands, and shouted, "God bless Fox News!"

I must say, however, that the people I spoke to were quite friendly to me. From Rand to those selling bumper stickers and decals to people wandering around like me, everybody was full of smiles, friendly greetings, and polite "excuse me"s.

Back on I-64, I crossed into West Virginia under waning sunlight, failed to get a campsite at Kanawah State Forest, ducked in and out of Charleston (another capital city, after all) for gas, Diet Coke, and a bad photograph, and then turned north on I-79. I wound through the mountains with a smattering of other cars and trucks, zoomed past what I expected would be high motel rates in Morgantown, and finally called it a day at a Super 8 in Cumberland, Maryland at 1:15 a.m. The day's numbers: 905.1 miles, $78.35 in gas bills, and roughly seventeen hours of driving, not counting my short pit stops. Whew!