There’d been rough patches. On my way back to the States, two braceros picked me up in Guerrero, and one flicked a switchblade and said, “Somos dos pobres hombres” (We are two poor men), so I flicked mine and said, “Yo tambien” (Me, too), but when their 1941 Plymouth broke down, I ended up paying for the repairs, my companions claiming they didn’t have a peso, the mechanic calling a cop who said we were all three going to jail if the gringo didn’t fork over. With my last ten dollars, I made it to Nogales, Arizona, shelled out two bucks for a flop, where I had my first bath in two weeks, and the next morning an old rod rider led me to a Southern Pacific freight, northward bound.
There were a lot of other young men out on the road with me, under the same spell. But where were they now, the Cassadys and the Kerouacs? The Woody Guthries rambling the sparkling sands of diamond deserts? Maybe they were out there somewhere; maybe, with my wife and dogs, staying in Triple A–approved campgrounds, I was traveling in the wrong circles and simply didn’t see them.
On the other hand, maybe the Internet and satellite and cable TV have quieted the restless demon. If you want to see the world, why risk flipping a boxcar, why stand at a windswept roadside with your thumb out, when in the climate-controlled safety of your room you can make the world come to you with the click of a mouse or a remote?
However, the Internet and TV—the talking heads on cable speaking in perfectly modulated, generic American—have not dulled the regional accent. At a diner where we stopped for lunch, Leslie cocked an ear, and when I realized she’d stopped listening to my no-doubt fascinating conversation, I asked what she was doing. Turns out she was listening raptly to snatches of local speech: She dint wawnta go inta the hawspitul for her whiz-dum teeth. And: He cunnit rize his awrms. And, the talk turning to computers, WiFi came out Wah-fah.
Nor has electronica entirely obliterated regional differences. Judging by the billboards and churches on our route, the South remains the most religious part of the country, with the rural Midwest a close second. In some towns, there was a house of worship on almost every corner; in Linden, Tennessee, population one thousand, we passed three on a single block, United Methodist, Church of Christ, and First Baptist.
“The churches here are like Starbucks back East,” Leslie marveled.
We also observed, in a very unofficial census, that the number of adult superstores in the South was directly proportional to the number of churches. Drive outside town past the steeples and you’d be sure to see a windowless, block-brick building luring customers with billboards featuring hot babes and lists of X-rated videos, lingerie, sex toys. Because there can be no redemption without sin, ample opportunities for both are offered.
The character of the landscape was changing, hills shrinking, horizons widening—the South easing into the lower Middle West. We crossed the Mississippi west of Dyersburg. A sign on the bridge welcomed us to Missouri. I planned to join the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail, a network of highways and byways that trace their journey to the Pacific, at the state capital, Jefferson City.
Broad cornfields in the bottomlands lay under sheets of shallow water, sandbags lined the roadway against a slow-moving disaster. Record snowfalls melting in the Rocky Mountains, a thousand miles away, were pouring into the whole vast watershed east of the Continental Divide, swelling the Missouri, the Platte, the Arkansas, and the Mississippi. Farms were inundated, towns and cities threatened, and in the west of the state, a tornado had annihilated much of Joplin. Wind and flood—a season of natural catastrophes.
Leslie had never been to Missouri, had, in fact, chosen North Carolina’s journalism school over the University of Missouri’s in part because Chapel Hill sounded, well, more peaceful and bucolic. But she fell for the Ozarks. “Have you noticed how every square inch is covered in green?” she asked. Of course I had. State Route 19, a scenic road that, for a change, really was, whipped northward through the lush hills like a carnival ride, all steep ups and downs and hairpin twists. Jade-colored rivers tumbled under narrow bridges. Towns were few and too small to support the usual Walmart/McDonald’s/Holiday Inn barnacles. Canoe rentals and rafting outfitters appeared to be the main industries. Between the towns, we’d sometimes see a house as grand as any on a southern plantation, and then a shack that looked abandoned but wasn’t, the yard decorated with cast-off appliances, a derelict pickup on blocks. The rural scenery, however, wasn’t as tranquil as it looked. The Ozarks were once moonshine country; now, way back in there at the ends of the logging roads, meth labs have replaced the whiskey stills.
* * *
Weary of crowded campgrounds, needing to give the dogs a break from the cramped truck bed and ourselves from Ethel’s coffin-size bunks, we rented a cabin on Meramec Farm, which Leslie had found in one of the growing number of brochures that were now sliding around Fred’s interior.
The cabin was small but well fixed with a refrigerator, an air conditioner, and—this drew a gasp of delight from Leslie—a real bed, mattress, box spring, and all.
We parked Ethel atop a rise near the main farmhouse. I backed her in with more skill than I’d previously shown, and was feeling proud of myself. Pride, as we know, goeth before the fall. As Leslie cranked the jackpost to unhitch the trailer, I noticed that Fred was slightly downhill of Ethel, causing the hitch assembly to form a shallow V.
“Wait till I block…”
Focused on her task, Leslie kept on cranking, and before I could finish the sentence—“the trailer’s wheels”—Ethel’s hitch sprang loose from Fred’s hitch ball with such force that she jumped backward and the jackpost leaped off the wood blocks. With a sickening bang, the trailer pitched forward, the jackpost plowing into the ground. Ethel now looked like a boat sinking by the bow.
Leslie stared in silence, first at Ethel, then at me. Three marriages and a few relationships in between qualify me to make this observation about Homo sapiens femalis, subspecies Americanus: they are congenitally incapable of apologizing for a mistake because they’re incapable of admitting they’ve made one. It’s always the guy’s fault. Number two son Marc, married for a decade, has likewise noticed this trait and has revised the old riddle about the falling tree not making a sound: “If a man were all alone in a forest with no woman there, would he still be wrong?”
I did two things: kept my temper and devised a solution. With the truck jack under one side of the A-frame and the hydraulic jack under the other, we would right the trailer—and hope the jackpost wasn’t bent. This we did, wringing wet in ninety-five-degree heat.
The jackpost was fine. Leslie murmured to the effect that she was glad I’d figured out what to do. I replied that we’d solved the problem together (gallantly, I thought), but added, “If you mention this in your blog, I wouldn’t mind your saying that I’m your hero.”
I knew that would be difficult, but I credit her for trying. This is what she wrote: “Phil asks that I write he’s my hero. Here you go, Phil! I make a delicious spaghetti dinner to celebrate.”
* * *
Mists thicker than a New England fog cloaked the Meramec Valley in the morning. When the sun burned them off, we rode the farm with its owner, Carol Harrison Springer, a fifty-nine-year-old woman whom it’s easy to misjudge because she stands only five-four, is cordial and hospitable, and speaks mildly, often finishing her remarks with a self-deprecating laugh.
The farm has been in her family since 1811, established by Springer’s great-great-great-grandfather on a land grant issued by President James Madison. She is the sixth generation to run the place, and when she retires, her son, Andy, will take over. Right now, they’re partners. Andy is in charge of the farm’s cattle operations, Springer tends to its herd of gaited horses and to urban visitors seeking a taste of rural life. As she put it, “You don’t live on a farm for two hundred years if you don’t adapt. Darwin was right about that. If you don’t adapt, you don’t last.”
After you’ve been around her for a while, you realize that her amiable manner and mode
rate tone of voice are, well, call them adaptations to her role as guest wrangler. They soften her natural feistiness and tenacity—not always successfully.
We experienced a failure in that regard on the ride. At the barn, a tall blonde young woman led our mounts into a corral. Leslie’s was a Missouri Foxtrotter named Penny, mine a Tennessee Walker called Beauty. We offered to saddle and bridle, assuring Springer that we knew how.
“Sofia will do that. By the time you got it done, it would be too hot to ride.”
She spoke with a firmness that foreclosed on any discussion. Sofia was from Sweden. Springer runs a “work-away” program, hiring young people from abroad to help out each summer.
“The reason I hire European kids is that they work harder than Americans,” she explained, showing some more of her no-nonsense side. “I’ve hired Americans, these young men who come out here in their cut-off T-shirts with muscles created in a gym. They’re beautiful to look at, but after a couple of hours stacking hay bales in the heat they suddenly remember they have to drive Mom to the store.”
Joined by Springer’s friend Laura, we set off, the horses’ legs swishing in the stirrup-high grass carpeting the Meramec River bottomlands. Leslie and I ride gaited horses quite a lot in Arizona. It’s something of an art. The object is to get the animal into its distinctive, four-beat amble and to keep it there. A slow walk is okay, but pacing, trotting, or loping are discouraged. Correctly managed, a gaited horse offers a ride so smooth that, in the words of an Arizona rancher we know, “it makes your ass laugh.”
As for mine, it chuckled once or twice, now and then gave out a guffaw; otherwise, it lost its sense of humor as Beauty broke into high lopes or slowed into jack-hammer trots. All the while, exasperated as a gym teacher coaching a klutzy kid, Springer threw out instructions: “Don’t kick her! Just squeeze with your legs! No, no! That’s not a gait, it’s a pace!” I can’t speak for the mood of Leslie’s derriere; it seemed happy on board Penny. She’s a fairly accomplished equestrienne; still, Springer wasn’t pleased with her performance. “You said a friend taught you to ride gaited horses? She didn’t teach you that you don’t just let the horse gait whenever she feels like it? You have to make her gait.” I decided to divert her attention from our horsemanship.
“How many acres is your farm?” I asked. “How many head of cattle and horses do you run here?” Springer winced. I’d spent enough time in the West to know that such questions are tantamount to asking how much money someone earns or has in the bank. “Sorry, Carol. But I’ve got to ask that. I’m a journalist.”
“Well, that’s your problem, not mine.”
Then, confessing that she had a degree in journalism (though she’d never practiced that dark art), she relented. If I had to know, Meramec Farm covered 475 acres and supported twenty-five horses and a hundred head of cattle.
Turning out of the pastures, we followed a trail into woods of oak, poplar, and shagbark hickory, then topped out on a rise above rolling green hills specked with black cattle and horses of every color: white, pinto, brown. But for Springer and a resolute band of citizens, Laura pointed out, we now would be gazing at an inland sea plied by water skiers and fishermen.
“Flat water recreation—that’s what it was all about,” Springer said, not without an undertone of scorn.
“It” was an Army Corps of Engineers project to dam the Meramec River and its tributaries to create an artificial lake that would have drowned Springer’s farm and the entire Meramec Valley. At the time—the midseventies—Springer was putting her journalism degree to good use managing the pack string for the Outdoor Leadership School in the Montana Rockies. She returned to Missouri to save the family farm and for another reason: “I was tired of looking at evergreens. I decided that I was a deciduous person.”
She and her cohort—sometimes called the Meramec Valley Irregulars—filed suit to stop the project in 1974. The guerrillas faced long odds against the conventional forces, a triumvirate of the Corps, the U.S. Congress, and local chambers of commerce, who saw tourist dollars flowing in place of the rivers.
“People thought we were crazy,” Springer told us. “You can’t fight the U.S. Army and the federal government, they said. You can’t, you can’t, you can’t. But a lot of farmers had already lost their land to eminent domain. We were going to lose ours, and we had to make a last-ditch effort.”
They waged a prolonged battle in the law courts and in the court of public opinion. In 1981, President Reagan signed a bill deauthorizing the dams—the first time in history that a federal water project had been scrapped. We understood Springer a little better. You don’t win victories like that if you’re made of cotton candy.
As we halted at the clear-running river to let the horses drink, Springer and Laura harmonized on an old bluegrass tune.
She walks through the corn leading down to the river
Her hair shone like gold in the hot morning sun
She took all the love that a poor boy could give her
And left me to die like a fox on the run
Like a fox, like a fox, like a fox on the run.
Cicadas, waking up in the midmorning heat, sang a different tune in the trees, a million-voiced whine that rose and fell at regular intervals. On the high note, the sound created a pressure in your ears, as if a wind were blowing right through them. The noise was almost frightening, and we were to find cicadas, with their weird orange eyes, crawling, flying, and belly-up all over the farm.
Taking a dirt road on our way back, we ran into Dell, a retired hospital administrator wearing denim coveralls, high rubber boots, and an Old West sheriff’s mustache. Dell was working in his garden, where he grew okra, kale, onions, carrots. Behind him stood a handsome dark-wood house and barn he’d built with his own hands in two years. He had a distinguished air—take off the overalls and put him in pinstripes and you’d think he was a diplomat. He, Springer, and Laura talked horseflesh for a while. Dell bred and trained gaited horses and mules and sold them to buyers all over the world.
“He might look like a farmer, but he’s got some brains in his head,” Springer said to us in an aside. “Dell trained a world-champion Tennessee Walker.”
He acknowledged the slightly backhanded compliment with a scuff of his boots.
“Wouldn’t mind travelin’ the country myself,” he drawled when told about us.
But he didn’t mean it. With a gesture that took in the house, the barn, and the tidy rows of vegetables, he said, “This place is as close to heaven as you’ll ever get.”
“Say hello to Norma for us,” Springer called as we rode away.
Once upon a time it was like this everywhere in rural America, I thought—people riding up a dusty road to exchange small talk with a neighbor, cultivating his garden.
The three-hour ride left the horses lathered in sweat. At the corral, a man garbed in a royal-blue jumpsuit removed their saddles and blankets and began to hose them down. Springer introduced us to Jerry Woods, a handsome man of seventy-two, with hazel eyes, strong, straight teeth, and wings of gray hair sprouting from under his baseball cap.
“Jerry is my horse trainer, best there is,” Springer said.
In a near-whisper, Woods told us that the relationship wasn’t strictly employer and employee: “Carol’s my sweetie pie.”
With her sharp critiques of my riding skills fresh in mind, I admit that while I found it easy to admire her, imagining her as a sweetie pie wasn’t so easy. I asked Woods for some horsemanship advice, and he gave it, tacking on a brief treatise on his training methods.
“My dad was in the U.S. mounted cavalry, and he could ride the hair off a horse,” he said, starting to brush Beauty’s flanks. “But he was tough on them, and on men. I knew from an early age that I wanted to train horses, and I decided that that wouldn’t be my way. I’m half Indian, and the Indians were the finest light cavalry in the world, horsemen extraordinaire. But they had a gentle way with horses. You won’t see me wearing spurs all the time, on
ly when I need to, cuz all it takes to get the horse into a gait is to give him a little nudge, check, and release. You keep that up for four hours, you’ll never have a problem.”
Like Bud Runyon back in Tennessee, Jerry Woods was a born yarn spinner, and in due course he spun the yarn of his life. As he did, we realized he was a breed of American that will, when his generation passes on, become as extinct as the mountain man and the open-range cowboy.
His father—not his grandfather—was born in 1896. After serving in World War I (Woods showed us a brass U.S. cavalry rosette worn on his father’s bridle), he returned to the Ozarks, a sharecropper who owned nothing, had no education, and raised whatever crop landowners wanted. He also raised ten children, five girls, five boys, of whom Jerry was the eighth in line.
“We didn’t have no electricity and no running water,” Woods said. “People usta call us hillbillies. We didn’t mind that. We wore it like a badge, but that’s not politically correct anymore, so now we call ourselves”—he grinned—“Ozark Americans.”
In the category of traditional values, you could do far worse than those that Oren Woods instilled in his brood: “My dad said you need to be honest and truthful. If you tell somebody you’re gonna do something, you do it till you die. Give a man, for a day’s pay, a day and a quarter of work, and you’ll always be needed.”
For their mother’s health, the family moved from the Ozarks to Arizona, but Woods didn’t care for it—too many cacti, lizards, rattlesnakes. “Hell, the grass out there would bite you.” At thirteen, he left home and thumbed his way back to Missouri, going to work at an uncle’s sawmill from daybreak till dark. Five years later, he enlisted in the navy, and the horse soldier’s son soon found himself patrolling the Mekong Delta’s treacherous labyrinth in a swift boat. On his first action, the boats were strung out to prevent an ambush from getting them all at once. But the sailors, he said, had miscalculated “how conniving the Vietcong were. Just as we turned to head back, Charlie gave us hell. Twenty-five boats went up, thirteen come back.”
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