In a thousand miles, I had seen nothing outside of museums and advertisements which indicated America had ever been inhabited by anybody other than immigrants. There had been a few names of rivers and a couple of brief encounters with folk claiming to have traces of aborigine blood, but I had to wait until I was west of the Mississippi before meeting my first Native American. A big man with short grey hair, sleepy eyes and a paunch, he was sat in front of signs for fishing bait and fresh donuts on the porch of the Easley store, rocking gently on the back legs of a plastic chair.
David Geurts was a full-blooded Oneida Indian, married to an Anglo-American for twenty-five years, with three children, all doing well at college. He was one of only 1,500 pure Oneida’s left, but the tribe and his brothers and sisters shunned him.
“They think I’ve sold out. They think any Indian who isn’t drunk and lying around the reservation is an Uncle Tom.”
David had only recently taken over the tenancy of the store and was still straightening it out. The place had stood empty since the 1995 flood, and he had been shovelling out loam and washing down surfaces off and on for eighteen months. Although he spent most of his time there, he also ran a successful flooring business which had him fielding phone calls from his manager while we talked. David was a grafter but it had been a struggle. When he first left the reservation to become a building labourer, he was fluent in Iroquois, the Oneida’s tongue, but his English was limited. Fellow workers labelled him a liar because his lips never touched when he spoke, as they wouldn’t when speaking Iroquois. Having mastered the language, however, the racism didn’t let up, so he changed his name and took himself back to the reservation to get a higher education. At the Indian college, he learned the “White Eye’s ways of doing business.” His plans for the store included bike hire and camping, each successful diversification increasing the hostility he would receive from the tribe he was keen to remain a part of. Next month he was off to Wisconsin for the Oneiga’s annual pow-wow and was curious to see what kind of reception he would walk into.
But the Katy Trail meant more than an opportunity to diversify for David Geurts, inveterate survivor. Despite the fact that the old railroad bridges carrying the Katy Trail across creeks were too narrow to drive a Hummer through, David had it on unassailable authority that the cycle path doubled as a military artery.
“As soon as the lights go out, you’re gonna see the army streaming down that trail. Convoys of ’em. You heard of the FEMA plan?”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency plan was apparently something dreamed up during Richard Nixon’s tenure to subvert the democratic process. In essence, it laid the ground for a military take-over of the United States led by the Commander-in-Chief, the President. Financed by the Rothschilds, Rockerfellers and Kennedys, sixty-five internment camps capable of holding 60,000 people had been built somewhere in the wilds of the deserts to incarcerate counter insurgents. According to David, the plan was so hush-hush that, when a newspaper got hold of the story, the FBI stormed in, smashed up the presses and bulldozed the office to the ground.
(FEMA was actually established in 1979 as a rapid response force for coping with federal natural disasters like the Great Flood, and has nothing to do with internal security conspiracies. During the ’93 flood it set up vast trailer parks known as ‘FEMAvilles’ to house those who lost their homes.)
“Have you heard Mr. C. on the radio?” I asked, fanning the flames.
“Good man. Does good work consciousness raising.”
Mr. C. is a basket case who regularly insinuates his way onto right-wing talk shows to rant about the New World Order and their conspiracies. My favourite was the one about the impending conquest of the United States. As more and more U.S. troops were flown out to Kosovo, so more and more Russian troops were amassing on the Mexican and Canadian borders. With orders to attack Uncle Sam while his back’s turned, the Ruskies planned to link up with the Peace Troops, a foreign military force who were already active in the country covertly preparing the ground for invasion. But come FEMA or Peace Troops, David Geurts was ready for anything.
“I’ve been stock-piling food, sleeping bags, arms, survival gear, and we’ve just finished my dune buggy. We’ve got over 200 built so far. They’re hidden in different places along the Missouri. That was my job — the logistics of stockpiling and mapping.”
David belonged to a group of local survivalists who weren’t going to take a White House coup lying down. They communicated with other groups through the internet, where there were over fifty survivalist web sites. In one day, the FBI closed down twenty-five sites but David assure me new ones were continually appearing, particularly from churches like the Southern Baptists whose Armageddon scenario neatly dove-tailed into the FEMA scenario.
Or rather, they used to communicate through computers. A nerd in the group recently discovered the hardware doubled as a receiver/transceiver and that Microsoft Excel was a thinly disguised tracking software sponsored by the U.S. government. David told me of his horror when his friend managed to punch up a digitised image of a bird’s eye view of his home (where the computer was based), his yard, even his dog running around the yard. David said Bill Gates was the Devil incarnate. It was the first thing he had said since we began talking about the Katy Trail which I had no dispute with.
Shortly after New Franklin, the Katy Trail arced south and crossed the river to Boonville. My route continued on the north bank, into the headwind and along a dirt road at the foot of the bluffs. I was aiming to bridge the Missouri at Glasgow. The road from there to Independence was the closest I could get to tracking the river. Within eight miles of New Franklin I was grinding my way up a cut through the cliffs, climbing into a Missouri landscape which had me gasping for breath.
After the gentle swell of Illinois, I presumed Missouri would be much the same. It wasn’t. As I reached the summit, a roller coaster complex of pastoral wolds stretched before me like a stormy sea. Big dippers slid steeply down to valley bottoms where new leaf copses queued up for a ride. It could have been the Scottish Borders, except the farms sprinkled across the upland were clapboard and white, and the trees were broadleaf. The cattle, however, were Angus.
With black clouds galloping up on my heels, I turned into the first farm and rode up a driveway where a school bus was parked up for the night. Ally Boggs, aged ten and killing time before tea, leapt off the swing and dashed inside to fetch her mum. I went through my begging routine. Ally’s mum scrutinised me. “Two days ago we had a murder in town, y’know.”
On Saturday night, somebody had walked into the home of a Boonesboro couple, shot the husband dead and “raped the wife every which way,” she said. “But, you’re okay by me if you’re okay by my husband. Melvin’s up in the far field, mowing hay. Can you cycle on tracks? Do you mind taking Ally with you? She doesn’t often get to cycle up the track.”
I was in.
The Boggs family farmed 250 acres of rolling upland. They grazed twenty-five head of beef and a dozen young calves which Melvin called “my babies.” Thanks to the European embargo against the import of hormone treated beef, the bottom had dropped out of the market, costing American cattlemen $500 million in lost revenue. Although Melvin didn’t treat his herd, he did think it was a lot of fuss about nothing. He wasn’t over concerned, though. He had retired, and the farm was just something to keep him ticking over, supplementing his pension. He thought about moving into cereal crops but, with soya and corn mountains growing, the picture wasn’t any rosier on the arable side of the fence.
Melvin Boggs was a lot older than his wife, and I would have confused Ally for his grand-daughter. Considering he was supposed to be taking it easy, the Boggs family annually nurtured five acres of tobacco, planted out from a seedbed about the size of a kitchen garden. For Howard County, this represented a sizeable stake in a crop which is labour intensive and very fickle. At different times in the cycle, Mr. and Mrs. Boggs and their two daughters were bent in the back-breaking work of planting out, harvesting, hanging and stripping tobacco, all by hand. Only the drying period provided respite and a little recuperation before the stripping that Ally so loathed. For a month after the sacks had gone to the agent, she found herself hacking up tobacco dust. For that, I had never felt more guilty about being a smoker.
Ally quizzed me about England, Robin Hood and my two dogs with seven legs, well past her bedtime. In front of us, dominating the driveway, the big yellow school bus caught the last rays and bounced them down to the lawn where we sat. It looked magnificent, every inch the star of the blacktop and symbol of all that is safe, secure and routine in American family life. Every adult has memories of riding the school bus and tales of woe or happiness to tell. Twice a day, it was a halfway house between the suffocation of home and the discipline of school, full of friends and enemies, intrigues and japes. The school run was the last time most Americans regularly travelled in a community of passengers, and they remember it fondly.
Though it put her in the unenviable position of having to be a goody two shoes, Ally was proud that her mum drove the school bus. Each new school day began with Mrs. Boggs sat at the steering wheel testing the whistles and bells.
“After a tragic accident,” her mum explained, switching the lights on and off, “we now have an arm that swings out from the bumper so children crossing in front of the bus are always visible to the driver.”
She pressed a button and the arm swung out. She pressed another and a Stop sign flicked out. In a design barely altered since the Reo Safety bus of the 1930s, there was nothing digital on Mrs. Boggs’ bus.
Everything double checked, Ally and her sister jumped aboard with their school bags, ready to start the morning run. Through the window, Ally pleaded for me to stay a second night, but I was anxious to keep moving. The Boggs’ came from a dynasty of small farmers whose roots were buried deep in Howard County. Their story might have filled some of the huge omissions in the Jefferson National Museum of Westward Expansion, but it was the stories of sculptor Michael Bauermeister which had been gnawing at me. What was up ahead that transformed his rides to the Pacific into such an ordeal? Surely not a couple of snarling dogs and a spot of wind? And if it was so terrible, why repeat the performance? While the going was good, I felt I needed to put miles behind me, to buy time for whatever was up ahead preparing to pounce.
There were steel fabricators and agricultural suppliers on the outskirts of Glasgow, USA, but the town itself was easily missed. The main road took a left at a high railroad embankment and crossed the river adjacent to the girder rail bridge. The two features were as a castle wall hiding the high street, but a narrow arch provided a discreet access I initially didn’t see. Beyond the portal, I found myself on a quay side among huge silos, grain elevators and warehouses. A little further on, the high street was lined with stores sporting several strings to their bow, like a laundromat doubling as an insurance agents.
I stopped off at Charlie’s Quik Chek to pick up supplies. Behind the deli counter, Charlie kept flicking his eyes up at the Scottish flag emblazoned on my baseball cap.
“Say, ain’t the original Glasgow in Scotland?” he asked. Shouting down the aisle to attract the attention of a customer, he hollered, “Hey, Sam, you wanna interview this guy. He’s from Scotland. Y’know, Glasgow, in Scotland.”
With his wife Barbara, Sam Audsley was the publisher and editor of The Glasgow Missourian. He was also the photographer, proof reader, advertising manager and star reporter, plus the manager of the custom printers which pushed out wedding invites and business cards. The headline news for the week was the resumption of grain barges leaving Glasgow.
Sam interviewed me down at The Outlook — a picnic area overlooking the river jammed between a row of workshops. I asked about the grain barges, explaining my disappointment at not being able to catch a boat upstream from St. Louis.
“The last fourteen days of April were the wettest on record. The river rose five feet above the high water mark for spring. We can’t get the barges in when it’s that high, but things are starting to settle down. A couple set off down stream last week carrying a million bushels, but nothing’s coming up. Mind you, the farmers can’t get into the fields, so what the hell. Until the river drops, the surface water behind the levees won’t subside. We’ve already passed the optimum date for planting out corn and we’re getting mighty close to the final date for soy beans. If the current weather persists, we’re are going to have another disastrous year.”
According to his own Missourian, farmers in the state had planted the lowest acreage of winter wheat since the 1970s. Last year’s harvest fetched the same prices as twenty-two years ago, but the soya and corn crop had flourished. Unfortunately that meant a glut and a buyer’s market, with huge surpluses enabling the big food processors to push down prices. A few farms had gone to the wall, Sam said, but the main victims were those companies supplying agricultural equipment, seed and fertilisers. The town had lost several businesses over the last twelve months.
Sam blamed interstates for distorting the public’s view of the countryside. In batting between cities on smooth blacktops which iron out contours, modern day motorists had lost the interaction they once had with the landscape and the small farming communities the old highways linked. With no communication between town and country dwellers beyond what they glean about each other from the media, the problems and frustrations of farmers were increasingly seen as the whinging of the well heeled.
“Most Americans don’t equate food with farming,” Sam said, “but then most of what they eat is so heavily processed you need five years at Yale to make sense of the ingredients label. The public just see farmers as people with a lot of land. They must be wealthy. The reality is patently otherwise. You say you stayed with the Boggs’. In this corner of Missouri the majority are like them, small farmers living hand to mouth.”
I crossed the river and climbed back into the hills riding through large areas of farm land either under water or dense with spring weeds. And I did ride through the fields — on farm tracks. I was determined to stay close to the river but between the bridge at Glasgow and the hamlet of Malta Bend, forty or so miles away, the Big Muddy squiggled in a twitchy arc to the north while the tarmac dipped to the south. The gap between road and river was a blank on my map and too big to venture into blind. I found my way through thanks a large-scale plan of the area nailed to the office wall of the Missouri Farmers Association depot outside Gilliam. It was a good move — the chart revealed I was entering 300 square miles of a maze as regimented and baffling as Hampton Court’s.
For several hours, I struggled through water-logged tracks and ankle deep mud across a bleak landscape of fallow fields. As darkness closed in, thunder rumbled along the Missouri valley and stars in the sky were extinguished. Through a thinning of woods to the north, the horizon suddenly pulsated with bright flashes which animated the trees into dancing shadow puppets. Like a night attack at the Somme, thunder and lightning reached a fever pitch. For nearly two hours, I huddled in my hastily erected tent and monitored the storm.
With an almighty crack, the ground jolted and the heavens opened. A second shaft of lightning struck the earth and shook it, lighting up the tent for a split second in which I saw my glasses case leap in the air like a genetically modified jumping bean. A third bolt grounded and the case leapt a little lower. I peeked through the fly sheet to check the heavy drumming was still the monsoon and not hail. Back in Indiana I had learned that hail was invariably an overture to a tornado.
The hail stones held off, but the deluge didn’t let up until early afternoon the next day. I lay in bed rereading Sam Audsley’s grim predictions about what would happen to the local economy if the weather didn’t rapidly take a turn for the better. When I finally decamped, I rode into a ferocious westerly heavy with freezing droplets which stung me like swarming bees. For twenty miserable miles there was no protection or shelter and my wheels were picking up mud like a rolling snowball collects snow.
At Malta Bend, the tarmac swung back up to shadow the Missouri. I left the mud behind but the wind blew stronger, unobstructed as it careered down the broad valley. I spent the afternoon fighting it and a telephone company. In an effort to call home, I tried the payphones in every village along Route 65, but couldn’t make sense of the recorded message which cut in as I dialled. At a couple of stops, a local popped up to see if I had got through. Expressions full of hope changed to resignation. It seemed Saline and Lafayette Counties were incommunicado.
I rode into the small town of Lexington and continued my efforts to contact Nottingham. Having again failed, I stopped a couple of blue rinse babes and inquired if there was a payphone in town which wasn’t owned by the Sprint telephone company. The women, both in their seventies and wearing figure hugging denims, explained that Sprint had the monopoly and I would probably have to cycle into Independence, thirty miles away, to find another supplier.
“We do have a lot of trouble with them,” the deary who looked like Nancy Reagan said, “but you could try the Chamber of Commerce. They might let you use their fax machine.”
It was important I made contact with Sandy. Since my return, something disturbing had haunted our weekly conversations — something she wasn’t telling me. Thanks to Sprint, I had missed our regular link-up by a couple of days and knew she would now be as worried about me as I was about whatever was going down with her. While waiting for the commerce office to finish with the one phone in town which didn’t connect to a pre-recorded message, I wrote my fax, concerned there would be no reply.
“I could let you talk to your wife,” the woman on reception said, “but if word got out they’d be queuing back down to Malta Bend.”
Not knowing what joyous little ghetto I might have to pedal through, I wanted to reach the Independence-Kansas City conurbation with daylight to spare, and was disappointed that I couldn’t give Lexington the time it deserved. It was a curiously impressive backwater of historic buildings and historic people, mostly well preserved. At some point it must have been an important town, but I couldn’t figure out why. Set high on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River, it certainly wasn’t a bridging point in the old days. Along the cliff edge, however, the beautifully restored antebellum mansions on Highland Avenue suggested somebody had made a lot of money here in the early 1800s. At the top of Jack’s Ferry Road leading up from the river’s edge stood another Madonna of the Trail. Lexington was once an important staging post on some historic highway, but which?
It was inevitable that, in researching such a convoluted journey, I would miss something significant. Five miles out of town, a modest historical marker beside a lay-by put paid to the mystery. I was now following nothing less than the Santa Fe Trail. If the swollen Missouri had cheated me out of sailing up to Independence, this simple plaque was ample compensation.
Along with the Oregon and California Trails, the Santa Fe Trail shared Independence, Missouri, as its starting point. One branch of the pioneer and argonaut trails adopted the line of the Santa Fe Trail into what became Topeka before peeling off north-west to snake through the midriff of America. The Santa Fe Trail meanwhile angled south-west to present day New Mexico. What I hadn’t appreciated was that the trade route south originally started in Franklin, near Boonville. Shortly after it was established in 1821, however, the Missouri section was washed away by the river and the jumping off point was shifted west to Independence.
Sooner than I was ready for it, the old Santa Fe Trail fed me into the outskirts of the Kansas City conurbation, past the gauntlet of throw-ups and into the tatty outer limits of Independence. The word on everybody’s shop front was ‘Thrift’. There was a Thriftway, Thrift Autos, Thrift Clothing and the Kingdom Come Mission Thrift Center. Second to ‘Thrift’ was ‘Pawn’. Avenue Pawn, Value Pawn, and plain Pawn were loosely interspersed with a rich selection of restaurants representative of the faces I saw cruising the sidewalks. Chinese, Mexican, Tex-Mex and Vietnamese outlets overwhelmed the burger bars, and it said something about the constituents of the borough that the Viet Tien Video store was doing a brisk business though it was only mid afternoon.
I should have stopped and walked around Independence, but knew nothing significant remained of its formative days as an assembly point for the start of the three great trails. In 1849, the present town of 120,000 souls was a village of a little over a thousand. Known as an ‘outfitting town’, the place was totally geared to the needs of the overlanders. If you required twenty wagons for your journey, they could be ordered at a price from Chicago. For a radius of a dozen miles around the village, over 10,000 people were camped up, preparing their kit and caboodle for the long haul through the American wilderness. More arrived by the day, mostly up the Missouri River, an eleven day journey (depending on how many sandbars they ran aground on). It had taken me six.
If not already convened in a joint-stock company, new arrivals scouted around for one to join. A sizable American city was camped in the grasslands, a conglomeration of neighbourhoods with names like the Boston and Newton Joint Stock Company, the Washington City Company, the Spartan Band and the Helltown Greasers. Having bought their way into a company of anything up to three hundred men, the argonauts spent the first couple of weeks on the trail going nowhere. They accumulated supplies (500 pounds of food per person), strengthened the simple farm wagons deemed most appropriate for the rough trail, sought advice on whether to use mules or oxen, and practised driving their ‘covered wagons’. They made tents, filled cartridges, salted beef, and learnt how to cook and play faro. When they were finally ready to leave, traditionally from Independence Square, many found themselves delayed by the cholera which rampaged through scores of camps. Their sick finally dead and buried, they pulled out crying, “Ho for California!” That spring, more than 35,000 apprentice prospectors set off from the banks of the Missouri to seek their fortune in the Sierra Nevadas.
My attempt to strike out from Independence was blocked by Route 24 feeding into another blessed interstate. Snared in the middle of a cloverleaf of motorways, I stopped a Mexican burdened down with shopping and asked him how to get to Kansas City.
“You sure you wanna go there?” he asked, “They just had a quake. Only a 2.8, but it’s left an eight foot deep crack in the hospital car park.”
Once again I was riding into a metropolis severed by a large river, this time the Kansas. Once again the map wasn’t showing me a bridge I could legally take to cross it. What was a little earthquake to add to my troubles?
Vaguely aware that downtown Kansas City had recently been revitalised but baffled why anybody would want to write a song about the place, I improvised my way down to the river’s edge. A cabby directed me to stick on 12th Street until it hit Route 169, my escape across the Kansas. From wherever I had arrived, I could see the bridge flying high, but no way to it. I cycled up and down the east bank, feeling my way through a ramshackle area of light industry and redundant meat packing plants. Finally I noticed a two storey box girder bridge carrying one of four interstates across the divide. The lower level was a disused road linking with nothing but a grass verge and concrete barriers. I pushed through the blockade and gingerly tested the roadbed. From over my head the reverberations of the interstate shuddered through the structure. Compared to the McKinley Toll Bridge, this flyer was solid as the Rockies.
Kansas City, Missouri, was the fourth and last Gateway to the West I passed through. For the Forty-Niners, it was the undisputed end of the United States and beginning of the wasteland. As one voyager wrote, ‘Here all the rules of the game changed, where a culture accustomed to travelling on a network of rivers adapted to an ocean of prairie’. Having crossed the great divide on my own private span, the rules of the game only altered because I immediately became lost. I pedalled up 3rd Street into a sprawl of shabby bungalows and littered sidewalks where groups of hooded youths eyed me with menace. On a street corner, a Sixties stereotype of a pimp openly handed over little packets to a nervous twitcher who was already well out of it.
Thinking the road out west lay due north, I rode deeper into the ghetto, past a barricaded Baptist Chapel and the church bus, parked in wasteland within a high security corral of chain link and razor wire. Finally I arrived at a leafy dead end where I received a friendly warning from a couple playing with their baby outside the last bungalow. Apparently the road west lay due south. “Ch’ou better ride, man,” the woman said, looking at her husband’s watch, “Ch’ou don’t wanna be round here whenna sun goes down.”
The Kansas River was the last major flow I would have to cross in an urban setting before reaching the Sacramento River in California. It was the last impediment I envisaged to my progress across America, but K.C. had one final trick up its sleeve. With a sense of relief, I returned to Route 24 and pulled away from the city, trapped in a flow of rush hour traffic black in skin and exhaust colour. Passing under the beltway of I-435, the road fell ominously silent. A quarter of a mile from the interstate, the tarmac came to an abrupt halt. A detour sign instructed me to backtrack onto I-435. Not just the road had been ripped up. For as far as I could see through binoculars, the landscape had been shaved by a fleet of earth movers parked the other side of the ‘KEEP OUT’ signs. I had no option but to hit the low gears and strike out due west, following caterpillar tracks between high banks of mud. Somewhere in front of the setting sun, I presumed the continuation of R-24 lay in wait.
A short distance into the crossing, a pick-up appeared from behind an escarpment and pulled up beside me. A thick set man who looked like an office worker leant out of the cab and gruffly informed me I was on private property. I told him I was going west and he told me to take the detour, so I told him I wasn’t allowed on the interstate and he told me that was my problem. I suggested that, since everybody had stopped work for the day and gone home, it was surely perfectly safe crossing the site. He suggested that was “totally fucking irrelevant. This here’s private property,” he repeated. “I can’t let you through. You’ve been told.”
He backed up and disappeared, leaving me weighing up no options what-so-ever. Then a maintenance wagon appeared from behind a different escarpment, this time containing a site worker wearing flick-up sun glasses. We went through the same arguments. He assured me there was a detour I could take, albeit slightly longer, and I assured him that I could be across this lot in quarter of an hour. “I’m running out of daylight,” I pleaded.
Finally he relented, warning me to keep a look out for earth movers putting in overtime.
“Thanks,” I said. “This country just isn’t geared for cyclists.”
“Yeh. Well, we growed up.”
Two thirds of the way across the site, with the continuation of the highway now in sight, I noticed a police car pull up in front of the far barriers. A copper climbed out and raised his binoculars. Jobsworth Number One had called in the law. While I resigned myself to spending the night in the cop shop, an earth mover slowly scraped a path in front of me. By the time it had passed, the police had disappeared.