Up there, along the Missouri River, north of St. Joe, the farmsteads these days appear wealthy, they occupy a different economic and social space from the little towns that grew up along the river and are now mostly sad and poor. Forest City, where Dad grew up, is a place I remembered as clean and prosperous. Maybe the future was clear to people older than me in the 1960’s when I last visited, but I thought then that the rhythms of its life were settled and constant. They weren’t.
My Grandma lived in a little clapboard place one street over from the Methodist Church, just down the hill a bit from ‘old Doc’ somebody’s place, the largest house in the town. (The good Doc must have been a source of much wisdom for my Dad because he told a lot of stories about him. Dad took a particular liking to Doc’s aphorism about drinking: you were a ‘damn fool’ if you took a drink before you were forty and a ‘damn fool’ is you didn’t after. The saying has more truth for me now that I’m well past forty; it was popular with Dad too in his later years.)
I couldn’t find Grandma’s house when I drove up from Kansas City two weeks ago. The Methodist Church was still there but it seemed smaller than I remembered.
About two streets further along, parallel to Grandma’s, lived my Aunt and Uncle. They were both teachers but my Uncle quit teaching to become the butcher and run the family grocery store that had been started by my Grandfather sometime in the 1920’s after Grandma and he decided a grocery store would be a better paying proposition than the bakery they first had in that space. And, hard at it was, the grocery store was a hell of a lot less work.
In summer my Aunt worked in the grocery store. They understood the concept of a vacation and I believe they took one or two over the years but mostly they worked. I think that for a lot of the folk up there, life and work were indistinguishable. This is an attitude that makes life more of a single piece – not a bad thing.
On of my most vivid memories of Aunt Margaret’s and Uncle Ross’s place was that the TV played in the morning; they watched the ‘Today’ show as they got ready. To me this was exciting. In our house we just didn’t play the TV until evening. Our mornings were a serious time, we got ready for work or school, we ate, we left, our individual tasks performed without background noise that I can remember.
But there was something more about the glowing TV in their living room; to me it was evidence of my Aunt and Uncle’s connectedness to life beyond Forest City and Holt County. It was a testimony to some of the values that they held to: Education was important, you needed to know something about the world. They chose to live there, rooted in the land but the blaring television was their acknowledgement of the wider world.
I had come to Forest City, that summer that is now many years faded, with a sense that I was traveling back in time. My head was full of Mark Twain and fantasies about life in Missouri river towns. Some of that expectation was met by the pace of life along the little lanes where my relatives lived. I walked out in the early, humid mornings, the air still cool, and poked down among the vines and brush that lined the creek in front of Grandma’s place. It always seemed that there was a lot of time available to me. But, I think I must also have been reassured that I still had an umbilical to the life of my nuclear family, carried out in a much more urban and seemingly ‘sophisticated’ place, far away, by the link that the TV in my Aunt and Uncle’s living room made between their world then, in a little river town, and the place I lived with my parents and sister.
That day as I drove around the frayed town, now a couple of weeks past, I couldn’t find my Aunt and Uncle’s house either. Later, at the café, I ate lunch. The food was no better than I remembered, more notable for its ability to take the edge off your hunger than any capacity to satisfy an esthetic. The owner, a man of about my age, had known my family and he remembered our name. Yeah, the farmhouse had been torn down some years before – I’d already figured that, so this information only depressed me a little bit more. On the other hand, the news that the building that had housed the grocery store was gone depressed me profoundly. It was just another blow. Where it stood in a row of connected brick shop fronts, was now only an empty and somewhat forlorn lot of uncut grass and weeds. What was the value of doing this?
Dad had inherited half of the store but gave it to my Uncle – who he really did love – for all the cigarettes he could smoke whenever he made one of his rare visits to Forest City. He quit later but I don’t recall what was substituted for the cigarettes.
Uncle Ross died of lung cancer some years before Dad died of the same evil disease. His passing shook Dad deeply. Ross’ death swept away the last props of the sense of permanency that Forest City gave to Dad’s peripatetic life. You see, my nuclear family moved a lot. That Forest City was there and populated with relatives and things that Dad remembered from his youth was important, it gave us some underpinnings, some stability that made our gypsy life easier. Dad and Mom met in Peru after the War. I was born in California but we moved to Mexico almost as soon as I could walk and had lived there for a number of years until Dad’s mining business failed. Later we lived in Arizona, Florida, North Carolina and Alabama, finally returning to Arizona where Dad lived out his last years. He called himself a ‘tramp engineer’.
The loss of tradition was sad but, thinking it deeper, it seems that maybe I’ve got an opportunity here; just as the ancestor whose family name I bear first left his roots behind – somewhere in Tennessee and, before that, in Virginia and England – to take up and own land that had never been owned before in Missouri (the concept being quite alien to the Indians who occupied it before us), I can put down new roots somewhere else, build something that more bears my imprint, that is more the result of an act more freely chosen by me and less dictated by people long dead. Maybe this little journey was a small epiphany?
-Santa Fe, 26 March 2005
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