The Longest Road

by Philip Caputo

  Done brushing, Woods bent down with a pick, lifted one of Beauty’s forefeet, and scraped the mud caked in her hoof. I admired the economy of his war story. He’d produced a full-length documentary with that last sentence.

  He planned to make a career of the service and did three tours in Vietnam. When he got orders for a fourth, he concluded that the navy was trying to kill him and got out, after ten years in uniform. He has no regrets. “I was ornery as a kid, bad ornery, even mean. Vietnam took all that out of me, it changed me for the better.”

  He paused in the hoof picking and turned philosophical. “I’ve figured out by livin’, and it took me years to learn this, that you can’t control nobody in this world but you, and that’s a full-time job. Because if you lose control and get mad and angry—which I usta get bad mad—you’ve lost control of the only thing in this world you can control. You can’t control what people say to you or do to you or how they act toward you, but you can control how you take it. Like an old boy told me one day that I was ugly, and I said, ‘Well, I didn’t realize that but I’ll work on it.’”

  “But you’re not, Jerry,” I interrupted, laughing as I pictured him consulting a cosmetic surgeon.

  “It’s all in your perspective,” he went on, over the neighing horses, the screeching cicadas. “Like the little boy whose daddy come inta the house and asked, ‘Son, did you roll the outhouse off the hill?’ And the little boy said, ‘Dad, just like George Washington, I cannot tell a lie. Yes, I did.’ And his dad beat the shit out of him. When he got done cryin’, he said, ‘Dad, when George Washington’s dad asked him if he cut down the cherry tree and George said I cannot tell a lie, yes, I did, George’s dad didn’t whip him.’ And the little boy’s dad said, ‘Yes, son, but George’s dad wasn’t in that cherry tree, was he?’ Like I said, it’s all in your perspective.”

  After his discharge, Woods went to work for the federal government as a mechanic in a warehouse in California. Like his father before him, he was drawn back to the Ozarks when he retired. Unlike his father, he didn’t have to sharecrop for a living. With his government and military pensions, he had the means to buy a place of his own, on land Oren Woods had tilled behind a mule-drawn plow. And there, Woods fulfilled his boyhood dream to raise and train horses.

  “It’s up there on the hill past the graveyard. The house that’s there now ain’t the house that usta be there—an old sharecropper’s shack. I’ve got pasture for my mares. Hadn’t been for Miss Carol, it would all be under water now.” He choked up, his eyes growing damp. “I just love it here, the hills and the rivers. Wouldn’t trade places with anyone.”

  Leslie and I walked back to our cabin, talking about Woods’s hard-won philosophy.

  “That man,” she observed, “has saved himself a hundred thousand dollars in psychiatrist’s bills.”

  Later on, after lunch, I met the kinder, gentler Carol Springer. She served me ice-cold lemonade in her kitchen and reminisced about the Meramec Valley Irregulars’ fight against the Corps of Engineers—a good time to be green in America, she said, the days of Ed Abbey and his Monkey Wrench Gang.

  She seemed, this petite midwestern farm woman, aware that she sometimes came off as edgy; though she didn’t apologize, she did point out that she came from a long line of spirited, independent women who broke convention or picked fights with formidable adversaries. A great-aunt graduated in journalism from Columbia University in 1904, when journalist was synonymous with newspaperman. Another female relative, as Springer would do decades later, locked horns with Washington in the thirties, stopping a federal road-paving project because it would have required felling a treasured grove of trees on her land. As for herself, Springer “never wanted to be someone who said, ‘Yes, sir!’ If you’re not uppity, you get stepped on.”

  I’d put a thousand dollars on the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series before betting on the chance of anyone stepping on her. She refilled my glass and expanded on her theory of survival through adaptation.

  “Take me. I’m bilingual. I learned to speak urban. I can speak to city people in a way my kinfolk couldn’t. That’s how we stopped the dam. We got a referendum of the people because I and other people could speak urban.”

  And then came her complicated laugh—self-deprecating but tinged with a sarcasm that said she didn’t think highly of the urban tongue.

  The campaign against the dam was long ago. What about today? How had the Great Recession affected life on Meramec Farm? It hadn’t. Cattle prices had hit a high, and there were more cattle than people in Crawford County. It was good to be a minority, Springer wisecracked. Fewer car wrecks, no crime, quiet neighbors that do nothing all day but munch grass.

  She and Andy and Jerry were another kind of minority—rural Americans, who now accounted for, at most, 17 percent of the population, a statistic she lamented. When she was a kid, her elementary school classmates knew what a cow was and what was done on a farm even if they weren’t from farm families. Folks these days seemed to think their supermarket vegetables and chickens and beef came into existence wrapped in plastic.

  “It’s not a great evolutionary thing to be so distant from where your food comes from,” she said.

  Everyone else upon whom I’d sprung my Big Question had to ponder before answering. Springer didn’t hesitate a beat, as if she’d already given it considerable thought.

  “I think the glue is a belief, that’s not clearly defined, that we have more in common than not, that we’re more alike than we’re different. I’m not sure it’s true, but the important thing is that we believe it is.”

  In other words, the perception becomes the reality?

  She shrugged. “I’ve been known to believe I’ll get home in the dark in the rain. I’m not convinced, but I believe I will, and I get there.”

  15.

  Next day, wanting to try out Springer’s barter arrangement—she will trade a night in a cabin for work on the farm—I offered my services. When it came to agricultural work, my résumé was pretty skimpy. I could operate a chain saw, but she didn’t need any wood cut; I could muck out the horse stalls, but that was Sofia’s job.

  “Can you drive a tractor-mower?”

  Yes!

  “Then you can mow my lawn.”

  I’d never driven a tractor-mower but reckoned that it didn’t require a license. Andy, a muscular man of twenty-two, led me to a shed where the machine resided, showed me the starter button, the gearshift, and the lever for raising and lowering the rotary blade. I took my seat and sputtered off. The lawn covered close to an acre; it was littered with sticks, broken up by trees and bushes, and had many dips and embankments, but I was determined to make it look like a Pebble Beach fairway. It came to me that I wanted to please Carol Springer; at least I didn’t want her telling some future guest that she had this writer who claimed he could drive a tractor-mower and made such a mess of her lawn that she had to call in a landscape crew to resod the whole thing.

  When my labors were done, I took the absence of criticism as praise. Inspired, I decided to give Andy a hand mowing a hay meadow. That notion dissolved as soon as I saw him, in a straw cowboy hat and wrap-around sunglasses, mounted atop a much larger, more complicated tractor pulling a disk-mower, an expensive piece of machinery prone to breakage if it was run over rocks. I contented myself with listening to a tutorial on the fine points of making hay. The stuff in this field was inferior because there were too many weeds; it would be baled by a round baler for cattle feed. The higher-quality hay in an upper field would be baled by a square baler for horse feed or for sale.

  Levelheaded, clear-sighted, serious without being a bore, Andy was a senior at the University of Missouri, where he majored in animal science with minors in business administration and English (there appeared to be a literary strain in the family). His ambition was to go on to veterinary school, then establish a practice and manage the farm.

  He was working his way through college in untypical fashion, paying for tuition and ex
penses with profits from his cattle business. He’d been in it since he was fourteen, when he’d inherited the Meramec Farm’s herd and seventy more head on another farm from his grandfather. There seemed to be little he didn’t know about breeding and the nuances of the market; he kept an eye out for fluctuations in the price of feed-corn, which dictated at what weight he would sell his steers and heifers. Sometimes he had to leave the campus in Columbia and come home, a two-and-a-half-hour drive, to deal with a cow with a prolapsed uterus, to treat a sick calf, or, as happened once, to repair a quarter mile of fence ripped apart by a tornado. Doing all that while carrying a full load at school, crewing on the rowing team, and maintaining a relationship with his girlfriend left little time for trivialities like, say, social networking.

  The one sure sign that you’ve entered geezerdom isn’t gray hair, wrinkles, wattles, or waning physical powers; it’s the conviction that the younger generation is going to hell and taking everyone with it. I guess it’s ever been so. Geriatric Cro-Magnons, huddled in their drafty caves, probably moaned that the tribe was done for because their kids were too lazy or inept to kill mastodons. Listening to Andy, I felt that the country’s future was in good hands, or at least in hands no worse than those of earlier generations. But he was a rarity in twenty-first-century America, rooted in the soil. He’d inherited a herd of cattle and with it the responsibility to care for it and the land that had sustained his family. His work as husbandman (now there’s a word you never hear anymore) had hastened him into maturity. He had a seriousness I’ve seen in young war veterans—without the nervous tics, the jumpiness, and all the dark legacies that war confers. Life isn’t a joke, time is too precious to waste texting inanities to your friends for hours on end. His mother had been onto something when she said that it’s good to know where your food comes from.

  Andy knew where his came from. He looked it in the eye, there on the pastures trod by his forebears for two hundred years.

  * * *

  In the afternoon, at an outfitter called Ozark Outdoors, Leslie and I rented a canoe for a firsthand look at the waterways saved by Springer and the Irregulars. The white-haired, white-bearded man who drove us in a van to the launch point wore a LIVE FREE OR DIE tattoo on his forearm. That being New Hampshire’s state motto, I asked if he was from there. Nope, he answered in a clearly non-Yankee accent. Missouri born and bred. Worked as a welder in the Chrysler plant and made good money till it shut down and moved to Mexico. He’d taken a buyout, spent most of it on home improvements and big-game hunting trips all over North America, and had to go back to work. Now he welded for Ozark Outdoors but occasionally transported canoes and canoeists to the rivers. He complained that the United Auto Workers union (to which he’d belonged) and government regulations were responsible for the Chrysler factory’s migration to Mexico.

  “In a plant that big, you need unions,” he said. “You need government regs like OSHA, but they didn’t know where or when to stop. The company couldn’t afford it and the corporate taxes we’ve got in this country.”

  As the son of a union man and a former union man myself, I thought he was being too kind to the Chrysler Corporation. Sure, if bigness was the font of the nation’s economic sorrows, Big Labor would not have been guiltless if it was still big. But it wasn’t. Like Chrysler’s muscle cars, it had been scaled down, stripped of its (figurative) fins and chrome and V-8 engines.

  We put in at a landing on the Huzzah, a tributary of the Courtois (pronounced, in a corruption that would horrify a Parisian, Coataway), which spills into the Meramec. Gliding over gravel shoals and through dancing riffles in our metal canoe, I reflected on the odd consequences of history. The end of the Vietnam War, no less than the efforts of conservationists, brought salvation to the Meramec River valley. Grumman, which had been building warplanes, found itself with immense stockpiles of surplus aluminum and began turning out canoes. Disdained by purists, the aluminum canoe was popular with weekend duffers and outfitters because it’s rustproof, weatherproof, and laughs at the rocks that can rip out the bottoms of the wood-and-canvas vessels. In a short time, the Meramec and its sister streams were busy with canoeists, and, as their numbers grew, landowners fighting the dam project gained an army of allies, without whose support the battle might have been lost.

  The waters of the Huzzah and Courtois ran clear and golden brown, and in the deeper pools we saw garfish, like silver spears, and smallmouth bass finning against the current. I am a passionate fly fisherman, and I love rivers and creeks more than I do lakes. Rivers take you places; lakes confine you. Rivers change, channels flowing into oxbows, rapids tumbling into flat water, pools tailing out into riffles; lakes stay the same. We coasted through the mouth of the Courtois into the broader Meramec, rounded a bend, and passed other canoeists, rafters, tubers, and picnickers, who waved and called out things like, “Hi, y’all havin’ a good time? Pretty day to be on the river.”

  I dislike crowds, but on that sparkling June afternoon it gave me pleasure to see so many people enjoying themselves on a river running free. Its liberty, its very existence, was Carol Springer’s legacy, and a good one.

  She saw us off the next morning with a lovely phrase: “You should come back in the fall. When the light falls on the trees, it’s like looking through a stained-glass window.” Though I’m a chronic wanderer, a part of me envied her, Jerry, Andy, and Dell, fixed to one place and content to be there.

  * * *

  It was a Saturday, June 10, my seventieth birthday. I’d reached the life span allotted by the Bible,1 a milestone I marked rather than celebrated on several roads: Interstate 44, Missouri Routes 19, 94, and 63; I-70 (to make better time, I’d again broken my no-interstate vow). What I remember of this itinerary was the forlorn charm of Route 94, winding alongside the swollen Missouri, and the sudden, dramatic appearance of the capitol building dome, bulging from out of distant trees as we approached Jefferson City. The building itself lived up to the grandeur promised by its dome, an imposing, many-pillared structure that looked as if it aspired to surpass the nation’s capitol. We parked and walked across the street to a memorial plaza dedicated to Lewis and Clark.

  On its twenty-second day out from the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, the Corps of Discovery—about three dozen men plus Lewis’s Newfoundland hound, Seaman—stopped at what’s now Jefferson City to repair a broken mast on their keelboat. An ensemble of bronze statues dominated the plaza: Meriwether Lewis, with Seaman at his feet, peering through a telescope; George Drouillard, a trapper clad in buckskins, standing with a flintlock resting against his shoulder; York, William Clark’s black slave, sitting beside a hatless Clark, who takes a sight with a sextant. The genial, redheaded Clark was the expedition’s cartographer. In sunlight and rain, in mosquito-ridden heat and blizzard, he noted compass bearings, mileages, and sextant readings in a leather-bound journal with quill and ink several times a day every day for the eighteen months it took the corps to reach the Pacific. He estimated that they had covered 4,162 miles. He was off by forty miles.

  * * *

  We overnighted in a Kampground of America outside Independence, a country town when Harry Truman was born there, now welded in asphalt and concrete to Kansas City. Leslie had noticed on our many KOA stays that the letter c was prohibited at the KOA. Guests bought food and supplies at the Kampground Store; those unequipped with trailers could rent a Kozy Kabin.

  For my birthday, my lady treated me to dinner at Hereford House, a landmark eatery noted for—surprise!—beef. She ordered pork ribs, served in such abundance that she took half a hog’s worth home in a doggie bag. I had a Kansas City strip, the finest steak I’d eaten anywhere, including Gene and Georgetti’s in Chicago. We ferried the rib scraps and steak fat back to the dogs at the kampground.

  It struck at eleven that night, a storm such as only the prairies can dish out, a gale-force wind shaking Ethel, rain and hail clattering against her roof. I ran outside in my underwear to close the hardtop’s window
s. I was soaked in seconds and pelted by hailstones. As the dogs would have no fresh air, I coaxed them out of the truck and led them into the trailer, where they shook themselves dry, licked my legs in gratitude, and promptly went to sleep on the floor. Leslie looked at them and drew in the perfume of wet gundog.

  I took a towel to myself and went back to bed, and that was how I spent the first night of my seventy-first year.

  The “lean and slippered pantaloon” is the sixth of the seven ages of man recited by Jaques in As You Like It. Now that I’d begun my journey to the seventh and the extended care facility awaiting my arrival there (“Mere oblivion,” saith Jaques. “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”); now that I turned to the obituary before the sports page, spirits rising when I read of the passage of nonagenarians, tumbling when the deceased were in their seventies; now that I was forced to listen to my peers narrate sagas about surgeries and infirmities, I reflected on Jaques’s soliloquy. The pantaloon refers to the snug, youthful hosiery worn by rusted-out Elizabethan males trying to look young.

  I vowed never to make myself ridiculous by adopting the dress, mannerisms, and slang of twenty-, thirty-, or even forty-somethings. I would not rinse what was left of my hair in Grecian Formula or address my male friends as “dude” or say things like “cool app.” The sixth-ager’s task is not to preserve the illusion of youth; it is to avoid nostalgia and remain relevant for as long as possible—tricky in an era when just about everything becomes obsolete in six months.

  How to stay current without latching onto every trend, how to age without growing into a cranky old fart mired in the past—those were my questions. I drew inspiration from my grandparents’ generation, because it, more than my parents’, lived through a time of dizzying technological change, radical upheavals in society. My paternal grandmother, Rose, born in Chicago in 1894, married in 1913 wearing a whalebone corset, was twenty-six before women won the right to vote. She lived well into the era of miniskirts and the feminist movement. She remembered horse-drawn fire engines, gaslight, wooden sidewalks, and hearing about the Wright Brothers’ first flight. At seventy-five, in my parents’ family room, she sat beside me watching Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, shaking her head in disbelief.