Corinna and Brian were keen to at least ride back from Carthage, and while my leg was hurting too bad to consider riding that far fully loaded, I was keen to visit our friend Edward and to see the recovery of Joplin.
Edward lives in nearby Carthage, but had the bad luck to be driving in Joplin when the tornado hit. His car was thrown approximately a half mile with him in it and landed on its roof with a pole skewering it from front to back. If he'd maintained a normal driving position while his car was being thrown about, the pole would have impaled him, but as it is, he made it out with miraculously minor physical injuries.
We took a more or less bicycle tour route going down. My xB was loaded with Brian and Corinna's bikes, Brian's B.O.B. trailer, all their touring/camping gear, my CPAP, changes of clothes, and against my better judgement our dogs.
I don't get the whole take your dogs everywhere impulse. I love our dogs, but I love for them to stay at home. If I leash train my cats, I can see taking them on some trips, but not multi-day out of town ones.
I am alone, in my marriage, in this view of pets and travel, and to her credit, Corinna does the vast majority of the dog-handling/managing/care when we take the hounds with us.
By the time we were in Harrisonville, I had my fill of interstate driving. US 71 is only recently dubbed 'Interstate 49' but it has long been the sort of road I hate to drive on—fast but incredibly boring.
Brian rode shotgun with a Missouri Gazetteer and we visited a pecan shop in Virginia, ran the dogs in a park in Drexel, saw an oil pump cowboy, and lots of scenic sorts of things getting to Carthage.
We even passed through Amsterdam, which had a windmill by it's caboose in the park. I think they could really pump up their tourism revenue if they used their name to justify legal drugs and prostitution.
We passed through Alba, which appears to have a sort of critical mass of the car unsafe at any speed, the Corvair.
We got to Edward's in a mere five hours. Or something like that. We enjoyed our trip along highways named 'V' and 'Y' and 'FF' but they took roughly double the time. It was such an eccentric route that when we called Edward for final guidance in to his Carthage estate, he kept asking where we were in 71 Hwy/I-49 and not seeming to hear when we said no, we came in on 96.
Some of the stuff at Edward's place was hard to identify. I asked about this swiveling truck thing and he didn't have any more notion how it came to be and for what than I did.
Edward also has cattle. Or his family does, I guess he doesn't have much to do with them except they're in his back yard and his dog plays with them.
Sheba kept barking at the cattle and it took me awhile to realize, she thought they were more dogs. And since they were the biggest dogs she'd ever seen, she figured she had to put up a big front to keep them from kicking her ass.
What I wasn't prepared for was our tour of Joplin. We did some fun stuff, ate a couple of meals out (Edward has a different sensibility about what is a 'good' place to eat than I, I would have definitely done the Colonel's Pancake House, for instance, but he seemed to think it might be almost lethal).
But when Edward started giving us a play-by-play of his tornado experience against a backdrop of the rebuilding effort, it got pretty heavy.
I guess I expected a mostly positive look at how marvelously all this has come back sort of story. There is definitely that. People have rebuilt about as fast as materials could be hauled in, new roofs, new houses, etc.
Between that are driveways to empty lots that appear to have no owner. And between all those new houses, so many twisted, shattered trees with dead branches and broken off limbs.
There are bright spots, a painted tree, rebounding neighborhoods.
But there were so many ghosts. The overwhelming nature of the tragedy is still near surface level.
I wondered at my friend Julie, I've known her since high school, and her career as a photojournalist. I was pretty set back by my own little photo-tour of Joplin a year and a half after the fact. She was there on assignment right after, took a picture that ran big on the front page of the New York Times.
Of course I wasn't the only photographer running abound Joplin shooting away. Which I found strangely comforting because I get the impression that our national attention span is so short that Joplin and it's kind get forgotten except maybe on anniversaries of disasters that make them famous.
We visited the gem & mineral museum as well, and even made an attempt on the George Washington Carver National Monument, getting there about ten minutes after it had closed.
My trip home, I didn't take the blue highways. Corinna and Brian are getting ready to cycle back, but I needed to get home with the dogs while I was still sharp, and since it was dark there wasn't a scenic advantage to those back roads. I got home in half the time, but with less than 10% the visual stimulation.
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