April 15, Eminence.
We crossed Mark Twain National Forest on highway 19. I'd go back for a hike but not with a trailer.
Some of the hills seemed like walls rising in front of us, so steep you had to take them in first gear, grinding down to a painful crawl. Go out of the road and truck and trailer capsize and roll down the mountain. One of the circus trucks couldn't take it and had to be pulled by a tractor trailer, both inching along up the hills, a loony sight; the trucks are bright red and painted with the childish cartoons of the circus world, the crazy clown bellowing up the hill, out of steam but grinning; the strange caravan stopped once, almost at the top of a hill, and looked like they were going to slide all the way back down, a road service tractor and I behind with nowhere to turn but into the deep.
We're in Missouri.
I used to live in Columbia, going to graduate school at the University of Missouri in journalism. My friends Greg and Sally Foster still live there and I haven't seen them in over ten years; our friendship is of the word. Crossing into Missouri was like entering familiar territory, another one of all the homes I've added along the way, loving it, hating it but always wanting to go back once I left, a bad case of chronic dissatisfaction. Nowadays it's the opposite and whatever place I happen to be in is home, and maybe that's what they call middle age, the days are counted and you know it so you enjoy it while it lasts - and finally I do, staying hungry, staying foolish.
A sign in the fake frontier village shopping center behind the circus.
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