Bill Geist - Way Off the Road: Discovering the Peculiar Charms of Small Town America

Contents

For Jody, Libby, Christina, Willie,
and little TBD

Authors Note

This book is 100 percent celebrity free. It contains no trace elements of red or blue states or other corrosive political toxins. Contents are all-natural, free-range, organic nonfiction with no synthetic additives to enhance size or performance. People with wood pulp allergies should not eat this book. Same goes for beavers. Taken optically as directed it has zero carbohydrates and zero grams of trans fat. No animals were harmed, no press credentials required, and no public relations representatives involved in the manufacture of this book. If you experience an erection lasting for more than four hours while using this product, Id be really surprised. Pregnant women should not operate heavy machinery during childbirth. Contains no miracle diet, no key to riches, no names or e-mail addresses of the people youll meet in heaven. No refunds. No batteries required. May cause restless leg syndrome or inoperable brain tumors. We dont know. We still dont really know much of anything for sure, now do we?

Introduction

There is a world outside our own, out there and out of sight, between the coastsbetween Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Chicago and St. Louis, Kansas City and Denverwhere people live slower, closer to nature, farther apart spatially, yet somehow more attached; a world where money, celebrity, and raw ambition dont always hold sway, and where people tend not to take themselves quite so seriously. This book is about that vanishing rural world from whence we all came at one time and place or another.

It is also about celebrating unique individuals who are resourceful, eccentric, idiosyncratic, and at times just plain battyyet oddly inspiring: an entrepreneur who ingeniously sucks problematic prairie dogs out of the ground with a sewer vacuum; a ninety-two-year-old publisher-pilot who delivers his newspapers by plane; the sole resident of a town who, as mayor, must hold public hearings with herself.

The year 2007 marks twenty years that Ive been on the road for CBS, and Ive seen a lot of unusual things. This thought occurs to me while watching a thousand sword-wielding medieval soldiers in full battle regalia and battle cry come charging down the side of a piney ravine toward a rendezvous with an opposing army stampeding down the other side. The warriors slash, stab, and spear one another with rattan weapons all the way up to the lunch break. Boy, if the people just over the hill on I-59 could see this! I am the only audience to this epic battle, which takes place outside Lumberton, Mississippi (pop: 2,228), in the twenty-first century, but no one here seems to realize this, lost as they are in their weekend medieval personas, eating medieval fare, wearing authentic garb, and speaking in stilted medieval language. For the likes of King Alarek of the Kingdom of Ans Theora (Texas and Oklahoma) and Orm the Wanderer of Trimaris (Florida), indeed for all the viscounts, dukes, exchequers, and others, its going to be tough to snap out of it back at the office on Monday morning. They refer to this as returning to the Mundane World. Indeed.

There is nothing of the Mundane World here. The people in this book live in the Mundane World but are not of it.

Traveling to forty-nine states, I have learned much about this nation, but few overarching truths except to say that, truth is, there arent many that hold true. Ive learned that the Amish play a mean game of donkey basketball (a Midwestern thing, where basketball players ride donkeys). Who knew? I thought they were like Quaker pacifists, but the night I saw them play in Middlefield, Ohio (pop: 2,233) they were ferociously competitive and aggressive in overpowering the firemens team. Fans packed the gym and filled the parking lot with their buggies. America is full of surprises.

We dont learn much about our country on the interstates, except that Americans are in a hell of a hurry and happily trade speed for wonder and discovery. Today Tocqueville would cross the country on I-80 from Jersey to Frisco, faithfully recording the exit numbers; Kerouacs On the Road would take place in an endlessly repeating pattern of Holiday Inns and Dennys; Least Heat-Moon would author Green Interstate Highways.

Flying, of course, is even worse. On a trip from Los Angeles to New York, crossing the Rockies on a clear day, I gaze down in awe, contemplating these majestic peaks when a flight attendant comes on the PA and orders us to pull down our window shades so that we can better enjoy todays in-flight movie, Dude, Wheres My Car?

I dont mind saying that in twenty years I have gained a measure of fame. One Sunday morning outside Lebanon, Indiana (pop: 14,222), I rang a farmhouse doorbell to ask if our crew could get a shot of the basketball hoop on their barn. I could see through the sheer curtain on the door window that the family was watching television. A young boy of about ten opened the door and took a step backward, wide-eyed and in an apparent state of shock. Its him! he shouted. Its the guy on TV! I looked past him and saw that a segment of mine was at that moment showing on their screen. After explaining about the hoop, I told the family that we like to get out and personally thank each viewer for watching the show.

I didnt know when I started that this book was going to be about small towns. I began writing about my favorite experiences and, after Id written eight, realized theyd all occurred in very small towns. Why, Im not really sure.

A return to my roots? My parents ran a country newspaper, the Fisher Reporter, in Fisher, Illinois (pop: 1,647), with some coverage of news from other towns in the Greater Fisher Metro Area, towns with quirky names like Normal and Oblong. My fathers favorite headline was OBLONG WOMAN MARRIES NORMAL MAN.

They moved to the big city, Champaign (pop: 60,000, then), where I grew up. It was still pretty provincial. I realized in flipping through an old yearbook recently that our foreign exchange student was from America. Hawaii. Who knew?

I made my way to Chicago, which my father had warned me was full of all manner of evil and badness: crime, filth, immorality, DemocratsIt was a new world of subway trains and skyscrapers and somehow tolerated intolerables: unending traffic jams, cramped quarters, and everyday rudeness that would get you punched out back where I came from. The suburbs tried to pretend they were small towns, except there were two hundred of them cemented together, literally, and attached to the city.

If Chicago was to me a different world, New York was an entirely different planet, light-years from Normal. People lived in NASA nose-cone-size apartments, in threatening neighborhoods near nothing, with smelly trash on the sidewalks (somebody forgot the alleys when New York was built), and paid exorbitant prices for the privilege. There were people in Manhattan, which is legally part of America, who didnt own TV sets or cars!

You could read fellow passengers watches and newspapers on the subway. Restaurant tables were so small and close together (two inches) you practically had to eat without using your arms, like it was a pie-eating or apple-bobbing contest. Fellow human beings came to be considered obstacles: in restaurants, on the roads, on the sidewalks. A cabdriver disclosed to me: Ive always considered courtesy a sign of weakness.