After leaving Kansas, my next scheduled stops were to visit friends & family in Hannibal MO, and Rochester IL. The line East was drawn directly through Columbia Missouri. It was one of the college towns we lived in for a while when I was a kid where I attended the second through fourth grades. There had not been any occasion for me to return for forty some-odd years, so I thought I’d stop in and check it out.
Finger Lakes State Park
As luck would have it, just to the North of town I located a fine spot to camp at Finger Lakes State Park. The weather was a bit drippy and cool, which was a shame because it would have been a great place to rent a kayak and paddle around at bit. The rain was just like Chain O’ Lakes in Indiana where I camped back in June – another park that featured small lakes linked by creeks. Only as I write this do I recognize the coincidence!
One really nice feature was a public shooting range just outside the State Park property. I’m not sure if it was operated by the county or state, but it was super nice and completely free to use. There were sections for different ranges from handgun out to 100 yards, complete with shooting benches and target stands. I took the opportunity to break out the pistols and shoot some paper targets. Seems I can still put the metal bits where I want them to go. Fun stuff.
Oakland Gravel Road
Oakland Gravel Road is paved now, but the name hasn’t changed. Pop said it was even when we lived there, but I guess “Oakland Asphalt Road” doesn’t have the the same ring to it. The house we lived in is still there, though everything seemed a lot less rural than in my 45 year old memories.
When we lived here, one of my pals was a chap named Wesley DeHaven. His family lived a couple houses down at a place that included a large bird house where they kept racing pigeons. They would drive them out miles away and release them, and time how long it took them to return home. Keeping the coop clean and feeding the pigeons took a lot of work, so the DeHavens had a hired man for that purpose.
Our family would get kittens from the pound for pets, but they kept running away (or so we thought). After going through several, we learned that the hired man was capturing any cats who came around the pigeon coop and would drown them in a bucket. Of course an open air building full of birds was irresistible to a cat, so he was putting a big dent in the neighborhood kitty population. Once he was discovered, he was fired and we stopped losing cats.
Lovejoy Lane & Blue Ridge Elementary School
Down the way from our old house was a street called Lovejoy Lane. Unlike OGR it truly was paved with gravel, and it went down to a small creek. There were few houses on that road, so as kids we considered it “the boonies”. Once my father took my Webelos den down to the creek to practice lighting fires on the sandbank along the water. Exciting stuff for a ten year old. Today Lovejoy is an unremarkable cut-through road connecting two subdivisions.
Heading in the other direction I retraced the route I used to ride my bike to attend Blue Ridge Elementary School. (Yes, back in the Seventies parents didn’t think twice about letting nine year old kids trek a half mile to school alone.) A landmark along the way was a spot in the valley between two small hills where a cesspool was located. Both my sister and I remember holding our breath as we pedaled madly trying to zoom past the stinky place before we had to inhale again. Now the area has modern sewer service, so the cesspool is gone, replaced with a field of very green grass. There’s probably enough fertilizer in that spot to grow basketball sized tomatoes if they wanted to.
I cruised past the school, but only took a single quick photo as I passed. It so happened that the school day had just ended, so the grounds were choked with moms in minivans, leaving no place to park. A lone man with out of state plates taking pictures of little kids coming out of their school was likely to attract attention I didn’t need, so I headed back to the camper.
Next time: Mark Twain Cave in Hannibal, Missouri
I was surprised by a public shooting range. Looked well cared for.