My mental abacus wore thin counting yellow dashes, as I retraced routes a hundred times to get to fresh pavement, and I counted the dashes then too. Their number is staggering but unimportant. It’s only one more burden in my quiver of compulsions. The yellow dashes speak only one language, but the places and the people along the roadside, even the dead ones—especially the dead ones—they have better stories, and those stories connect the dots in this journey.
I packed along the eyes of Everyman and my car provided the persistent “putt putt” of Pac Man. The spirits of Chief Tatschaga and Black Dog guided me past the menacing signs of doom, always reminding that the end is near. The highways themselves reminded me of that, because each highway has an end. Highways have souls. They showed me.
My map’s cover spells Missouri. But the adventure could just as easily be Texas or Manitoba or Lilliput. The map called out the names; I traced the stories. Every fold in the Ozarks, every bend in the rivers, every drive down the main drag in 700 towns reminded me that even as my map sets the stage, it can’t produce the play. Maps squish miles into millimeters. They conceal identities even as they reveal names. They’re lazy and they won’t work on their own, preferring to doze, folded tight as a sleeping dog, gravitating to dark out-of-the-way spots like glove compartments and magazine racks.
Maps are threatened by a lot of things—by GPS devices that talk to us in a soothing female voice, by TV shows that tell us where to go even as they hinder us from getting started, by packaged tours that lead us by the nose, and by airlines that require us to be on time so we can wait, and stand in lines and take direction from people who wish they were on vacation. But mostly maps suffer from those twin bookends that fence the borders of our lives: familiarity and neglect. We drive toward familiar. We neglect almost everything else.
I drove up Highway 15 and took the back roads to Looney Creek. It’s a peaceful spot, like most country cemeteries. Gentle hillsides, breeze flowing through the trees. It’s where my mother’s great-grandfather is buried. But his demise was anything but peaceful. He was murdered in Macon during the Civil War, executed by Union soldiers who had arrested him and nine other local men suspected of being Southern sympathizers.
That was the Macon Massacre, September 26, 1862.
After the massacre, eleven-year-old Edgar Davis Drake helped family members bury his dad at Looney Creek Cemetery. And then Edgar returned to work the family farm on Tiger Fork with his mother and brother and sister. The war raged on around Shelby County, but it was over for the fatherless Drake family. Edgar would tell my mother the story until he died in 1942 and joined his father at Looney Creek.
Beyond this peaceful spot, on this autumn afternoon, the Great Impressionist had turned expansive soybean fields into giant green-and-gold palettes. Some fields, planted earliest in the spring, already had turned brown, the beans ready for harvest. The drive through the patchwork of soybean fields was reminiscent of a Monet canvas or a Van Gogh landscape. Green, speckled with bright yellows and bordered by buckskin browns. These vibrant fields were framed by hardwood forests, themselves changing into their autumn dress of maroon and orange and gold. On some of the fields, farmers were beginning to harvest the grain, and flocks of red-tailed hawks followed the combines as they chopped up the cornstalks and exposed the once secret trails of a thousand mice.
Back on the road, only minutes west of here, I knew my car would stop at Main Street USA. The real one.
The World’s Imagineer
It was cocktail hour when they cornered me. We were churning up the Tennessee River toward Chattanooga on an old paddle-wheel steamboat. Four hundred travel agents had turned the steamer into a floating tourism convention. A couple from Carolina put me on the defensive. They couldn’t resist the temptation to ask, “Why would anybody go to Missouri?”
My answer was a question. “Do you book family vacations to Orlando?”
“Hundreds,” they said.
“And Disneyland, too?”
“Of course,” they answered, and eyed me like I was an idiot.
“Well, after they’ve seen Main Street at the Disney parks, send ’em to Marceline to see the real thing,” I said. They looked puzzled at my blasphemy against the Great Disney. After all, on the world stage, Marceline’s main street remains a secret.
That’s understandable. A tiny Midwest town founded with little fanfare by the Santa Fe Railroad surely can’t have a main street that competes with the bright lights of Broadway, the music on Bourbon Street, the stars along Hollywood Boulevard.
Nevertheless, perhaps the most replicated street in the world runs through the middle of Marceline.
Flash back to 1955: Walt Disney had long since moved away from Marceline and made his mouse tracks in the world. But a half century hadn’t dulled Disney’s memories of the happiest time of his life. That’s why Marceline’s main street inspired Walt’s blueprint for Main Street at Disneyland. For sure, the Magic Kingdom’s Main Street was a communal effort among Walt and his art directors, who jazzed it up with bells and whistles and walking photo-ops in the forms of life-size cartoon characters. But every element of Disney’s Marceline is represented at the theme parks. The train station. The locomotive. The gazebo. The picture show. Walt described the essence of his Main Street vision: “Main Street is everyone’s hometown—the heart line of America. To tell the truth, more things of importance happened to me in Marceline than have happened since, or are likely to in the future.”
Even with Hollywood success, Disney remained loyal to his roots. “I’m glad I’m a small-town boy,” he said, “and I’m glad Marceline was my town.” So Main Street in Disneyland maintains that Marceline feel, albeit with more window dressing. Ditto for Disney World and for the other magic kingdoms from Paris to Tokyo. Walt Disney wanted them that way.
Marceline’s main drag wasn’t always known as “Main Street.” For most of its history, street signs carried its given name, Kansas Avenue. And the Missouri state highway map calls it Route JJ. But to anybody who sees it now, it’s Main Street USA, right down to the black wrought-iron street signs sprouting mouse ears.
It’s nearly impossible to travel more than one block in Marceline without opening a page in the storybook of young Walt’s life. The icons pop up everywhere, testament to Walt Disney’s influence on the town, and the town’s influence on Walt. The Walt Disney Post Office. The Walt Disney Elementary School. The picture show where Disney’s “The Great Locomotive Chase” premiered.
Kaye Malins’ eyes sparkle when she tells stories about the young imagineer. Her dad and Walt were pals. She showed me around town, pointing out the spots where young Walt first discovered the world. When he wasn’t hanging out downtown in a vacant lot beside a giant wall painted with a Coca-Cola logo, he might be found in his back yard engaged in what he later called “belly botany.” Lying on his stomach in a field, he’d conduct an up-close study of ants and aphids, crickets and critters. Indeed, the descendants of Jiminy Cricket still live here.
On every trip back home, Walt would depart the train and walk through Marceline’s Santa Fe depot, a building that fell into disrepair after his death. But Kaye Malins and crew brought it back to life as the Walt Disney Hometown Museum, with hundreds of artifacts like the Midget Autopia kiddie-car ride. Kaye says it’s the only ride Walt allowed to leave a Disney property and operate elsewhere.
Kaye is a walking encyclopedia on Walt’s Marceline years. She literally dreams Disney, living in his boyhood home on the outskirts of town. That’s a Disney tale in itself. Her father, Rush Johnson, became a business associate of Walt Disney. The partners
