Henry's Rabbit Ranch

Grand Tour 3: The Road as a Museum to Ordinary Eccentricity

This entry is part 3 of 22 in the series Grand Tour

Monday, April 30, 2018 Springfield to St Louis

I resume the long-delayed transcribing of my Grand Tour travel diary in the midst of a pandemic which has meant, among other inconveniences, that I am at home on my laptop instead of somewhere in Utah, as originally planned for this October. Some say that the purpose of travel is to accumulate memories. If so, revisiting these diaries ought to be better than actually travelling. In some sense it is. Memory leaves out the tedious bits, the inconveniences, the frustrations and delays. Hopefully this account leaves them out too. Still, I’d rather be on the road right now. But here I sit and reminisce.

Route Map Springfield to St. Louis

On this day, May 1, 2018, we take a fairly short drive from Springfield to St. Louis, leaving time for various detours and bits of sight seeing.

While Route 66 is a 2500 mile open air museum, a Beamish Museum / Upper Canada Village / Colonial Williamsburg, right down to the original section of red brick pavement or the concrete section with the turkey tracks, both of which we drive today, it is less “authentic” than those sites in the sense that the old bits are scattered among all the new bits.

Red brick section of Route 66

Route 66 does not provide a full recreation of the historical experience such as you get from the formal outdoor museum sites. But the Route 66 experience is in some ways more authentic. You are not shopping in the shops at Beamish, nor digging coal in the mine or catching a train at the railway station. You are not doing what people did in these places in times past. At best you are watching reenactors do it. But on Route 66 you are doing what everyone who drove Route 66 was doing. You are driving to a real destination with the real, if tarnished, allure of California. If the trek is less arduous than it was for the Joad family, it is still a trek. It still requires stamina. You are still following the Mother Road for real, and I can’t think of another outdoor museum that really gives you the opportunity to do the thing for real the way Route 66 does.

Route 66 parallels railway tracks for much of its route. We see lots of trains, which is cool. I like trains.

We stop at Henry’s Rabbit Ranch. That is Rabbit as in Volkswagen, not rabbit as in bunny. There is no designated place to park. You sort of nudge your car in somewhere and hope it’s not in the way. For a roadside attraction aimed at passing roadies, this is passing strange. But it is part of the ordinary eccentricity of the road. (“Ordinary eccentricity” has become, for me, the unifying characteristic of the Route 66 experience.)

Henry's Rabbit Ranch

The Rabbit Ranch owner loves to tell his story: the ranch is a hobby that became an obsession. Some might call it hoarding. (Okay, I would call it hoarding.) But hoarding becomes a virtue, an exercise in ordinary eccentricity, if you put up a sign. And ordinarily eccentric if you don’t tell roadies where to park.

We buy a Bob Waldmire print for our artist daughter in law. The owner knew Bob Waldmire, who passed through many times before he died. He has Bob Waldmire’s old VW Rabbit that he used before the VW bus and school bus that we saw at the museum in Pontiac. The Rabbit is a station wagon with a wooden addition on the roof like the more ambitious one on the school bus. But there is none of the junk/detailed annotation of the other vehicles. And here is not being preserved, it is merely being kept.

Bob Waldmire's Rabbit

That seems to be a recurring feature of the ordinary eccentricity of the road. While there are lots of laudable preservation efforts, sometimes it is just about keeping stuff, not preserving it. Preservation seems a sane and forward looking approach, but somehow more mundane than simply keeping things. Preservation corporatizes the experience. Keeping is more consonant with the ordinary eccentricity of the road.

I suppose this happy state cannot continue forever. At as certain point what is not preserved will be forgotten, abandoned, and knocked down (as so much of it already is) or simply fall to bits. We will be left only with the preserved and the restored, and that will be fine and lovely, but it won’t be the same.

This kept not preserved thing is repeated all along the road. It adds a sense of urgency to the trip. Any of this may be gone at any time. Ordinary eccentricity has no succession plan. When the current owner dies, no one would know how to keep the thing up. It is an extension of the personality of the eccentric and will become mere junk the moment the animating spirit departs. The preserved parts of the road are important too. But without the merely kept it would be less a living thing than it is.

Of course, some of it is not even kept. It is simply abandoned and has not finished falling down yet. There is far too much of this to keep, let alone preserve. Will Route 66 be the same when places like Afton (later – in Oklahoma) finish falling down?

Seeking lunch on the approach to St Louis, we stopped at the Luna Café on Chain of Rocks road. It is authentic. This is an American word meaning the roofline sags and it has not been painted in 30 years. It looks rough and Anna is hesitant to go in. But we are the only car in the lot (not a Harley in site) and I am in a mood to go on all the rides on this trip, so in we go, our hands over our wallets. We are greeted cheerfully by the woman behind the bar who, eccentrically enough, does not tell us the entire history of the business (perhaps, she does not own it). The place is just a bar now so there is no lunch to be had. She asks if we want something to drink but is not in the least put out when we say no. Having no prospect of getting business out of us does not change her mood in the slightest. She invites us to take all the pictures we want. I get Anna to stand in front of various things while I take pictures of them.

Luna Cafe

I think it is here that I start to think of this project as “Anna standing in front of 100 things across America”. The name will not stick, but this business of taking pictures of oneself or loved ones standing in front of things is definitely a piece of contemporary ordinary eccentricity.

The barkeep directs us to the local lunch place, the Itty Bitty Café, a half mile back the way we came. The building is almost as authentic as the Luna Café, but loses one authenticity point for having been painted in recent memory. There is Route 66 memorabilia on the walls, some of it seemingly older than the road itself. Also a second-rate folk-art Route 66 map painted on the wall long ago. But the place is clean and the staff are pleasant in the rural way of people just being who they are at work, instead of who they are trained to be, and talking about what interests them in the words they use at home instead of speaking out of the employee handbook.

Ordinary eccentricity again. Ordinary eccentricity, it seems, does not waste a lot of time and money on paint. Or fixing things. (Or rather, it either spends nothing or far more than is needed.)

The food is good in a local hangout kind of way. I had a catfish sandwich and it was well cooked and delicious. But it is served on two pieces of plain bread out of the packet with one slice of lettuce, two slices of tomato and one of onion on the plate beside it. Presentation is not part of the product at the Itty Bitty Cafe, either in the building, the furniture, or the plumbing. It doesn’t need to be. We are the only customer who are not greeted by name – the only non-regulars. People walk in to pick up phone orders and also greeted by name. They exchange bits of news. It is a busy place – a popular place. Customers gossip from table to table. This is a place where people meet people, not a place where customers meet brands. You can’t package this as a franchise. Nor, I suppose can you protect it or nurture it or encourage its development or preservation. It is a virtuous weed that can only grow in neglected ground. Prosperity is not without its downsides.

We get stuck at a red light to cross the one lane bridge that leads to the parking lot for the now closed Chain of Rocks Bridge. I stopped just short of the loop in the road that activates the light. After much waiting and holding up other people, I am instructed by a local.

There is only one other car in the lot at Chain of Rocks parking lot. The weather is hot but dry. You have to walk a long way out on the bridge before you can see the river, and since we know our hotel is going to be overlooking the Mississippi, we decide not to bother walking out that far. Apart from the bend in the middle and its period narrowness, it is an unremarkable-looking bridge. The significance is in what it meant, not what it is. It is not a feat to marvel at, unless you think about driving a truck across it, and meeting another truck in the middle. Bridges seem so routine now that it is hard to realize the enormous developmental significance the older ones had when they opened. Today a new bridge may take a few minutes off your commute. When bridges like Chain of Rocks were built, they took days off a journey.

Chain of Rocks Bridge

We proceed towards downtown St Louis and the Gateway Arch. I hate driving in downtowns, especially in places where everything is twisted around a freeway and its on ramps. Everything comes at you far too fast and makes too little geographic sense and the contrast between the speed of the native who knows how it all works and the visitor who does not is so great as to be terrifying and frustrating to both.

And boy is it noisy. All cities are noisy to one degree or another, but downtown St. Louis is particularly cacophonous. This is not helped by construction in front of the hotel, but no matter where we walk, we are surrounded by constant noise. I wear noise cancelling earbuds the whole time. Don’t leave home without them.

We walked to the arch. The weather is really not so hot, and it is unusually dry for St. Louis, but we are not acclimatized. It feels hot to us, so we take it easy and don’t go far or fast.

The arch is a marvel, but there is not much to do with it. One can explore a church or a ruined abbey for hours, but the arch is so simple that by the time you have walked up to it, under it, and touched its steel flanks, you have pretty much exhausted the experience. (You can ride an elevator to the top, but we don’t because of our claustrophobia – besides our hotel room provides a 14th story view of the river and the city, so the view from the arch would provide little advance on what we have.)

The Gateway Arch, St. Louis

The arch may be eccentric, but there is nothing ordinary about it. We check an item of the to-see list and move on.

We walk down to the Mississippi to look at it. Anna elects to skip the ceremonial dipping of the finger that she usually practices at each significant body of water we visit. The water does not look welcoming.

We see a large heavy chain embedded in the the asphalt of the road. Eccentric? Certainly not ordinary.

Chain buried in asphalt.

We eat ice cream and walk back through park to check out the brew pub for which the hotel clerk gave us free beer tokens. Along the way we discover a public clock that is eccentric in more ways than one.

Eccentric clock, St. Louis

Also this, which feels too studied to be eccentric.

Fish head musician statue, St. Louis

That evening, we walk back to the brew pub for supper. All they have on tap are different varieties of lager. Not an ale in site. The waitress is not keen on several of the choices, but offers us samples. We confirm her opinion. One black lager, that she particularly disapproves of, tastes like it is trying to be Guinness and failing. As we continue west we will begin to wonder if there any ales west of the Mississippi. Falling back on Sam Adams is the safe choice when the American beer scene grows desolate. The food we ate has faded entirely from memory.

Series Navigation << Grand Tour 2: The Lincoln Museum as Shrine and ReliquaryGrand Tour 4: Memorializing Corporals, not Generals >>
Scroll to Top