The Call To Wander

The ensuing story starts at its end, in a way, recalling James Joyce: FINNEGAN'S WAKE. It is a challenge from mythology to all from celtic ancestry—to be "Finn again." A call to high adventure came as well from writings of my late grandmother, folklorist May Kennedy McCord, about an old Wilderness Road though the Ozarks—to fabled Rackensack—signifying a passage toward Vagabondia.

Ancestral Dance
(McCord family plot in Springfield)

The lure was compounded by growing up alongside old 66 on (then) the northern fringe of an expanding Springfield, Missouri (among nearby woods and streams since vanished). My mother too grew up on the old route—on a farm west of town—from before it was even paved. She married a hillbilly fisherman from Stone County and they moved to town; consigning me from birth (1940) to something of an exile from ancestral hills which always inspired me though, with tales of an American frontier lingering there in relative isolation from more bookish civilization.

The journey now continues holistically—in words and pictures—unfolding from an impressionistic portrait of midwestern life along the old highway which called to the "rabbit" in my blood: Go!

Trails End

Madcap Motel for Transients along Old 66

Note (rewritten from "Catalogue"): This was once a fine establishment. By 1976 when I returned to Springfield from rovin' and soon holed up in this place--the best of its kind sought along the way--it had turned into a wondrously merry fleabag (managed by old friend Tom Moore). It was a notorious hangout for fugitives. (The furious sheriff once staged a thunderous raid there that put the Keystone Kops to shame for sheer slapstick: looking haplessly for a young jail escapee who had been calling in daily taunting the fuzz for failure to catch him. Anyway armed squads managed that day to surround a wedding party in the wrong motel unit.) The office building pictured above sported bullet holes in windows. Local drunks would gather here when the saloons closed.

I painted pictures amidst the carousing and tinkered with crudely crafted "frames." The main building above was characteristically banged around, nailed to a bar wall and weathered for years in an old garage. Nature ran a rugged course through this and other artifacts later retrieved and "restored" (with new paint and glaze buffed out to disclose nature's handiwork). They impart a sense of the preposterous and the rebellious spirit of those days. The office is shaped like a cupcake; more vaguely as a teapot for the brewing of tempests. Anyway it seems well "off its rocker." The Trail's End Motel is a local legend.

The Painting in Progress

Fancy Rockwork (Morelock & son 1940's)