The Call from Afar
Journeys often take root in the blink of an eye. You begin the day in one place and end it contemplating a major life change. In 1987, Kit and I were walking home from work at National Geographic on a stretch of Connecticut Avenue in Washington, D.C. when we passed a shop that brought us to a halt. In the display window, a large work of art struck us like a lightning bolt. Two planets, each home to a single house, stood out in a constellation filled with gold sparkling stars. A bolt of neon light connected the two worlds. At the base of the painting by Michael Pello Pinuotti were the words “The Call from Afar.”
That message writ large on the painting that we bought that evening inspired a move from our urban life in the nation’s capital to the American heartland months later. From our base in Southern Boone County, the two of us began new chapters in our lives. Kit chaired the University of Missouri Department of Geography for the next fourteen years and I began a journey to what became a writer’s life, observing the world—first from our home called Breakfast Creek and later from Boomerang Creek.
I’d been a teacher in the Peace Corps in the late 1960s and in South Central Los Angeles where I met Kit over the next two decades. In Missouri, I found myself managing seven acres in the country knowing little or nothing about rural life. Over the next five years, I learned everything I could about the cycles of the seasons, gardening, planting, canning, raising ducks and geese, and tending cats. As we became part of the small farming community of Hartsburg, local farmers became our friends. From them, I learned the vocabulary of farming life as they planted and harvested land in the Hartsburg bottoms as their families have done for generations.
My writing life.
Writing came to me as unexpectedly as our move to Missouri had. Five years after our move to Missouri, we traveled back to DC for the month of July where we ran a geography education institute for NGS. Across the Midwest, it rained that entire month—an event of historic proportions and consequences known as the Great Flood of 1993. On our return flight at month’s end, I remember looking out the plane window and seeing the Mississippi River swollen and wandering far beyond its banks as we approached the St. Louis airport. To a person, passengers on that flight were stunning into silence by the sight of a mighty river gone rogue.
The Flood of 1993.
On our drive home, we knew that our first stop had to be Hartsburg, to see for ourselves what we had been reading about over the prior month. Descending Nichols Hill at the end of Route A, we parked at the corner where Second Street intersects Main. There we found ourselves face to face with a seven-foot wall of sandbags stained the color of well-steeped teabags. They were the barrier erected by volunteers to protect the post office, the Hitching Post Bar, and the white wooden homes along the approach to the now flooded town center.
A pumpkin stood sentinel atop the sandbag wall. Reaching my hand over the top of the barrier, my fingers touched the Missouri River, now several miles from where it should have been. As if struck by lightning, my journey to becoming a writer began. From that August until late November, the only place I wanted to be was Hartsburg where a massive cleanup effort was underway. In the days and weeks that followed, I donned high-top rubber boots, waded in brown river water, evacuated muck with long squeegee mops, and peeled layers of wallpaper off the flood-stained walls of the home where Brenda and David Reeded lived. I became family and learned the history of the house layer by layer as we stripped the structure down to its bare bones.
The final post-flood meal was served that Thanksgiving at Hartsburg’s fire station that had served as a café, post office, FEMA center and gathering place for local citizens displaced by the flood as well as providing daily meals for volunteers from near and far who flocked to the town to help. When the cleanup officially ended, I wrote an essay that encapsulated the impact I’d observed that this century flood had had on the community of Hartsburg. It ended up in the “Boone Country Journal” a week later, along with a few other submissions that followed. By Spring 1994, those random articles became a weekly column entitled “Notes from Breakfast Creek.” The column has also appeared in the “Columbia Tribune” every Monday since September 1997.
Hayden, Kit, Heidi, me last October when we made the decision to move west and be close to family.
Last October, a call from afar struck like lightning once again, inspiring yet another life-changing move. Kit and I decided to pull up stakes after thirty-two years in Missouri and are now beginning a new chapter in Nevada City, CA to be near family. In my final Tribune column next week, I will relate the saga of our journey west and my plans for transitioning from a weekly newspaper column to a weekly blog on this site: cathysalter.com.
What a joy and privilege writing for the “Boone Country Journal” and “Columbia Tribune” for the past quarter of a century has been.