When I was but a lad, I lived in St. Louis. But I had come from Kansas City, so the carload of us would make frequent holiday trips back to Missouri's great western city to visit family and friends.
I'm sketchy on the details, but my mother told me we would take Highway 40 on the earliest of these trips, zipping along at the breakneck speed of 50 miles per hour (in a '57 Chevy, no less -- though that car pre-dates me). It was wonderful, she told me. Two lanes -- one in each direction! -- and smooth. The weightless feeling you would momentarily get as you sailed over the top of the limitless hills was always an important part of the trip. Now, of course, you can travel the same route on Interstate 70 in half the time. In some places there are four lanes in each direction, and the road is flat and straight enuf that it is actually considered safe for a jumbo jet to land on in an emergency.
But back to the photo above. This is a photo for
Kim. Somehow, it was fashionable a couple of weeks ago for bloggers to post photos of these empty husks and say the photo was for Kim. As usual, I'm late to the party. This was one of the first photos I took with my new camera. It was late in the day and the light was already fading, so I didn't do so well with the close up. (Kim has admonished me never to use digital macro, but I'm not sure why.)
The memory of those old family road trips and this empty husk photo converged in the crowded spaces of my mind, and that's why I've written this somewhat self-indulgent post. Scattered along the route between Kansas City and St. Louis are old, mostly abandoned roadside motels -- I think they were originally called cabin camps in their earliest incarnations. Some of these have found new lives as antique shops, and one is even a
tres upscale winery. If you look closely you can sometimes still see a few faded, old billboards advertising these defunct motels, which were touted as destinations themselves rather than merely overnight stopping places on the long trek between the two great cities.
But most of the old motels were simply abandoned, and most of those have been bulldozed into rubble. I remember one, though: the Daniel Boone Motel. It was not that far outside of St. Louis. Today you would barely have made it up to cruising speed before you passed the site of this motel, but in its day, that must have been a long distance to have traveled if the prospect of lodging was already available. This was in the county where
Nathan Boone, Daniel Boone's son, had built his family home, so marketing that bit of heritage made sense.
But even in my day, the Daniel Boone Motel was abandoned. It's windows were broken out. The parking lot soon became a dumping ground for people's trash. The sign showing a coonskin-capped Boone fading more each time we sailed past. Even my young mind could see the world changing and leaving this roadside motel behind. I thought then that it was like the empty husk of a bug shell.
And so today, whenever I see these bug husks, I still think of that long-gone motel, sitting forlorn beside a road that has grown too fast and straight for it.
Missouri calendar:
- Male white-tailed der rub velvet off antlers; watch for their "rubs" on small trees.
- Total lunar eclipse around 5:30 a.m.
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August 28th, 2007 at 6:28 am
I remember similar motels along Route 1 when we drove up to visit my grandparents every summer. When Interstate 95 was completed, they also withered and died. The shells are interesting, though. What is it about an abandoned building that is so fascinating? Ghost towns, ruins, defunct business all have the same mysterious attraction.
August 28th, 2007 at 10:10 am
I didn’t know anything about the empty-husk for Kim photo meme going around. I must be in the outernets somewhere! Grand pic of that empty husk, and I do love how it connected to the old abandoned highways of your youth. I bet there many husks and shells of critters deep inside that old Daniel Boone Motel too.
August 28th, 2007 at 1:47 pm
much thanks, pablo.
yes, i remember the road trips too, a bit northeast of you, and a good few years earlier. and i did some exploring in some of those ruins, is this past decade. some fun, but no good fotos.
on the zoom thing. optical zoom is good. it actually changes the relationship of the elements of the lens. so you get a telescope effect, with an apparently closer clear view the more you zoom. digital zoom is not a telescope, it’s just a magnifying glass, beginning its work where the telescope has reached its limit.
maybe you can tell, i’m still having a hard time with words, difficult explaining about digital zoom. but here, you can demonstrate for yourself what it is. you have irfanview, right? if not, you should have, everyone who does any digital fotoing should have, even if they use the big expensive programs, because it’s small and light but does a lot of the basics which is all most of us need most of the time. and it’s free at irfanview.com
so anyway, take a foto of something, anything, at the maximum optical zoom level. open that image in irfanview (or whatever editing program you want, i’m not demanding, really. no, really. i’m not). where was i? oh, ok, resize that foto, make it 1/4 again as large. then put a mask on that image, centered, same size as the original image, and crop that.
it may look ok. prolly won’t. either way, digital zoom is only doing something that you can choose to do later, and prolly better.
hope that halfway makes sense. i’ll be better soon. really.
prolly.
August 28th, 2007 at 3:13 pm
I just returned from a trip to California, and to add interest to a road trip that is becoming way too familiar, I decided to take in as much of old Route 66 as exists between Springfield, Missouri and Santa Monica, California.
I must have seen a thousand places similar to the Daniel Boone Motel you describe in your post – bypassed, forlorn and crumbling from disuse. It was an interesting and eye-opening experience.
August 28th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
I-95 killed mom and pop motels and tourist shops along US 1 here in FL.
August 28th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
I remember traveling up PCH 101 as a boy and renting a cabin, somewhere near San Francisco, for the night. My older sister and I were highly interested in the owners pipe and all of the varied stuff he had with it. I can still remember the smell of that cabin and the pipe.
The cabin had all of the man’s vacation possisions in it, I m=not sure but we must have rented it from a rental agent somewhere. I think my mom had arranged it in advance but I’m not even sure about that. The interstate highways sure make it fast getting from place to place – but they take a lot of the fun out of the tripp.
by the way thanks for the round rock in my yard – it looks great.
August 28th, 2007 at 10:11 pm
My kind of post–great writing.
August 20th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
I have never seen any mention online about the Daniel Boone Motel. If it is the same, I lived behind the Daniel Boone Motel in Gray Summit in an OLD house in the early 70’s. It’s nice to know someone else remembers it! I have no photos. As far as I recall, it was definitely still operating at that time. We had moved to Missouri from California and traveled Route 66 much ourselves. Thanks for sharing a memory!