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Jump: Mt. Olive, Il → Carlinville, Il – Macoupin County Fairgrounds: 25 miles
Go out the way we came in… arrows to LEFT onto HWY 138 WEST
In Benld, follow arrows for HWY 4 NORTH to Carlinville
Arrows to the lot…
Shows at 2pm/4:30pm
JB hit a deer on the way to Mt. Olive. We passed the concession truck on the side of a road somewhere between Nowhere and No Place. Pulled over and stopped, thereby violating the First Rule of the Road, which states: always ignore what other circus vehicles do on the road unless you’re fucking the driver.
Well. Maybe it’s not the First Rule of the Road for every circus. Just this one.
Made quite the dent in the grille.
“So you killed, Bambi,” said Ben.
“Hey. Bambi did his best to take me out,” BJ said.
“Did the deer die?” I asked.
“I hope so,” said Stilts. Stilts, while not exactly an old hippie, has a lot of old hippie traits – the guilelessness, the sweetness, the love of altered states of consciousness. I was surprised he wasn’t more upset about killing an animal. But he’s a country boy after all, not bred to sentimentality. “He was really, really big. Fourteen inch point spread on those antlers. At least.”
“Wanna make Carlos very, very happy? Go back and get up the corpse,” said Ben. “Venison steaks for a week.”
“You go back and get the corpse,” said BJ. “We’re not going anywhere. Engine’s dead.”
“The Revenge of Bambi,” said Ben.
I suspect the rain that deluged us for most of the rest of the day was a further part of Bambi’s ghost’s vengeance scheme. The sky cracked open. It poured. Stilts – a meteorologist in the air force twenty some odd years ago and completely anal about monitoring meteorological conditions – totally missed it. The RV is not the place to be in a heavy downpour. Rain drops on a tin roof are a comforting sound but you also have to factor in the stink of wet dog, the half inch of mud on the RV floor, the accentuated hyperness of the resident 14 year old who is over hating me but now insists on using me as an audience for his stand-up comedy routines some of which are funny, all of which are politically incorrect.
I staked out a corner and hunkered down, alternately reading Fawn Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson biography and working on Dead Little Store accounting (everlasting project, still not done – I burst into tears whenever I think about the Dead Little Store. You wouldn’t believe how much time you waste when you’re sobbing hysterically and your nose starts running. Necessary prerequisite though for filing long over-due 2008 federal income taxes.)
When I was confident the rain would soak me straight to the bone thus enabling me to catch pneumonia and die a picturesque death, I decided to go out in it, make the trek to the nearby Mother Jones monument.
Yes, Mother Jones – noted hell raiser and union activist, once dubbed “the most dangerous woman in America” by no less a connoisseur of dangerous mammals than Teddy Roosevelt himself; unwitting catalyst of Michael Moore’s film career, since Moore used the money he made off the law suit he filed against the trust fund radicals who fired him as editor of Mother Jones magazine to finance Roger and Me – lays buried in Mt. Olive, Illinois. Who knows why? It’s not as though she ever visited the place.
Her grave lies in the rather plain, utilitarian Union Mine cemetery under a genuinely ugly monument. I didn’t see her ghost – maybe Wrathful Bambi preempted it.
Mt. Olive’s other tourist attraction is a genuine two-lane stretch of the original Route 66, historic Springfield to St. Louis loop. It runs straight through the cornfields. I don’t remember Buzz and Todd running into any cornfields. But then I was only eight years old when the TV show started, a little Brooklyn bunny. Maybe I hadn’t yet figured out that corn actually grew out of the ground.
Go out the way we came in… arrows to LEFT onto HWY 138 WEST
In Benld, follow arrows for HWY 4 NORTH to Carlinville
Arrows to the lot…
Shows at 2pm/4:30pm
JB hit a deer on the way to Mt. Olive. We passed the concession truck on the side of a road somewhere between Nowhere and No Place. Pulled over and stopped, thereby violating the First Rule of the Road, which states: always ignore what other circus vehicles do on the road unless you’re fucking the driver.
Well. Maybe it’s not the First Rule of the Road for every circus. Just this one.
Made quite the dent in the grille.
“So you killed, Bambi,” said Ben.
“Hey. Bambi did his best to take me out,” BJ said.
“Did the deer die?” I asked.
“I hope so,” said Stilts. Stilts, while not exactly an old hippie, has a lot of old hippie traits – the guilelessness, the sweetness, the love of altered states of consciousness. I was surprised he wasn’t more upset about killing an animal. But he’s a country boy after all, not bred to sentimentality. “He was really, really big. Fourteen inch point spread on those antlers. At least.”
“Wanna make Carlos very, very happy? Go back and get up the corpse,” said Ben. “Venison steaks for a week.”
“You go back and get the corpse,” said BJ. “We’re not going anywhere. Engine’s dead.”
“The Revenge of Bambi,” said Ben.
I suspect the rain that deluged us for most of the rest of the day was a further part of Bambi’s ghost’s vengeance scheme. The sky cracked open. It poured. Stilts – a meteorologist in the air force twenty some odd years ago and completely anal about monitoring meteorological conditions – totally missed it. The RV is not the place to be in a heavy downpour. Rain drops on a tin roof are a comforting sound but you also have to factor in the stink of wet dog, the half inch of mud on the RV floor, the accentuated hyperness of the resident 14 year old who is over hating me but now insists on using me as an audience for his stand-up comedy routines some of which are funny, all of which are politically incorrect.
I staked out a corner and hunkered down, alternately reading Fawn Brodie’s Thomas Jefferson biography and working on Dead Little Store accounting (everlasting project, still not done – I burst into tears whenever I think about the Dead Little Store. You wouldn’t believe how much time you waste when you’re sobbing hysterically and your nose starts running. Necessary prerequisite though for filing long over-due 2008 federal income taxes.)
When I was confident the rain would soak me straight to the bone thus enabling me to catch pneumonia and die a picturesque death, I decided to go out in it, make the trek to the nearby Mother Jones monument.
Yes, Mother Jones – noted hell raiser and union activist, once dubbed “the most dangerous woman in America” by no less a connoisseur of dangerous mammals than Teddy Roosevelt himself; unwitting catalyst of Michael Moore’s film career, since Moore used the money he made off the law suit he filed against the trust fund radicals who fired him as editor of Mother Jones magazine to finance Roger and Me – lays buried in Mt. Olive, Illinois. Who knows why? It’s not as though she ever visited the place.
Her grave lies in the rather plain, utilitarian Union Mine cemetery under a genuinely ugly monument. I didn’t see her ghost – maybe Wrathful Bambi preempted it.
Mt. Olive’s other tourist attraction is a genuine two-lane stretch of the original Route 66, historic Springfield to St. Louis loop. It runs straight through the cornfields. I don’t remember Buzz and Todd running into any cornfields. But then I was only eight years old when the TV show started, a little Brooklyn bunny. Maybe I hadn’t yet figured out that corn actually grew out of the ground.
