Stendal: Welcome to the end of the world

Because this is an upside-down week in our household - Wife sleeps in the daylight hours because of the split-shift schedule that she is on - I take the opportunity to get our son out of the house and let her get at least a few more hours sleep. This was something that I did and wrote about a few weeks ago.

I loaded Son into my vehicle, sippy cup full of milk, and we drove to town to where U.S. 231 and 50 intersect, and turned west onto 50. U.S. 50 used to be a coast-to-coast highway, but the ends were truncated somewhat, and the highway now has endpoints in Ocean City, MD, and West Sacramento, CA. Time magazine a few years ago did a photo essay on U.S. 50, and Shoals (the town in which I grew up) was featured. It was a momentary blast of local pride.

(An aside: I love lightly disjointed English; the U.S. 50 site I linked above features this on its front page: "This web site will lead you to many interesting places. Please bookmark at this time ROUTE50.com. This allows you to return and continue your journey without delays. O.K.")

50 is still a major thoroughfare to the locals, and there’s still plenty of truck traffic on it, but its relevance is diminished somewhat by the arrival of the interstate system. But if you wanted to, you could still travel from California to Maryland on it, which I find neat.

Heading west out of Loogootee on 50, the next town one runs into is the small town of Montgomery (pop. roughly 500). Remember how I wrote a couple of weeks ago how thrilled I was to learn in elementary school that Indiana was the smallest state in the lower 48 west of the Alleghenies? Montgomery is the answer to another bit of useless trivia, one that I once thought was a much bigger deal than what it really is: It’s the highest point on Highway 50 between St. Louis and Cincinnati. Whoopee!

A few miles west of Montgomery is the city of Washington. Son and I forsook the bypass around the south end of Washington in order to take what is now Business 50 directly into the very dead east end of a dying city. It’s a side of town that will likely become even more dead once Wal-Mart moves from its current location along Business 50 to a lot along the bypass in the next year or so. I don’t begrudge Wal-Mart their move, incidentally; I’m not one who buys into the argument that Wal-Mart is the root of all evil. But I do see the connection between the arrival of Wal-Mart and the demise of a lot of locally-owned businesses, and what’s happened in Washington is a prime example.

Stoplights were once, in my mind, a pretty decent barometer of how healthy the business district of a small town is. (Is that irony - “stoplights” indicating “progress”?) Growing up, I always thought my town was a poor town because it only had a flashing caution light in the middle of town, while Washington was a more vibrant town because it not only had stoplights going north on 57, but stoplights stretching about 4 or 5 blocks down Main Street, and they were all synchronized, which was cool to watch if you’re 9. Now, post-Wal-Mart, the stoplights are still on 57, but on Main Street, they've been replaced by stop signs at those intersections to accommodate the decreased traffic.

The business vacuum that Wal-Mart created in the middle of Washington eventually claimed at least two casualties from my youth. When Highway 50 still ran through town instead of bypassing it, Washington was bookended by two discount stores that my family frequented fairly often: K-Mart on the east, and 3D on the west. Now, the first thing you see when you head west into Washington proper on Business 50 is the blight of a former K-Mart store that now sits empty and rusting, with grass growing in the parking lot, and the building is lifeless save for the occasional Halloween-time haunted house. Welcome to Washington!

The 3D chain, meanwhile, was beset by many problems (the company that bought Danner’s Stores, Inc. filed Chapter 11 in the late 1980s) and was replaced by Big Lots. Not one of the shiny new Big Lots with the redesigned logo and some semblance of order in its stores, either – this was an old Big Lots with the feminine products next to the Uncle Alfie’s Reconstituted Motor Oil, which was next to the stale cereal, which was next to the boxcutters, while the sign along the highway and on the building was a garish orange with the name in black in a skinny version of that T-shirt iron-on font. Eventually, it closed, and something called “STAGE” (you’ve gotta say it in all caps) was there for about 6 minutes. Now the building houses a locally owned office supply store, which means that they’re hopefully in for the long haul, as opposed to a national chain trying to make it work on what is essentially a dead-end road on a dead end of town. They probably can as long as Office Depot or Staples stays clear.

Anyway. Back to the travelogue. To keep him from getting restless, I bought Son a Happy Meal, and we left Washington, heading south on the often-flooded Indiana 257. There was still water standing in the fields from recent flooding at the Daviess-Pike County line, which is demarcated by the White River. 257 is usually among the first of the local highways to flood when the banks are no longer able to hold water after torrential rains, and usually the last to be reopened to traffic after the waters recede.

Son and I drove all the way to the end of 257, singing “Itsy-Bitsy Spider” and playing peek-a-boo. When we got to Otwell, however, the games had to stop momentarily, for I had to sing him the title ditty from the musical my buddies and I began to write one drunken night called “Otwell!” (The chorus of the title song was all that we really ended up writing, if by “chorus” you mean “a barbershop quartet-style recitation of the word ‘Otwell,’” and by “writing” you mean “not having the ambition to actually commit it to paper, instead singing it drunkenly at random intervals on the cue of the first among us to begin singing it and almost getting a noise complaint filed against us.”)

Otwell was also the site of a particularly shameful moment in my life some years ago. It was around the time that Denis Leary’s “No Cure For Cancer” comedy album came out, and the big song from that album was “Asshole.” One of Leary’s lines in the song was, “I use public toilets, and I piss on the seat.” I don’t think I really need to say any more than that. Doug from Maine was with me at the time, and he was flabbergasted. (It was in Pike County, so it was OK.)

257 meanders over rolling hills (do hills do anything else, really?) further south through Velpen, home to nothing else but 100 or so folks and a major trash-collection business. Velpen was one of those little towns that grew up and died along the rails. Some little towns, like Edwardsport over in Knox County, are “river towns” – where the telltale trees along the river tell you all you need to know without even seeing the water – while other towns like Velpen are “railroad towns,” where you can tell that the railroad, which still crosses 257, was once the major artery of the community, and its decline brought with it a certain poverty in the towns that once depended on it so much and were unable to adjust to the changing times. Both probably thrived at one time until other modes of transportation and delivery became cheaper and more popular. I imagine that 200 years from now, the highway will no longer be a major mode of travel, and towns that don’t adapt will wither on the vine along them like leaves on a dying houseplant, much like the river towns and railroad towns that preceded them.

Further south on 257, we crossed Indiana 64 and wound through the Pike County hills to Stendal. Like Velpen before it, there’s not much in Stendal aside from the creatively named “Stendal Store,” which looks to have been boarded up for years. Bruce Springsteen would call Stendal a “dead-end town”; technically, even though the pavement continues at the southern edge of Stendal, the official “highway” portion ends, and the road becomes a county road (I believe it is what the locals call “old 64”). It was a relief, really, to see a road continue from the end of 257; I was a map geek when I was a kid, and seeing Stendal at the end of the road there, I feared that the road just dropped off into nothingness at its terminus. Still, driving through it, you get a sort of an eerie feeling that if the world ever ends, it will either start here or end here.

We turned around and started back north; I don’t really like to do that on these trips, preferring to make a loop around instead of doubling back, but I didn’t have the time to explore further at the end of 257; it was nearing suppertime, and Son starts to get restless about 90 minutes into these trips. He can only jibberish his ABCs - and he gets especially excited when he gets to the last line; if he were able to actually speak the words, it would sound like, “Next. Time. Won’t. You. Sing. With. MEEEEEE!” – but it gets old for him after about 15 or 20 recitals. (Not for me, though. It’s the sweetest music in the world.)