Our family spent the week of July 4 in Washington, D.C., a far remove in miles, but not in influence, from the wet, wild, scenic and historic environs of Traveler Country.

One of our stops, for example was the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial, overlooking the Tidal Basin. Touring the site reminded me that it was FDR’s jobs programs that put the craftsmen to work who built the stone entrances, lodges, waterways and other structures that give Missouri State Parks their distinctive, attractive appearance.

We toured the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, next to an ancient red brick building with the familiar green emblem of the U.S. Forest Service out front. If this obsolete structure is the only home of the Forest Service in the nation’s capital, I wonder if the agency has the tools to do its job.

Somewhere near the capital, we saw a statute of General U.S. Grant on horseback. According to biographer Jean Edward Smith, Grant took command of the Union army on August 30, 1861, at Cape Girardeau.

Grant’s footprints, of course, are all over St. Louis, where he even has a car wash named for him. Grant was posted to Jefferson Barracks after graduating from West Point. He met his wife, Julia, in St. Louis, and they built a home called Hardscrabble, which still stands, and lived later on Julia’s home place, White Haven, on Gravois Road. We’re all familiar with Grant’s Farm, where you can tour Grant’s cabin.

When he was president, Grant intervened to help his friend James Eads finish his bridge over the Mississippi River, over the objections of steamboat interests, according to information published by the St.Louis Public Library.

You can’t walk around downtown D.C. without dealing with the National Park Service, which manages the National Mall and many of the monuments. I couldn’t help but think of the Park Service and its stewardship of the Ozark National Scenic Riverways.

Congress was in July 4 recess and many Washingtonians had fled to avoid the crush of tourists like us, so we didn’t see many of the elected officials and agency employees whose decisions have so much impact on our daily lives in Traveler Country and beyond.

As I gazed down on the empty House of Representatives chamber from the gallery, I was reminded how interconnected we all are in this representative democracy.

That’s how it is and how it should be.

Emery Styron
River Hills Traveler

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A summer goal is to stay in all the state parks with camping facilities in Traveler country as I make my advertising rounds for the publication.

I prefer camping to staying in motels. It save you money and puts you in contact with other people and nature.This summer I’ve camped in Babler, Hawn, St. Joe, Sam Baker, Washington and Meramec State Parks and a National Parks Service Campground at Alley Spring. I’ve met campers, volunteer hosts, various wild animals, birds and insects, and seen some of Missouri’s prettiest scenery.

Each park has its own personality. Babler is an outpost in St. Louis’ western sprawl. Its sky is never dark and rarely quiet, as air traffic from nearby Spirit of St. Louis Airport flies overhead. Babler is frequented by bicyclists from nearby suburbs, who enjoy the steep and scenic hills and miles of roads.

St. Joe is an ATV paradise with some fishing lakes thrown in. Old lead mining wasteland has been used to make a place for people who like to camp and ride their off-road vehicles.

Hawn, Washington and Sam Baker offer more intimate encounters with nature. Pickle Creek meanders through the deep hollow where the Hawn campground is set, with spectacular scenes just steps from your tent site. Baker lays along the St. Francis River and you can make a canoe trip right at the park. Washington offers easy access to the Big River, plus trails, petroglyphs and great scenery.

Meramec, on the nights I was there, was full and loud, with noisy campers and roaring motorcyles. Perhaps that’s because it’s not far off Interstate 44. Camping is along the Meramec River front, handy for swimming, fishing, canoeing, kayaking or tubing. I found the 1.8 mile Deer Hollow Hiking Trail, and enjoyed an early morning uphill workout that came back into the paved park road for an easy walk back to camp.

It’s fun to talk with the volunter camp hosts and the people you meet around you. If you haven’t partaken of Missouri State Parks yet this summer, make plans now to get out there. Maybe I’ll see you in a campground.

Emery Styron
River Hills Traveler

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Cross-country bicyclists are a common sight on the steep hills and scenic byways of Traveler Country. Many are heavily loaded with camping gear and supplies. Their itineraries are not for the weak-kneed or faint of heart.

Traveler encountered Charlie and Sue Johnson of Bettendorf, Iowa, taking a break from camping at the Madison Inn in Fredericktown. The couple is on a three-month ride from the Quad Cities in Iowa to Mobile, Ala., then to Owen Sound, Ontario, north of Toronto.

This is their fourth major summer ride. Previous trips took them from Washington to Maine, California to Florida and Oregon to Virginia.

The pair found some of Missouri’s highway signage confusing but the countryside beautiful.

They had overnighted in Lesterville, and came to Fredericktown on Missouri 72, which they planned to take to Cape Girardeau. They found Fredericktown appealing and decided to stay an extra night to take in the rodeo and attend church. Then it was off to Cape in hopes of finding a good bike shop before heading to Mobile.

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Jim Anderson of Eminence and I spent a pleasant day last week fishing and floating a stretch of the Jacks Fork River between Bay Creek and Alley Spring.

Jim grew up in Piedmont, earned an ag degree at MU, and worked in agribusiness in Iowa, Kansas and Colorado before buying the Shady Lane Cabins and Motel in Eminence five years ago. He’s a wealth of information about the Current and Jacks Fork.

The night before we fished, we drove out to see some of the wild horse band that roams the Scenic Riverways. As many Traveler readers know, the horses are descended from those turned loose by farmers in the Great Depression of the 1930s and have been the subject of much controversy and publicity over the years.

It was fun to watch the stallion, mares and colts graze and frolic in the dusk. Jim tells me the National Park Service culls the herd to keep the numbers around 40.

So far as the fishing goes, we caught enough to keep things interesting but nothing to brag about. Jim’s an excellent guide and didn’t want me to be skunked. I don’t think he went so far as to put a fish on my hook when I wasn’t looking, but he worked hard to make sure I caught something.

One lesson learned is to be careful about pulling on lures caught in tree limbs. I had one, I think it was a Rooster Tail, come flying back across the river and knock the right lens out of my glasses and cut my cheek. I’m lucky not to have lost an eye. Snipping the line or at least ducking my head would have been the wiser course. Hindsight’s 20/20, even out of one eye.

It was also nice to renew the acquaintance of Shane Van Steenis at Harvey’s
Alley Spring Canoe Rental. Shane hails from Bloomfield, Iowa, near where I worked and lived the past several years. He and Jim both report a good start to the season on the Jacks Fork and Upper Current.

Emery Styron
River Hills Traveler

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Two brothers, two nephews and I enjoyed a beautiful afternoon on the Eleven Point River last Thursday. We put in at Whitten and floated to Riverton, with a stop at the lovely Boze Mill Spring.

Water was a little higher than normal for this time of year and a stiff wind blowing upstream made it a little hard to get started. We eventually learned how to travel with the current and found the going easier.

It was the first time in a canoe for young James Styron, who sighted a muskrat, several turtles and herons and a kingfisher.

We enjoyed getting acquainted with Mike and Wendy Jones, friendly proprietors of Hufstedler’s Canoe Rental at Riverton.

More photos from the float trip are on the Photo Gallery section of this site.

Emery Styron
Traveler publisher

The point I was trying to make and many missed is that we HAVE gun control all over the country and it is constitutional. Some of it is quite good, in fact. You can’t call the requirement for hunter education in hunting anything but gun control. And it is certainly a good thing.

We are going to have more gun control legislation as time passes. We’d best be in a position to have some influence in the writing of those laws. We won’t if we splinter over silly things like personal opinion on the appearance of some firearms. Nor if we paint a broad segment of society as being our arch enemies.

One letter writer pegged me in that regard. Indeed, I painted the whole NRA as being radical. That was wrong. I guess it is because the people who snipe at me for having a more “liberal” view always seem to point out that they are NRA members as if they represent the whole organization. 

Bob Todd, Traveler editor

Thunderbird Petroglyph, Washington State Park

It’s been an interesting week in Traveler Country.

I camped two nights in Washington State Park on the Big River between De Soto and Potosi and pulled a major camping boner at Babler State Park near Wildwood.

You wouldn’t realize driving down Missouri 21 what a vast, rugged jewel Washington State Park is. It has more than 2,100 acres of high ridges and deep valleys, bordering on the Big River. Native American petroglyphs estimated at 1,000 years old are just five minutes off the highway, along with fishing and swimming access on the river and great hiking trails.

There were only three sets of campers in the campground while I was there, plus the host: what appeared to be a homeless family, a roofer and his dog and a motor coach. There were no racoon problems as in Babler State Park. That may be due to the blare of televisions late into the night.

I moved the popup to Babler on Wednesday so as to attend the quarterly meeting of the Missouri Smallmouth Alliance at Powder Valley Nature Center. It was there I made an error no camper should.

I rolled into the campground about 4:30 p.m., checked in with the host. She said she’d find me and collect the camp fee. I set up the trailer, gulped down a sandwich and headed off to Powder Valley without actually registering my site.

When I got back to the park entrance about 10 p.m., the gates were closed and I had no code to punch into the electronic keypad. I could have contacted the St. Louis County police and asked them to call someone at the campground, but no one in the campground even knew my name since I wasn’t registered.

I rented a cheap motel room in Manchester and went out and registered the next morning. Glad I chose a $9 basic site instead of a $16 electric one since I didn’t even stay overnight.

The moral of the story. Be sure you register before you leave the campground.

Dave Hamilton, a furbearer biologist with the Missouri Department of Conservation, was featured speaker at the Smallmouth Alliance meeting. He acknowledged that the otter population has exploded since the critters were reintroduced to Missouri 23 years ago and that on some streams and farm ponds, otters have been really hard on the fish population.

We’ll have more about that in a future print issue of Traveler, July or later.

Emery Styron
River Hills Traveler

“How do you login and comment on this darn blog?” some have asked.

Good question, until now. We went into the administration section, checked a couple of boxes and lo and behold, a “Register” option now appears at the right under the Meta heading.

To log in, you must first register. Click on “Register” and you’ll bring up a box asking for your user name and email address. Enter those and click the “Register” button, and you’ll be immediately emailed a temporary password.

Go to your email inbox, retrieve your new password, then come back to Traveler Blog. Click “Login” this time, enter your user name and password. That will bring up a profile, where you can change the password if you like.

At the top of that page, beside “riverhillstraveler.com Blog” is a link that says “View site.” Click on that and you’ll be back at the blog. At the bottom of any entry is a link to submit comments. Once you are logged in, you can fire away.

Emery Styron
River Hills Traveler

I am camping this week at Babler State Park, just north of Eureka off I-44. It’s an adventure, as usual, this time with wildlife. More about that in a bit.

Our old Coachmen pop-up didn’t see any use last year. We bought it used, year before last and things didn’t go well. In a blaze of enthusiasm, we took it out every chance that arose. Each one was a disaster.

We got windblown and rain-soaked in Nebraska, and had to take shelter at a motel in Omaha.

We broke a spring on the way to Mark Twain Lake in northeast Missouri. The tire rubbed on the wheel well lining and nearly caught the trailer on fire. I spent most of the Fourth of July weekend on my back underneath the pop-up in a campground so crowded it looked like a Mideast refugee settlement.

The next time and the time after, it rained again. We felt personally responsible for flood conditions just for dropping the tongue on our trailer ball.

Last summer, when we mentioned camping, our kids brought up softball and swimming lessons and church camp. It was clear they’d rather stay home and clean their bedrooms than suffer another soggy weekend under mildewy canvas.

This time it’s just me. I’m camping by night and selling ads by day. I stopped by the supermarket in Wildwood for a loaf of bread and some salad before going to camp last night. While I changing clothes in the trailer, I noticed movement inside the mini-van. I scrambled out half dressed to find a racoon raiding the grocery supply.

Even if a racoon is Traveler’ mascot, I didn’t take it kindly. The critter made off with a loaf of bread and punctured the plastic bag in a new box of cereal with one of its claws.

I had a salad instead of sandwiches last night and took my chances with the cereal this morning. All in all, it’s great to be camping again. Babler is so beautiful and serene, it was hard to make myself leave this morning. After a day of fighting traffic and making calls all over the western side of the metro area, I can’t wait to get back out the park and eat supper under the stars.

By Emery Styron, River Hills Traveler

My wife stopped at our backyard garden Saturday afternoon, noticed the green onions were about eight inches tall, and pulled six or eight out of the ground to go with supper.

That got me thinking about the way we eat these days. The onions were savory and delicious and the only thing on the table that night that didn’t pass through way too many hands and processes on the way to our stomachs.

This morning, I had a simple breakfast: Granola from a bag inside a box, cranberry juice from a plastic bottle, yogurt from a plastic container with a foil seal and an orange. There was a pile of waste when I finished. Only the orange peels were biodegradable. Had I eaten at a fast-food restaurant there would have been a paper bag, napkin, plastic tableware, etc. to dispose of, too.

Things have gotten way to complicated. It’s so much more tasty and satisfying to pull an onion out of the ground, wash it off and eat it than to buy a bag of them at the store, not knowing what they’ve been fertilized or sprayed with, or how many hands have touched them, or how much petroleum it took to produce them.

We’ve gotten too far from those basics in our thinking and in the way our food is produced. Many people don’t associate chicken nuggets with walking, squawking birds or hambugers with bawling, ornery cattle. Nuggets are a manufactured, chickenish product made from birds that may have never set foot or beak on real soil. Burgers and steaks, despite their more rugged image, come mostly from confined feeding operations. Processed food tastes even worse when you think about how it is produced.
How do we get back to the basics? Hunting or fishing is one way. You kill an animal and you eat what you can. What you can’t eat you return to the soil or leave for other animals. There will be some packaging, storage, transportation, etc., but those can be minimized if you do your hunting and fishing close to home.

Foraging is another way. This is the time of year when morel-hunters enjoy nature’s bounty. I have good memories of taking my wife blackberry-picking in southwest Missouri years ago when she was nine-months pregnant. We drove the car close up against the loaded roadside bushes near Shoal Creek and she filled her lap with luscious berries.

Gardening also shortens the food chain and feels good. I don’t know why I feel so proud of a crop of tomatoes or onions. I only watch. Nature does most of the work.

There’s no trip to the store. No plastic bag to recycle. No preservatives or pesticides to worry about unless you put them on yourself. There are weeds to pull and bugs to pick off, but that’s part of the fun.

Next best thing is to buy at a farmer’s market or hook up with a local farmer whose practices you know.

Those are some of my thoughts on food. What are you eating and thinking?