Gallipolis, Ohio, clings to the inside crook of the Ohio River the way an old hound curls against a cook-stove in February—too weary to roam, too stubborn to quit the warmth. From the West Virginia shore you can see her riverfront of red-brick warehouses and weather-grayed wharves crouched behind a modern floodwall, as though still bracing for the 1937 waters that once lapped at second-story windows. The town was laid out in 1790 by the French 500—aristocrats and craftsmen fleeing Paris guillotines who traded silk salons for the hickory forest of a brand-new Northwest Territory. They named their refuge “Gallipolis,” stitching together Gallia—Latin for France—and polis—Greek for city—an optimistic graft that promised Versailles on the frontier but produced, instead, a handful of cabins and an unfenced cemetery.

Two hundred and thirty-odd years later, the population hovers around 3,300 souls, give or take the heartbeat of babies born at Holzer Hospital or elders carried up to Mound Hill Cemetery. Between the river’s brown reach and the first Appalachian ridges, the town’s streets run quiet, brick-paved in places, potholed in others, shouldering the weight of time like a store clerk balancing boxes too long. Gallipolis has never reached for skyline or sprawl. It was built for endurance, not spectacle.

I did not arrive seeking any of that. I arrived because of a pill bottle.

2 · The Pill and the Bait-and-Switch

Bob Evans’s Farm Festival, twenty miles upriver in Rio Grande, had left me dust-coated, sausage-greased, and one day away from finishing the only prescription that keeps a particular demon at bay—unimportant which demon; suffice to say it rides the bloodstream like a stowaway. The festival’s crowds dispersed on a Sunday, and Monday morning found me staring at the red cross of the CVS Pharmacy on State Route 160, believing my out-of-state script would be little more than a handshake and a co-pay.

“Sure, we can fill it,” the technician said, sliding glasses down her nose. “But we’ll have to order it—earliest truck gets here Wednesday.”

“Wednesday,” I repeated, as though the word were an uncooperative gear. My skin crawled at the arithmetic: two empty days, maybe three if trucks ran late. The demon flicked its tail.

I inquired politely, then less politely, about getting a supply from somewhere else in town. No chance. So Gallipolis, with her sleepy streets and river breath, became my unintended host—an old French city playing pharmacist’s waiting room.

3 · Lodging Above the River

Cheap motels cluster near the four-lane, but I wanted river air. I found a spot to park Josie beside the river. From the window I watched coal barges plod upstream, pushed by diesel tugs whose horns sounded like weary cattle. Across the water, Point Pleasant, West Virginia, shimmered in July haze, its floodwall murals guarding tales of river wars and the Silver Bridge that collapsed in 1967, dragging forty-six commuters to their death and birthing the legend of the Mothman. River towns remember tragedies the way farmers remember drought years: by taste, not date.

4 · Court Square and the Echo of France

With time to kill, I walked. Court Street spills into Gallipolis City Park—four acres of manicured grass and shade trees ringed by 19th-century storefronts that lean inward like gossiping aunts. At the center stands a white bandstand that hoists “Gallipolis in Lights” each winter, when volunteers sling fifty thousand bulbs into shapes of reindeer and riverboats and hope. 

Daytime, the park hosted only pigeons and a bronze plaque listing the original French families, surnames that once rolled with Parisian flourish—Mauger, DeBouchette, Creuzet—but now tumble out of local mouths as plain as cornbread. Children with scooters nipped around the memorial stones; their laughter braided with cicada buzz, the universal soundtrack of Mid-Ohio summer.

I ducked into Our House Tavern, an 1819 brick inn turned museum where General Lafayette supposedly drank Madeira on his return tour. A docent in a blue cardigan and voice like sweet tea recited tales of pallets docking at Gallipolis landing, unloading crates of French wine that Ohio farmers found too sour. “They mixed it with river water,” she sighed, “and wondered why it turned.” Cultures graft imperfectly. Inside the tavern’s kitchen, iron pots still hung above a hearth big enough to roast hogs; the smell of wood smoke from centuries of fires seemed preserved in the mortar.

I asked the docent what kept her here. She smiled as though I’d missed something obvious. “The people,” she said, “the river keeps moving so we don’t have to.” That sentence followed me for blocks, a riddle wrapped in current.

5 · Pharmacy Day Two—No Dice

Tuesday morning my pill bottle was a rattling maraca of two lonely tablets. The pharmacy’s computer still blinked order pending. I paced grocery aisles heavy with apple butter and pickled bologna, contemplating the desperation math of half-doses. The demon stretched and yawned.

That afternoon I cracked, pointed Josie north toward Jackson, population six-thousand-plus, hopeful of bigger inventories. A twenty-nine-mile shot up State Route 35 delivered salvation in a Walgreens no larger than a feed store. Prescription filled, demon lulled, I exhaled the handshake I hadn’t realized I was holding.

Common sense said keep moving, yet Gallipolis tugged. I owed her the attention boredom sometimes affords wonder. So back to the river I drove, a voluntary captive now.

6 · Coffee, Coal Dust, and Holzer

Wednesday dawn draped fog over the water like linen over a corpse, slow to lift. I found coffee at Shake Shoppe, a chrome diner planted in 1950 when Route 7 still mattered. Counter stools squeaked; a cook flipped pancakes big enough to rim a hubcap. The waitress, refilled my mug until the spoon stood upright. When I asked what folks did around here, she shrugged: “Work Holzer, some. Drive to Point Pleasant plant. Rest of us make do.”

Holzer Health System began as a doctor’s front-porch clinic in 1909, now the county’s anchor employer—a hospital complex plus a web of urgent cares dotting the hills. Medicine replaced sawmills; scrubs replaced miner’s bibs. Yet wages seldom outrun Appalachia’s stubborn poverty rate. People bounce between staying and leaving like driftwood banging river pilings.

After breakfast I wandered south past clapboard houses wearing both peeling paint and Trump flags, past brick Victorians rehabbed by Columbus escapees looking for cheap mortgages. The economic fault lines ran visible as sidewalk cracks. But every porch—fresh or sagging—held a rocking chair facing the river. Watching water remains the town’s truest occupation.

7 · Mound Hill and Silver Memories

I climbed Mound Hill Cemetery, a switchback ascent yielding views of three states and two centuries. The highest point is an Adena burial mound predating Europe’s stumble into the continent. The French built their city under another people’s graves, a pattern older than empire. I read dates chiseled into marble: 1802, 1864, 1918 Spanish Flu cluster, 1967 etched on two stones side by side—victims of Silver Bridge.

Locals still speak of that collapse in present tense: When the bridge fell. Entire families plunged during rush-hour Christmas shopping, cars folding “like a deck of cards” the papers said. The disaster birthed new federal bridge-inspection laws, but here it birthed something quieter: a reflexive glance upward whenever a semi rumbles across the newer Silver Memorial span.

I stood at a WWII veteran’s grave and realized Gallipolis counts time by absences: French exodus, railroad fade, bridge collapse, children moving away. Town identity built less on what remains than on how it survives vanishing.

8 · River Evening with Teenagers and Fireflies

My last night I carried a folding chair to the levee path. Fireflies stitched Morse code across the grass. Two high-school boys drifted by on skateboards, one hauling a guitar case plastered with anime stickers. They stopped when they spotted Josie, her two-tone paint catching sodium-vapor lamplight.

“Sweet bus,” said the taller kid, running a hand along the gutter seam.

“She’s a van,” I corrected gently.

“Still sweet,” he grinned. They asked mileage, top speed, if she had Wi-Fi (I laughed). They dreamed of escaping after graduation, maybe follow the river to Louisville, maybe catch a concert in Cincinnati. I asked what they’d miss about Gallipolis.

“Nothing,” the short one lied. His eyes lingered on the water. “Maybe the quiet,” taller kid admitted. They pushed off, wheels clicking sidewalk joints until distance swallowed them.

Watching their silhouettes fade, I felt the river’s hush swallow my own restlessness. Quiet can be heavy, but it steadies the bones.

9 · What the Town Taught

Gallipolis dazzles no one. She doesn’t intend to. She is the middle stanza of a longer song—the part listeners hum absent-mindedly because the hook lies elsewhere. Yet without the middle, the melody collapses. River towns are glue between the crescendo of cities. They keep freight moving, kids grounded, history honest.

Waiting for medicine there taught me the calculus of “enough.” Enough to keep going. Enough to root. Enough to stand on a levee and hear your own pulse sync with water. Gallipolis nurses its wounds—economic, infrastructural, emotional—yet each winter volunteers weave a million twinkling lights through the park because beauty, no matter how small, is defiance against dark.

I left with my prescription bottle fat and my notebook fatter. No heroic benefactor graced my pages, but a humble city reminded me that sometimes generosity flows in slow currents: a pharmacist ordering unprofitable stock, a diner waitress topping off coffee on credit, a town that lets a stranger linger without question. Not every gift shouts.

The Ohio River kept rolling, brown and unhurried, toward Cairo and the Mississippi beyond. So did Josie, gearbox whining into top gear. Somewhere downriver another town waited, shaped by what it lost and what it refused to relinquish. I carried Gallipolis with me like river silt in tire treads—quiet, stubborn, just heavy enough to matter. 

But first I needed to grab one last cup of coffee, review some photos and unscramble my notes. Josie was rolling down a side street when she tugged me to the left. I obeyed. My eyes flitted across a street with mostly empty store fronts except for an intriguing spot called “Poppy’s Coffee, Tea and Remedies.” Fate was about to toss me softball, all I had to do was step up to the plate.

1 · Last Days in the Driveway 

You’d be surprised how loud a town can get once you decide to leave it. Lawn-mower engines nagging through Saturday mornings, delivery trucks hissing compressed air at intersections, your own phone coughing up one more “urgent” e-mail—all of it conspires to make staying put sound reasonable. But the very noise that pleads I stay is the noise that finally sends me packing.

So I stood in the driveway, mid-April sun not yet mean, sleeves pushed to the elbow, two knuckles raw where the socket slipped, and listened to the neighborhood’s hum as if it were background music I’d soon forget. Josie, my forty-two-year-old Volkswagen Vanagon, lay half-gutted before me: air filter out, fan belt off, oil dripping on to what used to be the shipping container of a refrigerator, now flattened and protecting the garage floor.  

The engine smelled of hot metal and ancient promises. Most Vanagon owners name their rigs for luck, but Josie earned hers the hard way—that first breakdown in Wyoming where we slept in separate tow yards while a thunderstorm rattled chain link like jail doors. She forgave me, eventually. I forgave her, mostly. We’ve been married to the road ever since.

Preparing her for a tour through small-town America felt less like maintenance and more like pregame pep talk. I crawled under, twisting the torque wrench until the motor mounts squeaked the language of steel fatigue. She groaned, I groaned back. That’s how we say I love you.

2 · Lists You Can’t Order from Amazon

While the oil drained, I opened the notebook I keep in my back pocket and added yet another line to the packing index:

• line 42: unsaid apologies for leaving too long (won’t fit in luggage—file under emotional baggage)
  
  

It joined other absurdities:

• spare fan belt
  
  
• duct tape (good for hoses, emotions, seat seams)
  
  
• envelopes—12, each holding $1,000 for whoever needs it more than I do
  
  
• Brenda’s patience (non-returnable, handle with gratitude, “just be home by Christmas.”)
  
  

Tools and talismans, faith and flange sealant, all thrown in together like gumbo.

Travel, at least the way I prefer it, demands two kinds of preparation: mechanical and interior. You can buy gasket kits; you can’t buy readiness to be lonely. You can torque lug nuts; you can’t torque courage (at least not sober). For the past month I toggled between the two shops—garage out front for wrenches, mind upstairs for inventory of what I still feared.

The fears line up neatly if you let them:

• Will story subjects slam doors when I knock?
  
  
• Will the air-cooled engine melt on a Utah grade?
  
  
• Will the bank statement laugh when I drain savings into the tank?
  
  
• Will the silence inside Josie’s cockpit swell toward deafening when my mind starts to catalog people I’ve lost?
  
  

I wrote each fear in ink, closed the notebook, and kept turning bolts. You don’t exorcise doubts; you torque them to spec and hope the threads hold.

3 · The Map that Won’t Obey

For navigation I carry a laminated Rand McNally Road Atlas, Sharpie stars marking every town someone once said, Oh you’ve gotta stop there. Digital maps whisper efficiency; paper maps seduce with suggestion. They show roads that no algorithm will choose because they take you five miles off the shortest line just to wind past an abandoned two-room schoolhouse or a field where buffalo might still remember when they ruled the earth like titans.

Weeks before departure, I spread the atlas across the kitchen table and traced a blue highlighter over highways I’d never driven. Route 60 across the Shawnee; Route 36 skimming the belly of Ohio; U.S. 83 straight up the Great Plains like a plumb line to the horizon. Then I closed the book. None of that is binding. Plans are what the road laughs at while it hands you detours gift-wrapped in orange construction barrels.

Brenda stood by the coffee pot watching my cartography. “Do you even know where you’re going?”

“Anywhere the line wiggles more than it should,” I said.

Brenda half-jokingly asks me to stay. I promise I’ll call every night. You must always promise. Promises are the tether between go and come home.

4 · The Garage as Temple

The day before launch I performed a ritual older than motor travel: the final once-over. Oil at the line? Check. Valves? Self-adjusting. Spark plugs gapped like soldiers at inspection. I caressed each hose clamp, muttered psalms of prevention. Pilgrimages do not wait for perfection. They start when the heart says go, even if the body of the vehicle isn’t entirely on board.

In the engine compartment I hung a dog-tag stamped “HOPE & GEN TOUR” because vans, like sailors, travel better wearing identity round the neck. If a mechanic finds me unconscious at a Love’s Travel Stop, at least he’ll know the mission.

Turning out the light, I said goodnight to Josie the way a father tucks blankets around a child before her first field trip: half trust, half terror, love threaded through both.

5 · Packing What Won’t Break

I packed two pairs of hiking pants, the kind you can zipper off the legs and have instant shorts, five T-shirts, five pairs of socks, a thrift-store blazer in case some small-town council wanted a fancy interview. I stuffed them all into a brand-new plastic economy storage bin from Home Depot. I packed two cameras—digital for the documentary shots and an ancient Hasselblad as an offering to the film gods—a selection of favorite pens, and a great blank notebook with linen paper, deckle-edge, the kind that makes your scribble feel like scripture.

Food? Plenty of Ramen noodles, canned beef stew and chili, peanut butter, and tuna in a pouch. Coffee grounds, a favorite mug, a one-burner butane stove for all the cooking, and a cheap aluminum set of backpacking pots and plates.

What else does a man need? He needs open eyes. He needs that child-sense of maybe. 

6 · The Mind as Hitchhiker

Even pared down to axle grease and underwear, the hardest cargo to stow is the mind itself. It flits, flaps, refuses harness. In the weeks leading to departure, I practiced sitting still in the driver’s seat while Josie slept on jacks. Ten minutes. Eyes shut. Not meditating, exactly—just acquainting nerves with stillness. A pre-ride handshake between man and machine.

Sometimes I replayed dialogue with ghosts: my father, who taught me life skills in a cantankerous, begrudging way; my son, who died by his own hand, whose laugh still echoes when I break a bolt loose; and the estranged friend who called generosity naïve. They rode shotgun for those ten minutes, argued or forgave, then evaporated. Call it mental packing. You decide which spirits to bring along.

7 · Road Etiquette for Strangers

I drafted a manifesto on hospitality and taped it to the dashboard:

1. Accept coffee when offered—no matter the brew strength.
   
   
2. Listen twice before answering once.
   
   
3. Pay for the pie if the widow insists it’s free.
   
   
4. Don’t photograph tears without permission.
   
   
5. Always replace a borrowed tool cleaner than you received it.
   
   
6. Leave handwritten thanks where your tire tracks remain.
   
   

The rules aren’t cosmic. They’re small kindnesses that grease conversation more than any credit card swipe.

8 · Saying Goodbye to the Internet

Two nights before rollout, I ran backups of backups, scheduled out-of-office replies that read like confessionals, and slid my phone into “Do Not Disturb except Brenda” mode. Connectivity is the great devourer. It eats present moments first, the future next. Out there on two-lane blacktop I need to hear wind, not notification pings.

I kept the phone. I’m not suicidal. But I exiled it to the crease of the passenger seat, where it must holler through four layers of willpower to claim my attention.

9 · First Miles—Learning to Breathe in Third Gear

Launch morning, the neighborhood hushed as though the world loaned me a quiet minute. Dew glossed the windshield like varnish. I say the same silent prayer I always say before turning the key to nudge Josie awake. I finally turn the key, and Josie rumbles to life. 

Backup camera? Ha. I craned my neck, watched Brenda in the rearview mirror; she raised a coffee mug in salute, bathrobe cinched tight against the dawn. A wink, a wave, a small ache sliding between ribs. Then the throttle opened. We crawled out of the neighborhood, wide tires kissing pavement that still remembered midsummer tar.

At the city limit sign my breath finally unclenched. Third gear humming, trees arching overhead like the nave of a roadside cathedral. Every mile past familiar grocery stores peeled away a layer of hurry I hadn’t realized was strangling me.

10 · The First Unscheduled Turn

Forty-seven miles in, the atlas pegged a thin county road curling east toward a cluster named Pine Ridge—population too small for census rounding. The pavement narrowed, inviting mischief. I flicked the blinker left though no one followed, and we dove into sycamore shade.

Within minutes gravestones appeared—old, lichen-licked, Civil War-era names. I stopped, engine idling, because curiosity tugged the sleeve. Wandering among markers, I found a single stone with a carved lamb and the dates 1904-1910. Someone had left a spoonful of marbles beneath, bright glass winking under leaf litter. I knelt, with nothing to say, but gratitude swelled anyway. Preparation had guided me here: the slowed-down heart willing to pause, the notebook ready to capture the whisper of memory.

Back in the driver’s seat I wrote the child’s epitaph: Short song, still echoing. That line may never appear in a chapter, but leaving it behind felt like polishing a window only I could see through.

11 · Mechanical Baptisms

Preparations, even meticulous, never outrun random chance. At mile 200 Josie sputtered like she’d swallowed a wasp. I coasted onto gravel, shut her down, and held my breath. I phone a friend who rides the same vintage steed. We agree something went amiss because the engine is just too hot. Let her cool down and move on. A half hour later, I again spark her engine to life. I wipe little beads of sweat from my upper lip. I grab a pen and wrote in the margin: Fear sometimes pays dividends, even though I wasn’t quite sure what that meant, and I never would…

Breakdowns aren’t setbacks; they are introductions. When you kneel on a stranger’s driveway wrestling a stuck bolt, neighbors appear bearing lemonade and small talk. That is where stories germinate, not under pristine success but amid shared aggravation.

12 · The Art of Slowness

By afternoon the odometer clocked another 100 miles and the day bulged with detail: a cotton field opening like a prayer book, two kids selling boiled peanuts from a card table, the bright yelp of a fox trotting across fresh asphalt. Every unscheduled mile felt earned, chiseled into memory deeper than any interstate ninety-minute blur could ever match.

Steinbeck wrote that a journey is like marriage—the certain way to be wrong is to think you control it. I taped that quote above the rearview as training material. Slow is the only pace that lets revelation overtake you.

13 · The First Camp

Night found us on Forest Service land. I parked under loblolly pines, cracked the vent windows so cricket symphonies could drift in. Dinner was chicken-flavored ramen and washed down with river-cold water. I wrote until the page blurred, then folded into the bed, quilt pulled to chin.

Lying there, I inventoried the day’s intangible cargo:

• two marbles etched by weather
  
  
• the taste of lemonade with too much sugar
  
  
• the ghost of a gravestone lamb
  
  
• the hush that befell me when the phone stayed mute all afternoon
  
  

None of those weigh more than a feather, yet the van felt heavier—rich with gathered earth.

14 · Unwritten To-Do Lists

Before sleep I drafted a new checklist:

• Stop at more cemeteries; the dead haven’t forgotten how to speak.
  
  
• Ask every cashier where the locals eat; trust the first answer.
  
  
• Keep the map folded wrong-side out so surprise can read it first.
  
  
• Remember Brenda’s face when doubt bites—phone her before doubt chews through to the bone.
  
  

Preparation doesn’t end at departure; it evolves. Each day sculpts the next day’s readiness, like a carpenter shaving wood until the grain reveals its own desire to curve.

15 · The Point of All This Wrenching and Worry

Why chase small towns with a creaky van? Because the heartbeat of a country hides in places unpinned by GPS heat maps. Because generosity sounds louder where populations whisper. Because I need reminding that worth resides in stories traded over counters sticky with pie syrup, not in metrics tracked by investors.

Mechanical checks, packing rations, mental calisthenics—these are not chores, they are devotions. Each spin of a wrench says I intend to arrive. Each map fold says I intend to be lost enough to see. Each good-bye says home is portable; it rides behind the lungs.

Josie creaked as the night cooled. The wind sifted pine needles across the roof. My muscles ached in the fine print of joints, but the ache felt clean, like a barn swept after muck-out. Tomorrow would bring road, and road would bring whatever mischief kindness required. I drifted asleep to the idea that all preparation, at its root, is hope made tangible—threads you tie before the storm so the tent won’t blow away.

Morning always keeps its promise when you’ve done the work in darkness.

1 · Crossing into Gallia County

Josie wheezed up the last rise on State Route 588 just as morning cracked open behind us, spilling light across the hollows. Below, the Bob Evans homestead sprawled in orderly rectangles of groomed pasture and whitewashed rail fence. A half-century ago, the story goes, a farm boy named Robert Evans lured truck drivers off U.S. Route 35 with the smell of sage-heavy sausage and a promise of bottomless coffee. By 1971 he’d hatched the notion of a harvest homecoming—one weekend every October when neighbors, traders, and the merely curious might gather “down on the farm” to eat, barter, and remind one another why God invented autumn. That seed became the Bob Evans Farm Festival, now past its fiftieth birthday and drawing, the brochures brag, something like thirty-thousand visitors over three days. (Celebrating 50 Years of Tradition Down on the Farm ... - Bob Evans)

I’d come chasing that origin myth. A man who folds generosity into sausage links seemed tailor-made for the Hope & Generosity Tour. I pictured county-fair grit: 4-H kids wrestling Holsteins into the show ring, pie contests judged by church ladies with stern palates, fiddlers trading licks from the flatbed of a grain truck. Instead, as Josie rattled onto the parking plateau, what reached my ears first was pop music piped from a PA and the electronic jangle of a credit-card reader approving someone’s purchase of kettle corn.

I pictured county-fair grit: 4-H kids wrestling Holsteins into the show ring, pie contests judged by church ladies with stern palates, fiddlers trading licks from the flatbed of a grain truck.

2 · Midway of Merchandise

The festival grounds unfurled like a county fair clipped of its livestock: a midway of tents, each flapping against autumn wind. Under canvas I found rows of merch—“hand-poured” candles, laser-engraved cutting boards, tie-dye hoodies that would have puzzled Bob in his bib overalls. Craft vendors are tradition here, the program insists—more than one hundred of them at peak, hawking everything from gourd birdhouses to welded-horseshoe yard art. (53rd Annual Farm Festival - Bob Evans) But commerce felt less accent than engine. Card swipe, receipt print, shuffle on.

Food stalls clustered like piglets round the mother-sow of profit. Funnel cakes. Corn dogs. Frozen lemonade. And of course sausage sandwiches—$8.50 a link, slathered in onions. They smelled divine; they always have. Still, I missed the older country-fair alchemy where a church youth group flipped burgers to fund mission trips, or the Lions Club sold ham-n-bean dinners from a steam table dented by decades of use.

Down by the hollow a carnival whirred. Third-hand rides—Tilt-A-Whirl, Berry-Go-Round—moaned each time the wind shifted, the metal joints complaining like old mules in harness. Parents tugged children past the games of chance; five or ten bucks—depending on age—garnered the wearer unlimited rides. The midway barkers looked tired already, Friday morning, two whole days ahead of them.

3 · Echoes of a Simpler Fair

Memory works like a barn cat—slips in uninvited, curls on your lap, demands stroking. Mine wandered to the Black Walnut Festival in Spencer, West Virginia, circa 1998. There the carnival rides were just as suspect, but everything else pulsed with local nerve: the FFA auctioning pumpkins, the VFW slinging hog roast by the pound, the marching band leading a parade where half the county turned out because the other half was the parade. That fair reeked of sweat and sawdust, but also of ownership—a community showing off its handiwork to itself.

At Bob Evans I felt mostly like a spectator pulling dollars from a billfold so national brands could tally ROI Monday morning. Maybe I’m guilty of nostalgia, longing for a world that existed only because I was small enough to look upward. Yet talking to older vendors confirmed the shift.

4 · Voices from Behind the Tables

I spoke with a couple that drive three hours from Athens County each year to sell their handmade “farm crafts.” They’ve been at the festival since 1992. “Back then,” the husband said, squinting against the sun, “you could trade crafts for beef and call it square.” He laughed, then his face tightened. “Now it’s bookings, booth fees, credit card swipes, and sales tax. Folks still smile, but they’re counting pennies inside.”

He said the tenor of the fair changed about the same time its ownership changed hands. Back in 2017 Bob Evans split itself into two parts: the restaurant business and the product side of things. “Hear tell they got somethun like, well, a bit more than half a billion,” for the restaurant side, he said. With that deal came the rights to the festival. Community swapped out for commerce. 

5 · The Story Bob Told

Around noon I slouched toward the homestead—a white clapboard farmhouse trimmed in forest green, now a museum. “Closed until further notice,” a sign said. I jiggled the door handle. Unlocked. I invited myself in. 

Inside, displays told the corporate legend: Bob Evans grinding sausage in a home kitchen, selling it to truckers; franchising a diner; growing a brand across the Midwest; donating back to the farm that birthed him. For decades the festival channeled that origin story—one weekend to honor farmers and artisans, with horse pulls, sheep-shearing, and hayrides ringing the hollow.

The pamphlet with a schedule of events noted the “Ready Go Dog Show,” in which canines race down a ramp and launch themselves into the air over a pool of water to snatch a flying Frisbee out of the air. There was a timber demonstration with all manner of cutting and chopping going on. A tap-dancing troupe performed several times during the day. Sadly, although listed on the schedule, a note on the pamphlet read, “Due to recent weather events, All American Pig Racing will not be attending this year.” Oh, I almost forgot the hilarity (and horror) of the public axe throwing booth…

All these activities were competing against two main stages pushing Nashville hopefuls through rented PA. Some visitors found them; most stuck to the craft aisles where the money churned.

7 · Looking for Stories, Finding Sales Pitches

I’d arrived hoping to gather material for the Tour—testimonies of generosity, neighbors lifting neighbors. Instead I was pitched essential-oil diffusers and artisan jerky. I asked a festival volunteer where I might find local 4-H exhibits. She frowned. “We haven’t had animal showing for years. Health regs, liability.” Liability, that deadweight noun.

Across the lane, two girls in matching Bob Evans T-shirts—paid brand ambassadors—handed out coupons good for a free stack of hotcakes at the interstate exit twenty miles north. They told me corporate runs the festival marketing now “to present a consistent guest experience.” Their script was polite, their smiles weary.

8 · An Old-Timer in the Shade

I finally found resonance in a corner of the grounds where a single bale of straw served as seat for Emerson “Emory” Steele, eighty-four, retired from dairy long before the price crash. He nursed a cup of coffee, watching passersby. When I asked how long he’d attended, his eyes lit: “Since before they called it Festival, back when Bob still walked the barns.” Emory remembers pot-luck suppers on fold-out tables, fiddles after dark, and “neighbors just talkin’, catching up before winter shut us in.” He glanced at the vendor tents. “Now it’s handbags from Carolina and popcorn in a souvenir bucket. Not sayin’ that’s wrong. Just sayin’ it’s different.”

9 · Economics of Change

A festival of 30,000 guests costs money: shuttle buses from satellite lots, portable toilets, security, performance fees. Ticket price is five dollars, kids free. Booth rental climb every year,  vendors told me. Some proceed to other craft circuits—Dollywood Harvest, Ohio Renaissance, Gatlinburg. The festival’s overhead demands volume. Volume demands spectacle. Spectacle displaces intimacy. It’s a familiar trajectory: success crowds the seed that birthed it.

10 · The Sausage Sandwich That Saved the Day

Late afternoon I bought a sandwich anyway, more for story than hunger. Pork patty grilled, onions caramelized, bun steamed in sausage grease—aroma so nostalgic it punched straight through my cynicism. I carried it to a hillside where an oompah band blared “Roll Out the Barrel.” Children rolled too, tumbling down grass until their mothers shrieked with mock alarm. The golden hour slid over us, and the farm—vines along the split-rail, pond gleaming copper—looked like a painting you could almost trust.

It struck me then that maybe resilience sometimes masquerades as commerce. Maybe the women in the candle booth need those sales to patch a mortgage. Maybe the dog wrangler's labor pays tuition for a kid back home. Profit and community are not mutually exclusive; they’re uneasy bedfellows in every county of the republic.

11 · When the Generators Drone Off

By dusk the generators coughed silent. Vendors zipped canvas, carnival lights blinked out one by one. I lingered as the crowd shrunk to dozens instead of thousands. A janitor in a reflective vest swept corndog sticks into a push cart ambled by. I asked if he liked the festival.

“The checks clear,” he said. “My boy runs a craft booth—engraving Bible verses on shotgun shells. Folks buy ’em for Christmas tree ornaments.” He shook his head, half smile, half bewilderment. “Tween the sweepin’ and the crafts, we can make his college payment without loans. I’ll sweep all night ifin’ I have to.”

There it was—resilience again, dressed in neon signage and barkers’ shouts but breathing the same ragged breath I was to hear throughout my travels.

12 · Driving Out Under a Hunter’s Moon

Josie and I spent the night hunkered down in the free “primitive” camping sites, primitive meaning no amenities like electrical hookups or blackwater dump stations. Josie stuck out like a chipped domino tile among the sea of RVs and fifth-wheelers. 

The next morning Josie grumbled awake. We rolled onto the county road, the festival grounds shrinking behind us. In the rearview, the Ferris wheel silhouette looked strangely noble against the dawn. I still carried disappointment, but it sat next to understanding in the passenger seat, neither pushing the other off.

Here is what I know after one long Midwest day:

• Traditions morph; sometimes they sell tickets to survive.
  
  
• Nostalgia can blind a traveler to the quiet ways people still gift each other hope.
  
  
• Even a corporate festival sets a stage where a janitor sweeps his kid closer to freedom.
  
  

Bob Evans once said he liked to treat strangers like friends and friends like family. The festival bearing his name treats customers like guests, which is not the same thing, but it isn’t nothing. Somewhere in the merch maze, if you watch close, the old handshake culture bleeds through. A vendor rounds down a price for a veteran; a volunteer refills a stranger’s water bottle without charge; an elder farmer spends a half hour telling a boy from the suburbs how corn turns sunlight into sugar.

I drove west into the dawn, windows open, sausage grease now a memory. Today another town would test my expectations. Maybe I’d find a story that fit like the blue ribbon on a prize 4-H steer. Maybe I’d find only commerce again. Either way, the work is the same: roll in, greet the dust, listen for the wind that won’t lie down. Because underneath every sales pitch hums that resilient power line, and if you tune your ear just right you can hear it singing:

We’re still here. We manage. We mend.

Maybe the old days smelled purer because the scale was small enough to mask the math. Maybe every generation mistakes evolution for loss. I won’t pretend my disappointment didn’t matter, but I tuck it beside the sausage sandwich memory, let them argue like siblings in the back seat while Josie hums broken lullabies.

Festival, fair, marketplace, or memory, one truth remains: people gather because they cannot bear isolation. They will line up for rides slightly unsafe, queue for food served in paper boats, trade dollars for trinkets if it buys them a day of shared air beneath a harvest sky. Community may come merchandized, but it still beats, still breathes.

And that, too, is worth the ink.

In 2006 I zig-zagged the continent, racking up 15,000 honest miles in a little Ford Escape Hybrid that wheezed like a kettle but kept the faith. Hundreds of small towns blurred past the windshield, each one carrying the same hard-scrabble tune: boarded storefronts, auctioned farms, hope stretched thin as baler twine. I’ve gone back since—one-week, two-week rambles—and the chorus hasn’t changed much. Out there, a clean thousand bucks can still tip the scale for a family riding the edge. Take this very real hypothetical for example:

Ben Davidson. Farmer, son of a farmer, grandson of the same stubborn stock. Dawn to dusk he talks to the soil, prays for rain, curses drought, then starts over. Simple pleasures; harsh arithmetic. Every dollar earns blisters.

One morning an envelope lands on his porch—official, unexpected, crisp. A check for $1,000. Ben balks, turns it over, holds it to the light. Evening settles; ideas sprout like spring beans. That tired tractor—clunky, coughing—needs a rebuilt engine. He’s been saving for years, a dollar here, seventy-five cents there. This windfall pushes him over the top. New heart for the old beast. Fields breathe easier, and so does Ben.

In America only 46.1 percent of farmers clear a positive income from the dirt; the rest—53.9 percent—scrape below poverty lines, moonlighting off-farm to keep the lights on.

The ripples travel fast. In America only 46.1 percent of farmers clear a positive income from the dirt; the rest—53.9 percent—scrape below poverty lines, moonlighting off-farm to keep the lights on. With reliable horsepower Ben quits his second job. He plows straighter, plants tighter, harvests heavier. Extra yield patches the barn roof, upgrades feed, salts away a few bucks for tomorrow.

And the change doesn’t stop at his fence line. Spare time and steadier nerves pull Ben into town: teaching soil science at the grade school, arguing road repairs on the council, showing up because he finally can. Prosperity hires a neighbor who’s been hurting for work, and that paycheck spins through the café, the hardware store, the church potluck—binding folks together the way twine binds hay.

All from one modest check. A thousand dollars, no more, no less. It stiffens a man’s spine, steadies a farm, sparks a chain the length of Main Street. In the hushed Midwest—big sky, bigger silences—such small mercies ring loud. They prove what we keep forgetting: a little can go a mighty long way when it lands in the right hands at the right time.

Join us in driving 'The Hope and Generosity Tour' across the nation. Your support fuels our journey, empowers community heroes, and weaves a story of hope and generosity that spans across America's small towns. 

Please donate today. Also, share our campaign with your friends and family, and follow Josie's journey as we embark on this unforgettable adventure!

 You can donate now by following this link: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-the-hope-generosity-tour-across-america

In the heart of Missouri, where the soil is rich and the lives of the people are steeped in simplicity and tradition, lives a woman whose calling was not to the fields, but to the souls that till them. Pam Sebastian, or “Pastor Pam,” as she is known, serves two churches in two towns that dot the map like seeds scattered by the hand of God. One a simple, modest house of worship, the other a glorious testament to time and history built by hands that knew the ache of labor. They are places where faith was not a matter of show, but of survival…

Well, that was true then—back in 2005—when I met Pam during my time with the Missouri Photo Workshop. Today she is more a “circuit rider”-type pastor. She rotates among three different churches. She no longer has a formal office and works out of her home.

What hasn’t changed is that her life of service and dedication to others is really where the idea for the Hope & Generosity Tour started. I figured there must be hundreds, thousands, or more people just like her whose stories go unsung and whose lives are simply a quiet testament to the resilience and power of hope and generosity. 

I choose Pam to be the poster child of the tour, the first recipient of the $1,000 gift. I needed someone to front my GoFundMe campaign for the tour and I could think of no one more convincing than her. So I set off for Missouri again; she wasn’t hard to find.

I figured there must be hundreds, thousands, or more people just like
her whose stories go unsung and whose lives are simply a quiet testament
to the resilience and power of hope and generosity. 

I first met her in the spring of 2005, the year the rivers all ran fat and the price of diesel made old men curse at the filling station. She stood in the doorway of “the rock church,” a 150-year-old historic monument to honest stonecutting labor and Presbyterian tradition.

She was wiping flour from her hands—she’d been rolling piecrust for a funeral reception—and studying me with eyes that did not blink so much as settle. Her greeting was neither grand nor perfunctory. It was a simple nod, as if to say, Come in if you’re hungry; stay out if you’re selling snake oil. In that nod lived a sermon. I stayed.

Back then she tended two congregations 30 miles apart. One a modest sanctuary of industrial design. The other had been raised a century earlier by quarrymen who chiseled scripture into limestone lintels, convinced the Lord liked his Word carved deep. Sundays she preached twice, zig-zagging county roads while the frost still clung to ditch grass. Between sermons she huddled with a farmer about to lose his fourth-generation acreage, then hurried to sit with a widow so brittle she looked like she would break with one good sneeze. 

She worked from a cramped office on the main floor, the walls sweating each summer like a sinner caught lying. Her desk was a battlefield of hymnbooks, unpaid heating bills, and T-ball schedules. She knew the family histories behind every name scrawled there, knew who secretly cut firewood for the retired schoolteacher, knew whose pantry rattled with nothing but mouse droppings. And because she knew, she showed up—quietly, firmly, sometimes with nothing more than a roasted chicken and a willingness to listen while the recipient pretended not to cry.

Two decades have rearranged the furniture of her life, but not the foundation. She has retired from full-time pastoring—that is the lie she tells her medical chart. In truth she has become a circuit rider, rotating among three churches like a comet in low orbit, never distant enough for folks to forget her pull. There is no office now, only a kitchen table cluttered with handwritten sermon notes, half-drunk coffee gone the color of river mud, and, one more than one occasion, a burlap sack of venison bound for the food bank.

That venison arrives courtesy of hunters she wrangles each hunting season. She does not hunt; she organizes, sleeves rolled, voice level. “The food bank needs protein,” she reminds them, and full-bearded men who speak fluent camouflage suddenly remember the Beatitudes. They field-dress their kill with the precision of surgeons because Pastor Pam asked them to, and they deliver twenty-pound parcels of meat that will simmer all winter in crockpots across the county.

Habitat for Humanity claims another slice of her calendar. She has sat on its regional board so long the minutes read like a diary of calloused hands and unfinished mortgages. On build days, she was not the ribbon-cutting dignitary but the one in paint-flecked overalls, coaxing crooked studs into plumb with a seven-pound hammer. She quotes scripture as she works, not to shame the volunteers but to remind them why the hammer in their hands matters as much as the prayer on their lips.

Her voice is a study in contrasts. It can soothe like creek water sliding over limestone, or it can break against stubbornness like a pry bar against rusted bolts. I have heard it hush a sanctuary packed with grief, each mourners’ sigh woven into her benediction. I have also heard it ring—short, sharp sentences arranged like barbed wire. She is kind. She is relentless. These traits live in permanent alliance.

The towns she serves are aging. Grain elevators once white as Sunday shirts now wear rust streaks that look like tear tracks. Young people leave, chasing paychecks on the interstate. Those who stay measure progress in repaired gravestones and the return of purple martins in March. They do not attend church to be dazzled; they attend to remember they are not alone in their remembering. Pastor Pam offers no spectacle. She offers presence. Some Sundays that is the holiest miracle imaginable.

Presence, however, exacts a toll. Her hair, streaked with silver, is pulled back in a hurried twist that surrenders strands to the wind. Arthritis nips her knuckles, but she refuses the cushion of preaching from a stool. She stands because the Word deserves legs beneath it. She stands, too, at hospital bedsides past midnight, coaxing psalms from a throat lined with fatigue. More than once she’s climbed into her Jeep after a fourteen-hour day only to sit motionless, both hands on the wheel, the cabin light exposing the tremor in her shoulders. She allows herself thirty seconds of stillness. Then the key turns, and headlights carve a path home.

She pays for such stubbornness in blood pressure readings that worry her doctor and nights where sleep is a stranger that only waves from the porch. Yet complaint is foreign currency to her tongue. Ask how she is, and she will tilt her head, considering, as though cataloging a thousand unvoiced aches, then reply something like, “Blessed beyond measure.” 

It was her capacity for sacrifice, her insistence that love must cost the giver something, that seeded the Hope & Generosity Tour in my own restless mind. I looked at her life—turned outward like an open palm—and imagined an army of such unseen stalwarts scattered across forgotten zip codes. I suspected they, too, were bone-tired but unbowed, and I wanted the world to know them. She became my “poster child,” though she would laugh at that phrase and swat it aside like a horsefly. When I launched a GoFundMe to finance the tour, I placed her story at the top, trusting her authenticity to burn away skepticism. It did. Donations started to flow.

Long before the first mile of my journey, I drove back to Missouri with an envelope heavy enough to make a banker smile. One thousand dollars. I handed it to her in the fellowship hall where fluorescent lights hummed and potluck aromas still haunted the air. She eyed the envelope as she might a snake in a shoebox. “Why?” she asked. “It’s for whatever grace tells you. No strings attached. Do with what you will.” A long pause. Then a half-laugh, half-sob escaped her chest. 

She accepted the gift the way an oak accepts lightning—rigid, crackling, inevitable. “I know just where this is going,” she said. And she recounted a story about a small, Civil War-era Black church in town that had been forced to start holding services in the basement because the roof had been condemned. “They’ve been trying to save for a new roof… money’s scarce,” she said through her tears. “This should put them over the top to get those repairs done.” 

She will endure until the heart clenched behind her sternum calls time. On afternoon she met at dawn her home where a menagerie of dogs announced my arrival. She held a Mason jar of sweet tea, the ice clinking like distant chimes. “What keeps you going?” I asked, not for the first time. She looked toward the horizon where the sun blazed down on the fallow fields. “Love is work,” she said. “Work isn’t done.”

Her answer hangs in my ear whenever cynicism tempts me. It reminds me that hope, like seed corn, is small and unremarkable until it is buried. Only then does it multiply. Pastor Pam buries hope daily: in sermons stitched with local gossip so the timid will listen; in Habitat walls plumbed true so a toddler’s first steps won’t tilt; in handwritten notes slipped under doors at dawn so the grieving will find company with their coffee.

She gives until her pulse stutters, then she gives a bit more. The cardiologist frowns. She smiles back. There is a secret behind that smile, a calculus older than medicine: better a heart worn thin by generosity than one thickened by caution.

When historians tally the arithmetic of empires, they will overlook her. That is fine. She is not building empires. She is mending the single fragile seam that runs through all of us, the seam that promises we are seen and we are worth the seeing. I have witnessed her stitch that seam with the gold thread of her own breath. It is a quiet heroism, yes, but make no mistake—it is the kind that tilts the axis of small towns and keeps the barn swallows returning each April.

Someday she will set down the hammer, the venison ledger, and the dog-eared Bible. She will close her front door against the evening breeze and know she has earned her rest. Until that day, the circuit will glow with her taillights, and the people will lean forward when they spot that Jeep cresting a gravel ridge. They will say, “Pastor Pam’s a coming.” Their voices will lift, lighter than the road dust, because where she is, hope is. Because where she is, generosity has put on its walking shoes.

In the end, it was not the large gestures, but the small, steady acts of love and faith that define her. She is a woman who gives all of herself, leaving little behind for her own needs. And in the silent hours of the night, when the world sleeps, she prays not for herself, but for the strength to keep going, to be the rock her people need, one day at a time.