Thunder and Marshall Moments

1 · October on the Odometer

I left South Carolina in the bright crackle of mid October 2024 with only one instruction drifting from the porch where Brenda waved me off: “Be home by Christmas.” I promised, then pointed Josie toward the Blue Ridge escarpment.

The Hope & Generosity Tour had no sponsors beyond a prayer and a promise of help from the folks at GoWesty should I get jammed up on the side of the road in NoWheresville. My intended route was a loose noose: Carolina into Ohio for the Bob Evans Farm Festival, west across Indiana soybean, Illinois prairie, then angling south-west through Missouri before dropping into Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and at last closing the loop back to the Atlantic pine barrens before December twenty-fifth. A harvest season ride.

I rolled north over fog-drapped Appalachians, watched maple leaves turn. Then crossed the Ohio River and caught the smell of sausage grease and funnel-cake oil. I shook hands with dozens of strangers, scribbled half as many stories. Then I pivoted west, driving days defined by corn stubble and radio static. Indiana blurred, Illinois flattened. The land began to breathe. I hit the long, slow exhale of the Missouri prairie and breathed right along with it.

That same sky was also busy assembling trouble.

2 · Barometers and Borderlines

On a late October morning, the barometer in my head dropped two notches somewhere west of Sedalia. The air thickened, the horizon hazed. High cirrus stretched above like pulled taffy, and the wind veered south, damp and urgent. Longtime plainsfolk can feel such shifts in their knee joints; I felt it in the Vanagon’s steering, a subtle wander as gusts toyed with her squared shoulders.

I rumbled north on U.S. 65, on the old freight trail connecting Arkansas to Iowa. The country opened wide. Soybeans already harvested, stalks pale as straw. Corn sheared to ankle-high stubs. And the ground waiting for winter’s first freeze. Grain elevators sat like silent sentinels. Each hamlet announced itself with its own rust-striped water tower proclaiming a hopeful town: Houstonia, Malta Bend, Gilliam.

Forty miles short of Marshall, the sky dimmed as though someone had laid a blacksmith’s apron over the sun. A low rumble vibrated through the floor pan. The weather app, lagging by minutes, pinged a severe-storm warning for Saline County. I thumbed the notification away; there are moments when silicon feels like gossip compared to the ancient honesty of thunder.

3 · The Great Midwestern Overture

A Midwestern thunderstorm is a freak show. The air goes electric, white knuckles grip the wheel, and a smell of tin and wet soil with something tasting like metallic—ozone is everywhere.

First came those scout drops, lazy, hesitant splats on the windshield. Then the deluge of a billion drops hitting sheet iron. Rain thick enough to shave with slammed onto Josie’s roof, drowning the wipers on the second pass. Visibility shrank to mere feet; ditches on either side filled within seconds, water racing like newborn creeks toward some unseen river.

Lightning cracked so near the white flash that it overpowered the van’s cabin, turning it into freeze-frame animation. After each burst the landscape then vanished to ink. The thunder that followed felt amphibious, splitting the sky and heartbeat.

It was hours compressed into thirty minutes. The squall passed. The thunder moved east, while the rain seemed content with its softer ragtime patter. Sunlight muscled through ragged cloud seams. Steam drifted off the pavement. Every leaf from every sycamore along the fencerow glittered with new polish.

I turned the key. Josie barked once and settled into her work-song idle. We pulled back onto 65, tires hissing through sheet water, and I thought: If that isn’t church, what is?

4 · First Sight of Marshall

Ten miles later a green sign announced MARSHALL CITY LIMITS. Population ten thousand three hundred-odd, give or take the last census and the next funeral.

I crossed into downtown on Arrow street. I heard the square before I really saw it owing to tires thrumming over brick pavers and the faint chime of the courthouse bell. I parked by the courthouse to walk the square.

After a thunderstorm walking is like a museum after closing: everything hushed, polished, more vivid for being damp. The courthouse lawn gleamed; puddles in sidewalk seams mirrored the clocktower. I paused at a bronze marker noting The Battle of Marshall, October 13 1863, when Confederate raider J. O. Shelby slammed into 1,800 Union soldiers garrisoned here, ending his 40-day “Great Raid” across Missouri. Casualties were few, the plaque assured, but bullet scars left brilliant traces and still freckle limestone on the northwest corner of the courthouse if you know where to look.

I ducked inside S&P’s Diner—smell of bacon grease and dish soap—and choose a stool at the gleaming stainless steel counter that sits on a red and white checked vinyl tile floor. A gallery of children’s crayon artwork plastered behind the counter. Before I’d even settled in a waitress had a mug and a pot of coffee at the ready, as if she’d read my mind. I nodded and she poured.

“You ain’t from around here,” she said with a head nod toward Josie, “but you beat the rain, so the day’s lookin’ up.” We chatted about the weather, like all Missourians do; she pronounced the storm “a whopper” and predicted good yields for wheat because thunderstorms “stir nitrogen in the soil.” I nodded as though I had known that all along.

5 · October Ledger

I wrote that night by headlamp in Josie’s cramped bunk:

Storm over Saline County baptized both land and traveler. Town of Marshall: brick, history, starch-pressed courtesy. Thunder swept the sky; bakery swept cinnamon across the square. Remember the smell of rain and yeast together—like communion wafers and wine of the ordinary.

I noted also: Looking for someone I haven’t met yet. Because stories travel faster than vans, and I’d heard rumors of a woman in this town who stitched generations together with little more than crayons, soft rebuke, and bottomless patience. But meeting her would have to wait for morning.