i-49 southbound, exit 53
anniversary of the time i went on a fun road trip to a crushingly sad place
blogging is ultimately a very silly little endeavor but i am trying to be consistent, so here we are again1. this one is long, you’ll have to opt to the website to see it.
first - it would be stupid to send out a newsletter without mentioning the situation in Gaza. this isn’t a political blog and i assume most of of you are already aware but on the off chance you might be wondering where to send money to directly help people in dire need, especially in light of Israel’s strategy as of 10/122 to strangle hospital operations in Gaza, consider the Middle East Children’s Alliance or American Near East Refugee Aid.
on to the blog. i’ve been reading more slowly recently. i’m almost done with Gunnhild Oyehaug’s Evil Flowers and I’ve just started Katherine Alcott’s Emergency. i’m also reading Denis Johnson’s The Stars at Noon. but none of these are ready for me to say anything pithy about and so this week is something different: an essay, for Frances
Frances is a writer i’ve mentioned in passing - them of “letting me crash on their couch at AWP23” fame. They're very smart, very nice, they're a pillar of the Seattle queer literary community, they have a very talented boyfriend and very cute animals, and their book in progress is very good and also btw they have an event coming up in November with Sim Kern you can go to virtually
Frances is also very pro-essay while i am actually mostly anti-essay. i think Online Essay is the worst possible genre for trans people because almost always it turns, by author choice or editor direction, into trans people relating everything in their life back to transition in some way and while that can be articulate or even mildly intriguing in some cases more frequently it’s just incredibly boring and sad3. i struggle to think of an essay on transition that has ever said anything at all to me with rare exception.4 but Frances has been cheerfully unrelenting in the “maybe write an essay about it (it being anything)” camp and i’m highly susceptible to suggestion, ultimately, so here is an essay: it’s about the Precious Moments Chapel, Park, Picher, Oklahoma, and dead dogs.
fairly frequently at my new job people act, or maybe really are, astounded by how many places i’ve lived. this is kind of silly. i have lived in comparatively few places. but i understand how “dc, denver, arkansas, kansas” in a row feels baffling. four places in five years, seven discrete living arrangements from 2018-2023, is maybe a bit unusual. i generally explain it as “yeah, that was the point at which i had to buy a car.” from 2019-2023, i did a lot of driving - mostly from my grad program in Lawrence, Kansas to Mar’s program in Fayetteville, Arkansas. every other weekend from august of 2020 to may of 2022 i drove 550 miles (267 one way) through some of the most beautiful and blighted countryside imaginable: southwestern Missouri.
if you’ve ever driven east-west cross-country before you know that most of the major interstates run through what i’d call corn country. there are huge swaths of nothing to look at but corn. corn country is better than, say, the Western Kansas Wasteland, but it’s nothing remarkable. there is some corn country going north-south on 1-49, but there’s more than that, too. there are trees, prairies, valleys, rivers, and profoundly dangerous drivers5.
there are also dogs and billboards.
missouri is the worst state in the nation for puppy mills, and has been for the last eleven years. the first time i saw a dog on the side of the road was in 2019, when Mar and i were going up to Kansas City for zinecon. we were stunned, thinking that the hounds that we nearly struck and killed must have escaped from their yard. as they went running back away from the highway, i remember thinking “close call.” and then not five miles up i saw a dead dog. and then on the way back i saw more dead dogs. and i realized that probably those dogs i had avoided hitting had, in fact, been let out to get hit. in 2020, when i started driving up and down missouri routinely i saw them all the time. dead dogs and living dogs standing in the median about to become dead. i once managed to pull over and get close enough to one of these living animals that i thought i might grab it but an 18-wheeler scared it away from me down onto a slope i couldn’t get to, and then it vanished. maybe it got hit later. the speed limit on i-49 was 65 mostly, 70 sometimes, which meant people would go up to 90 and not slow down. on top of dogs there were a lot of dead hawks, cats, deer, and once, though i didn’t pull over to take any photos to prove it, i swear i saw a mountain lion.
while i was avoiding hitting these dogs, i was also admiring the various billboards in missouri. like the two-parter for the blue-top quilt shop that said something like “scream until your husband stops!” and then, at the shop, “you screamed, he stopped!” and the one for some law firm that just said “arassed at work? #metoo,” and the giant cowboys poised Yosemite Sam style for Max Motors. of all of these, the most intriguing were the ones for the Precious Moments Chapel at Carthage.
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Samuel J Butcher created Precious Moments, which was/were6 ubiquitous in my childhood. it was a whole line of merchandise - cards, magnets, posters, and of course porcelain statues of all these big-eyed baby-adult-angel hybrids. i never really knew what the hell was going on with the style, like, they were kids? but they were adults? none of my friends or family ever owned them, but they filled Albertson’s card racks, Hallmark and thrift store shelves, sometimes might have sat on teachers’ desks. these days they’re more obscure - they’ve been overshadowed as Visible Collectors Items by equally ugly collectable trinkets like funkopops. but, despite the financial odds, the Precious Moments Chapel, supported by the 501c3 Precious Moments Foundation, still operates.
the final push that sent me on my Precious Moments Pilgrimage came in the form of a google widget. i had already decided i was going to set a short story in Carthage (titled, naturally, Carthago Delenda Est because what else do you call a story about Carthage?) and was debating the merits of a site visit. it was the start of my final fall semester. Mar had recently departed for hir teaching job in France and the seven hour time difference left us both with long spans of time in which we had to do our own thing before we could catch up. probably i was delaying on thinking about my thesis when i found myself looking at google maps, laughing until i cried about the fact that the italian restaurant at the Precious Moments Chapel was explicitly listed as “lgbtq friendly!”
gay people don’t exist in the world of Precious Moments as far as i know. you will likely never find a little statue of two baby-men kissing, two baby-women holding up a baby-baby of their own. Precious Moments is sexlessly, explicitly Christian. and missouri is kind of famously not great with lgbt people as a class. the nonsensicality of this information label pushed me over the edge. what the hell i thought, i should see this place before i never go back to missouri ever again in my life if i can help it.
so in october of 2022 Ryan Skrabalak of Spiral Editions7 and teamed up. he wanted to see a superfund site in oklahoma, just a bit away from the missouri border, which of course i agreed would be fun. one car is better than two and two sites of curiosity are better than one. we set out, with Spiral Editions Managing Editor Donkey aka Danushka aka Belladonna the Dog, with gleeful, curious hearts, fueled by coffee and Taylor’s Donuts. we stopped at the ripley's believe it or not smallest gravesite and did a bit of leaf peeping. we got gas at the Bear Stop. we made it to the Precious Moments Park and Chapel around noon, ready to marvel, expecting to eat some LGBTQ friendly Italian before going to Pitcher.
we were at the chapel for maybe 45 minutes. we did not stay for lunch.
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i know that i will die. it’s kind of an abstract but i know it will happen. i know that my loved ones, too, will die. i don’t love this, i’m not looking forward to this, but i feel like in my day to day, if you asked me about it, i’d say i’m fairly clear-eyed about it. surprising, tragic things happen all the time - my mother, who is in her 70s, recently got very lucky in surviving a 20 foot fall (she misjudged when it was time to jump from a ski lift) and for about three days in january of 2023 i wasn’t sure exactly how lucky she would be. i know she won’t be lucky forever. shortly after my mother survived, my father’s mother died8. i know that eventually i will be the person being volatile and emotional in grief, i know eventually i will be dead. i think it’s important to acknowledge these things, for everyone to acknowledge them for themselves in the most straightforward, radical acceptance kind of way. otherwise you run the risk of creating a space like the Precious Moments Park and Chapel.
maybe it was the fact we visited in the fall, or on a Saturday, or the fact that COVID had impacted the operation of the place, but the mood was strange from our arrival. we drove through winding, two-lane backroads dotted with trailer homes in various states of decay until we came across the enormous parking lot. empty space after empty space sprawled out in front of a building that looked like the hybrid of a nursing home and a PF Chang’s. after we walked through the gauntlet of baby-angels, though the front doors, we found ourselves in a gift shop/reception space that i can only think to describe as “really kind of some backrooms shit.” it was an un-place. silent, staffed only by two or three women at the gift shop who would not look at us, a dry water feature. the overhead lights were dim, like someone had installed the wrong wattage, and all around us precious moments figurines remained stationary in play-pretend poses while a TV without sound showed us the process of creating them.
a terrible fact/flaw about me is that i’m a nervous laugher. people hate nervous laughers because we’re very annoying. it is an annoying response to have to distress. Ryan was kind enough not to tell me to shut up as i began tittering, walking past the gift store full of sad-eyed build-a-bear knockoffs through the storybook land of the figurines towards the exit that would take us to the Chapel. i truly couldn’t help but laugh out loud when we came to the final statue in the reception area: the memorial to the Oklahoma City Bombing victims.
i was overcome. i think even Ryan laughed. there comes a point at which something is so out of place, so wrong, such an inappropriate response, that the contrast embodied by the existence of this wrong thing creates something like humor. how else are you supposed to react to art that’s at once kitch, sincere, and so entirely out of touch? this sculpture was darksided9. it was also, i would later see, the exemplar piece to explain this place. a time capsule tragedy.
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the most current academic article written about the Precious Moments Chapel is an autoethnography/travelogue by Andrew Causey, who described the Park as “a place for unanchored emotions.” i did feel unanchored as we wandered the silent halls examining the art. i felt as though i had trespassed into someone’s dream, accidentally found myself in a world that was so far removed from mine i might as well have jumped through one of C.S. Lewis’ magic pools. i felt unmoored from reality. the halls were some kind of clean linoleum, the light somehow just as dim as it had been in reception. i thought about sensory deprivation tanks and how this place was a hideous cousin to them, a negative sensory input machine.
we came to Philip’s Room.
Philip Butcher, one of Samuel Butcher’s sons, was twenty-seven (27) years old when he died in a car accident but you would be forgiven for thinking he died at 7 instead. the mural of children grieving at an empty bed, of child-angels welcoming an unpictured Philip to child-angel heaven, suggest the prematurity of the death understandably overwhelmed Samuel Butcher. the room, which Precious Moments describes as a place that “continues to be a healing place for all those struck by loss,” is a notable feature in all the academic writing about the space10. visitors are meant to read about Philip’s death, then write their own experiences of loss in one of the visitor books, which will live in perpetuity in the shrine/reflection room. there’s a wall full of photos of deceased individuals whose relationship with the Chapel or the Butcher family was unspecified. they all died before the year 2000.
i realized, looking at these ledgers and photos and paintings, that i was feeling profoundly sad for the families. not only for their loss, which is an inherent eventuality of living, but for the way the Precious Moments Chapel seemed to hold the memory of these dead people in a perpetual child-mode. it was the art, of course, but also the suggestion from the art that death turned people back into children, like the best part of a 27-year-old was who he was in kindergarten. i wondered about how the families of these people who all died before 2000 thought of these dead people, many of whom were also in their twenties. did they chose to remember their lost children as young because they didn’t know them as adults? it felt forcibly undignified, this literal infantilizing. of course, i’ve never lost a child and i never will. i will never have children, and the choices of parents of dead children are, fundamentally, something i’ll always be distant from. still, in that moment in Philip’s room, i felt so sad that for a moment i also felt angry. like, what the fuck, why are you denying the fullness of these lives? just to sell back the idea of innocence in tacky little statuettes?
my experience in Philip’s Room is mirrored by the one researcher Aaron Ketchell had all the way back in 1999 when he wrote “the Precious Moments Chapel seems to function primarily as a place of ritualized purification, with its liturgical process consisting of both a tour and the purchase of gift shop mementos. The site's ability to dispel anxieties and fears and to solidify an encouraging vision of the promised hereafter is best seen in the chapel's marque mural, Hallelujah Square.”
for Ryan and me, it’s safe to say our anxieties and fears were not at all dispelled by a visit to Hallelujah Square, though we did spend a fair amount of time looking at it from the back pews. it was the only place we saw other tourists. and honestly it’s impossible not to feel somewhat awed by the main room of the Chapel itself. the stained glass is clean and intricate, the paintings all completed by hand by one dedicated man transforming the world into his own outsider art museum, “guided by the Lord.”
in the nave a docent was presenting to a group of elderly women. the enormous altar image had not yet been completed, the docent explained, when Mr. Butcher’s mother passed away. with apparently sincere sorrow, the docent reflect that Mrs. Butcher “never lived to see a precious moment.”
at that point we had to leave.
—
we drove, in part on route 66, to Picher, Oklahoma, to clear our minds. after the claustrophobia of the chapel, it was nice to be back on the road. we let Donkey stick her head out the window as we crossed the state line and we listened to 90s country. “I was surprised by how upsetting that was,” Ryan said, and I agreed. I told him, “I think if we’d eaten lunch there we would have been trapped the forever.”
there was no such fear in Picher. the ghost town, ringed by enormous piles of chat, was wide open. we parked on the side of the highway where a group of bikers had just been. the sound of their rock music, blasting out of their heavy touring cruisers, dissipated into thin air. it was beautiful.
Picher had been the site of subsurface zinc mining from 1913-1967. zinc mining creates wastewater that is incredibly toxic, and for those 54 years of operation that wastewater seeped into the ground. it became part of an EPA superfund site in 198011, but as late as 1994 it was determined by the Indian Health Agency (the Quapaw Tribe owns and administers part of the land) that 34-5% of Picher’s population under 18 years old had some level of lead poisoning. most of the buildings are gone now, destroyed by the army corps of engineers, a 2008 tornado, or arson, but the tribal police still operate a base in at least one of the buildings.
nobody stopped us from walking the streets. it was quiet and warm. we stopped Donkey from getting into the grass and the water and i took a bunch of pictures. i wondered about where everyone had gone to when they left. probably Joplin or Tulsa or any of the towns in between. i learned later from a co-worker whose brother worked for the Oklahoma state electric company, that even though nobody has lived in the city for seven plus years, electricians come to service it. the ghosts of the town are fully electrified.
picher and precious moments are the same, of course - they are dead. picher at least has the grace to acknowledge this. precious moments is trapped out of time - the last bad thing to happen there was the oklahoma city bombing. there is precious moments 9-11 commemoration but it’s indecipherable from all the other generic patriotism wrapped up in the brand. part of what made the Chapel so horrible to visit is it’s fundamental inability to be a part of now. maybe in 100 years, assuming it still stands, the effect will fade. churches from the 1300s still stand and nobody goes into them and thinks “damn, what a sad attempt of this building to cling to life.” but then again churches from the 1300s don’t attempt to say “heaven will be perfect because you will be a child again.” and visitors to the Precious Moments Chapel are on the decline. already part of the park is shuttered (the art museum) and eventually, i suspect, it will be broken down piece by piece and sold to people who steadfastly do not want to be sad, who will take refuge in the overwrought images of innocence and placidity that mirrors joy, no tears in heaven, until they, too, are dead. i hope they get the heaven they want.
—
we saw dogs on our trip, too. we made pitstops in Joplin for good coffee, Galena for a stretch. we were at a stoplight when Donkey stuck her head out the window and started barking furiously. there, in the empty football field of a middle school, were two dogs with crusty eyes, barking back, running in circles. the light was red for a long time, maybe we were waiting for a train, i can’t remember. i remember asking Ryan if he was up to going to Fayetteville, to the Ozark Holler Mutts, if we could catch these animals. but we couldn’t catch them. someone pulled up behind us and the volume of cars became too much for the strays - they ran across the football field back towards the woods. we probably wouldn’t have been able to get them anyway, or keep them safe in the car with an unusually territorial Donkey.
so we continued on our way. we made a pitstop at the Maple Festival in Carthage. we saw the neighborhoods. we drove back while the sun set and ryan read me the wikipedia article on the death of Scott Joplin, then the wikipedia article on syphilis, and we listened to Scott Joplin’s music. i saw a small white dog dead on the side of the road on the way back in to Kansas City and i thought i hate everyone in missouri, i would turn this place into an inland sea. i was so grateful not to be driving home alone.
the story i went to the Precious Moments Park and Chapel to do site research for, Carthago Delenda Est, is still in progress12. as soon as i got to Philadelphia in the fall of 2023, i sold my car.
and that’s a wrap on the blog! if you want more info on helping dogs in the Ozarks check out Ozark Holler Mutts (where Ms Donkey came from), Spay Arkansas, and the House of Little Dogs in addition to various county humane societies and the ASPCA.
will i say this every time until it sticks? probably! a couple of years ago i ran a half marathon just for funsies and i’m currently back in the training for another and every time i wake up before 6 AM i say to myself “it’ll be fine, you can walk if you need to.” “i’m trying to be consistent” is clearly my blogging “you can walk if you need to.”
as of 10/13 an order of forced evacuation, amounting to a population transfer, has been ordered for a million people. a population transfer took place earlier this year in the Nagorno Karabakh - the refugee situation in Armenia is still something you could also consider donating to, if you felt inclined. the Nagorno Karabakh Relief Fund and the ArmeniaFund are both reputable and widely trusted.
the most extreme example of this is of course Daniel Lavery nee Ortberg whose capacity to tell a good joke was violently obliterated by his transition
and that exception was written by a cis woman about her ftm partner that featured them going on a hike with their geriatric dog and the cis woman thinking “if he’s such a man he should volunteer to shoot this animal” not because she actually wanted him to but because she was angry at him for opting into a sex role where that kind of offer would be acceptable. this essay fascinated me at the same time that it was the clearest possible “oh my god just break up” kind of essay. it lives in the part of my brain as the incredibly annoying essay about coming out as a lesbian round two via a cruise which featured the author blaming her nonbinary partner for being “a Peter Pan boi” when they had literally bought a house together, the fundamental most opposite of “delayed childhood” move imaginable to me. i wish i could link to the “man up and kill my dog” article but i read it in undergrad and have never been able to find it since. the likelihood it was scrubbed from the internet post 2012, around when i read it, is high.
nobody is a good driver. everyone jokes about how “the drivers are so bad in X state” but that’s because nobody is a good driver. cars are dangerous machines. i was almost hit fully side-on in missouri by a horse trailer because the guy towing it merged on top of me - i had to drive myself at like 60 mph into the side of the road and stop to let him pass. all of this, naturally, under the shadow of one of those fucking giant megaflags TRUMP 2024 that assholes fly at the borders of their property (probably a leftover of those “people’s convoys,” which i saw several times in the lead up to the election and which were always a huge pain in the ass.)
the slipperiness of Precious Moments, linguistically, does fascinate me. Precious Moments is singular and plural at the same time - it’s a brand, they’re thousands of little figures. Precious Moments is/are a hivemind.
if you buy some of Spiral’s excellent poetry right now you will be donating to MECA in addition to getting excellent poetry
eventually i’ll write a zine about the family slides i took from her house and that my dad’s family mailed me because i asked for them - my grandfather was an avid photographer and i think his work is really beautiful. it’s a mix of mundane images of life in Texas in the 70s and 80s and flight photography of coastal pollution, which he took to support my grandmother’s adventures in (ultimately successful) lobbying to protect the John O’Quinn Estuarial Corridor in Galveston
it doesn’t escape me that the memefication of “darksided” comes from the fundamental miscommunication between hardline conservative christianity and the rest of everyone else, including generic cultural christians (most white americans.) it’s funny to us because it’s so unusual, but it’s not funny to them. Marguerite Perrin was probably in sincere emotional distress during the filming. it does seem like things have turned around for her, though, which is good.
Patrons are encouraged to leave their own thoughts in textual form at the end of the tour, and based upon the tens of large scrapbooks on shelves in the room, it appears that many pilgrims act upon that opportunity, augmenting the thousands of letters received by the chapel each year which consist of similar sentiments. While touring the site, individuals are prompted to read the art within the context of Butcher's own life story and to use his apparent ability to overcome tragedy as a template for the assuaging of tragic baggage which they might bring to the place. Attesting to this process, Bill Nichols, from Granite City, Illinois, states, "We're Christians. The fact that he lost a son and he's trying to find good in it... conveys the thought of keeping Jesus in his life even in death" (Cornelius 1-8). from Aaron Ketchell’s “Suffering, Salvation, and the World’s Most Popular Collectable.”
which didn’t stop them from being 1A State Football Champs in 1984, as proudly memorialized by the Picher High School Mascot: Zinco the Gorilla
the first draft was pretty poorly received in my last mfa workshop class, with my advisor beginning the 3 hour period where another student and i were being workshopped with a short lecture about how we should keep in mind that “shadow stories,” those that deal exclusively with dark themes, are not necessarily more deep or meaningful than others that don’t. it was disheartening at the time but it’s also hilarious in retrospect. like, this draft was bad enough that one of the six other students in the class just did not bother to show up for it. honestly bless Kij for just coming out and saying “you will still be workshopped even though you wrote something that caused people to have a big emotional reaction.” like, fair! i agree that “causing a big reaction” doesn’t make good art. part of what i’m doing with this story now is re-structuring and adding. I’ve been working with Callum Angus through some of his freelance classes (I’m deeply privileged to be able to continue taking classes outside the confines of an institution, and in fact having the privilege to spend money to take classes via zoom at Catapult, before the classes were shuttered, is a big part of how i got into grad school anyway) and he and my classmates in that space have given me a lot to think through with the protagonist and the Themes etc