I gazed at it admiringly. “I bet that cost a few loonies.” I’d learned that slang for money during my Toronto seminars.
He smiled at my use of the word. “You’re looking at my retirement,” he said.
“You came all the way down from Canada to drive the Route?” I asked.
“We sure did.”
“Why?”
A broad smile crossed his face. “Because it’s there.”
Like the long, lonely stretch from the Meramec Caverns to Lebanon, the 124 miles to my next destination—Joplin, Missouri—didn’t have much to offer other than a whole lot of fresh air and old road.
That and a few oddities. I passed three unusual sites that I made note of in my diary.
The first was an old casket shop just outside Lebanon that was missing its roof. I don’t know how long the stone block building had been abandoned, but the entire inside of it had grown into a forest.
Second was a dead possum that someone had put on top of a mailbox. It was fresh enough that it was covered with flies. When I told a shopkeeper in town about it he said, “Welcome to the Ozarks.”
Third, I spent a night in the Boots Court Motel, a famous Route 66 attraction and the kind of place that still promoted itself with “a radio in every room.” Apparently, Clark Gable had spent a night at the hotel, camping out in room 6. I asked to stay in room 6 but, not surprisingly, it was already occupied.
Three days from Lebanon, I walked into the populous city of Joplin and an encounter that changed my life.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I’ve met a man who claims to have talked with God.
—CHARLES JAMES’S DIARY
The city of Joplin was named after a minister, but had he known what the town would become at the height of its mining boom, he probably would have asked for his name back. Shortly before the Civil War, lead was discovered in Joplin and mining camps began popping up around the city. This was followed a few years later by the discovery of a more valuable mineral, what the miners back then called “jack”—today known as zinc. Miners poured into the town and soon bars and brothels outnumbered the churches by ten to one. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Joplin had become a regional metropolis, as well as the lead- and zinc-mining capital of the world.
Today the city’s mining past is still revealed by a landscape that had been remade with tailings piles and abandoned open-pit mines.
Joplin was also a favorite hangout of Bonnie and Clyde. Once, after the Joplin police had been tipped off to their whereabouts, the couple got away, killing two police officers in their escape. In their haste, they left a camera behind. The local newspaper developed the film in the camera, which led to the iconic pictures we have today of the two outlaws smiling and posing with machine guns.
I stopped at a pub near the center of Joplin, a few blocks from the hospital. There was an older gentleman, probably in his late sixties, sitting at the bar with a tall mug of dark ale. I sat down next to him. The long days alone must have been getting to me, because I was eager for conversation.
“What are you drinking?” I asked.
He nudged his glass. “Their Oatmeal Stout.”
“How is it?”
“It’s good,” he said, then he took a drink as if he’d just remembered it was good. “Nothing better at the end of a stressful day.”
“I hear you.”
The bartender set a small plastic dish of mixed nuts in front of me, and I ordered the same beer as the man was drinking.
After I ordered, the man turned to me. “Benjamin Franklin said, ‘Beer is proof that God loves us.’ ”
“Beer is God,” I said.
He looked at me as though my comment bothered him. “No, it’s not,” he said. “God is God.”
“You’re a believer in God?” I asked. “The big Santa in the sky?”
His brow furrowed. “The Santa in the sky?”
“Isn’t that what God is? Just an adult version of Santa Claus. Didn’t Freud prove that?”
“Freud proved what?”
The bartender set my beer down in front of me, and I took a drink. “That is good,” I said.
“You were saying that Freud proved there is no God,” the man said.
“Right. He said that God is just the manifestation of our deepest wishes. Especially the wish for security in a dangerous world. That’s why we usually think of God as a man, since men are traditionally the protectors. Freud proved there is no God.”
The man’s brow again furrowed. “I don’t think Freud’s argument was that God didn’t exist; it was more that our belief in Him is driven by our desire for Him to exist. Which, in fact, He does.”
“You say that like you’ve seen God,” I said, lifting my mug.
He looked at me for a moment, then said, “As a matter of fact, I have.”
I set down my glass and looked at him, waiting for the punch line. None came. “You’ve seen God,” I said.
He looked at me calmly. “Yes.”
“What if I told you I thought you were crazy?”
He smiled. “Well, I did just come from the hospital’s psych ward.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card.
Raymond George, MD
Chairman
Department of Psychiatry
I looked up from the card, feeling a little stupid that I’d been tossing around Freud with a professional. “You’re a psychiatrist?”
“I’m the chairman of the department.”
“Do they know you claim to have seen God?”
“Does who know?”
“Whomever you report to.”
He nodded. “Yes. The hospital board and CEO all know.”
“And they still gave you that job . . .”
He smiled. “I know. I’m still a little surprised that happened.”
I took another drink, then turned back to him. “So tell me about God,” I said flippantly. “What’s he like? Does he wear tweed or is it all white robes and burning bush stuff? And if he didn’t want Adam and Eve to eat the apple, why did he even make the tree?” I lifted my beer. “Tell me about him.”
He looked at me for a moment and said, “No. I don’t think I will.” He turned back to his glass.
I looked at him incredulously. “Hey, you can’t make a statement like that and not deliver.”
He looked at me sternly. “You’ve already decided I’m either a fool or a liar, so why would I waste my time?”
It was difficult talking to someone whose life had been devoted to surfing people’s minds. “What if I told you that I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt?”
“Then I’d say you were a fool or a liar. Based on your reaction, I would seriously doubt you’re capable of making such an abrupt paradigm shift.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “But all the same, I’m interested in what you think you saw.”
His mouth rose in an amused smile. “What I think I saw?” He took another long draw from his mug, wiped his mouth with a napkin, then turned back and looked at me. His piercing blue eyes were nearly eclipsed beneath heavy gray caterpillar eyebrows. “All right. I’ll share my experience. For your benefit, not mine. Do with it as you will.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“It was 1972, just a few weeks before the Vietnam peace agreement was signed in Paris. I was a newly recruited private in the air force. I was stationed in Biloxi, awaiting my assignment. It was just a little before Christmas, and I had been given a furlough to go home to Denver.
“Two days before my vacation, I came down with a fever and cough. It got worse fast. By the next day I was hospitalized with pneumonia.
“Suddenly I found myself feeling better and sitting by the side of my bed with a nurse running out of my room. I called out to her, but she ignored me. I followed her out to the corridor and shouted for her again, but again she didn’t respond.
“There was another nurse walking toward me. I turned to her and said, ‘I’m sorry, but could
you help me find my doctor? I’m supposed to be going home.’
“She didn’t even look at me. It made me angry. I reached out to grab her arm, and my hand went right through her.
“At that point I had pretty much figured out that something was wrong. Then my nurse came running back with a doctor. I tried to get their attention, but they ran past me to my bed. That’s when I saw that there was still someone in the bed. Someone who looked an awful lot like me.
“The doctor looked at my heart monitor, which looked crazy—like a bunch of radio waves—then grabbed the paddles and shocked my body. I watched my body nearly jump off the bed. He tried twice more; then the monitor started buzzing. The nurse said, ‘He’s asystolic.’
“I looked at the monitor. I had flatlined. The doctor started performing chest compressions. Then he and the nurse traded off. Finally, after five or so minutes, the doctor stopped. He was panting with exhaustion. He said, ‘I’m calling it. He’s gone.’ I just stood there looking at them. ‘I’m not gone,’ I said. ‘I’m right here. Keep doing it.’
“Then the nurse pulled the sheet up over my head. I shouted at them. ‘Don’t stop! I’m going home for Christmas. My parents are expecting me!’ Almost as soon as I said that, I was above the hospital, moving at a tremendous speed. Even though I was flying over snow-covered mountains, I wasn’t cold. In fact, I couldn’t feel anything except motion.
“In less than a minute, I was standing in my parents’ kitchen. My parents were sitting at the kitchen table. They had just finished dinner and my mother was asking my father what she should make for my homecoming dinner.
“He said, ‘You know how he loves your stuffed peppers and rice.’ Then he came over to help her with the dishes, and my mother said that she was going to tell me that Margaret Wright, a girl I had dated for a while, was marrying the Wallis boy, and hoped that I would take it all right. My mother then added, ‘I never wanted them to marry anyway. Her mother is a closet lush.’ My dad said, ‘At least Margaret won’t have to change her initials.’
“I’m telling you all this because I verified the entire conversation with them after I got home.” He shifted a little in his chair. “The whole time I was trying to talk to them but they couldn’t see or hear me. After a while I started thinking of my body, and suddenly I was transported back to the hospital in the same way I came. Considering that my parents lived almost fourteen hundred miles away in Denver and I’d traveled the distance in less than a minute, I was moving impossibly fast. I’ve done the math. I had to be moving faster than mach one hundred.”
“Nobody could survive that much acceleration,” I said.
“Then it’s a good thing I was already dead,” he replied, grinning.
I thought over his story, then said, “So where was your God in all this?”
He nodded. “That’s exactly what I was wondering. I was suddenly back at the hospital standing next to my body, trying to figure out what to do next. I’m wondering, Could this really be death, to just hang around the world with no substance?
“Just then the room began to glow impossibly bright. Brighter than anything I’d ever seen or could have seen with my eyes without losing them.
“At first I wondered where the light was coming from, but then I realized it wasn’t where but who. The light was coming from a personage standing in front of me. Then a voice said to me, You are in the presence of the Son of God.”
“Jesus,” I said. “You saw Jesus Christ.”
“Yes.”
If he was lying, I couldn’t see it. He told the story as calmly as if he were reciting what he’d had for dinner last night. True or not, I was convinced that he, at least, believed his story.
“Then what?” I asked.
“He asked me what I had done with my life.”
“What did you say?”
“I said that I was just starting my life. I wasn’t supposed to die this young. He said to me, ‘Death can come at any time.’ ”
“Then what?”
“We left the hospital. He showed me things.”
“What things?”
“Things I can’t tell you.”
“Really?” I said. “Like, you know the future?”
He smiled. “I didn’t think you believed me.”
“I didn’t,” I said. “But you’re pretty convincing. So how did you come back to life?”
“That’s a story in itself,” he said. “In all I was gone just nine minutes. But it would have taken several days to see all that I saw.”
“Nine minutes; you should be brain-dead.”
“I’ve been accused of that as well,” he said, slightly grinning.
“You have witnesses?”
“Many. And I have a signed death certificate. It hangs on the wall next to my doctorate degree. Everyone should have one. It’s a good way to keep your priorities straight.”
Meeting him felt like more than a coincidence. Both of us had been pronounced dead.
He finished his beer. After a moment he said, “You don’t have to believe me. You don’t have to believe anything. It doesn’t change the truth of my experience.
“But if I can give you some advice, for your own sake, keep an open mind. There’s a difference between not believing in the existence of a higher power and denying the existence of a higher power because you’ve blamed it for something that’s happened to you.”
I just looked at him with astonishment. “How did you know that something happened to me?”
“I didn’t. But most of the people I meet who claim there is no God are really just angry at God and feel like denial is a way to get back at Him.”
I took a much-needed drink. For a few minutes neither of us spoke. Then I turned to him. “I lost God after my father nearly beat me to death. I reasoned, if God wasn’t powerful enough to stop him, He isn’t a God. And if He were powerful enough to stop him, but doesn’t, then He’s not good.”
The man nodded slowly and said, “That’s an understandable rationale, but flawed.”
“How so?”
“The greatest gift God could give us is free agency. Without it, there’s no point of existence. We’d just be meat puppets. Would you agree with that?”
I thought about it, then nodded. “I can accept that.”
“But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t allow free agency only if it agrees with your will. That’s not free agency, it’s control. So what is it, freedom or control?”
“You should have been a minister,” I said.
“No, I don’t like working Sundays. But I’d have to say that spending a few minutes on the other side trumps a lifetime in theological studies.”
“And your bosses at the hospital really know about this?”
He smiled. “You would have enjoyed my job interview. I was interviewed by the hospital’s CEO, a declared atheist. I was thinking that the interview was going well, when he crossed his arms, looked me in the eyes, and said, ‘You’re on record saying that you have seen God. Is that true?’
“I thought, There it goes. But I wasn’t going to lie about the most significant event of my life. I certainly wasn’t going to deny Him. So I looked the doctor in the eyes and said, ‘Yes, it is true.’
“He looked at me for a moment, nodded, and said, ‘All right, we’ll get back to you.’ Two days later they offered me the job.”
“That’s pretty remarkable,” I said.
“That was more than eight years ago. Since then Dr. Probst, the CEO, and I have become close friends. About a year ago I reminded him about the interview. He laughed and said, ‘Look, I didn’t know if you’d seen God or what, but I did know that you were on record saying that you had. So if you’d denied it, you were not someone I could trust.’ ”
I thought for a moment. “So you’re saying that God lets bad things happen because He loves us.”
“Yes. It’s a paradox.”
“It’s a terrible paradox,” I said.
“It is, except when
you consider the conclusion.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s all temporary. In the end, love wins.”
I woke the next morning unable to get the conversation I’d had with the doctor out of my mind. Had he really had that experience? I believe that he believed it, but that doesn’t make it true. I had heard about near-death experiences before, even once from a client, but I had always dismissed them as delusions of weaker minds. But this man’s mind wasn’t weak. And as far as I could figure out, he had no motivation to lie. I suppose that’s what bothered me most of all. I couldn’t figure out the man’s angle.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Kansas claims a mere eleven miles of Route 66. It took me less than three hours before I could say, “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore . . .”
—CHARLES JAMES’S DIARY
Two and a half weeks from the time I crossed over the Mississippi River into Missouri, I walked out of the western side of the state, over the Kansas border.
Of the eight Route 66 states, Kansas has the least amount of road, with just eleven miles of asphalt crossing through the southeastern corner of the state. The Historic Route 66 Highway signs turned from blue to brown.
I stopped for lunch at a restored vintage 66 gas station-turned-café that had the actual rusted-brown truck that inspired the character Tow Mater in Cars.
I wasn’t alone in the café. Somehow I had caught up to the Corvette-driving Canadians I’d run into at the Munger Moss Motel. We had a burger together along with two Australians who had started their trek in Los Angeles and were following the Route from west to east.
One of the Canadians was complaining about the difficulty of following the Route along some stretches, and the Australian erupted, “You think you got it hard, mate? Half the cities don’t even have signs facing west. You have to drive the bloody thing with one eye in the rearview mirror!”
Chapter Twenty-Five
There are people who are as much a part of the Route as the road itself.
—CHARLES JAMES’S DIARY