a midwestern ghost town times beach missouri

My car sits in the gooey center of the slice. The river forms the curve of crust the highway and the railroad tracks are its edges. The park, like the town that came before, is shaped like a generous piece of pie. From the parking area, three parallel trails run out to the Meramec River, where they dead-end at a path that contours the river from the old Route 66 bridge at the east end of the park to the Burlington Northern Railroad trestle at the west. I sit in the car for a moment and orient myself on the small map I printed back at my parents’ house. I lift the wire mesh lid off the cage, reach in, and stroke her broad forehead. “They test dioxin on guinea pigs, and it kills them. The government is telling people to leave and not come back. Morning after morning, the newspaper on our breakfast table shows houses half-submerged. It’s late December 1982, and the TV news anchors are talking about dioxin and floods and a place called Times Beach. I don’t know what dioxin is, but I know it’s bad. “Don’t call her that!” I yell, turning my back on him to watch my rodent friend root around in her cedar-chip bedding. He’s just nicknamed my pet guinea pig “Dioxin,” and I am little-sister mad. “Di-o-xin, Di-o-xin.” My brother Pete taps on the Plexiglas cage and taunts me. I’ve come here to see what it looks like when an entire town disappears. I’ve come here to understand a decades-old story about contamination and erasure in flyover country, a place just outside my home ground, a place abandoned, quarantined, vanished.

Sun glints off the yellow tube slide, and shadows web the ground. I kill the ignition and stare through the windshield at a play structure that sprouts primary-colored against the brown of Missouri’s monotone winter woods. Mine is the lone car in the wide asphalt parking lot.

Where the river bends gently northwest, I exit the highway and drive through a gate marked Route 66 State Park. We make our lives among relics and ruins of former times, former worlds.įrom the road, the river is hidden amid bluffs of limestone and sand, but I can trace the water’s arcing path by the leafless trees that line its banks.

A midwestern ghost town times beach missouri