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A section of I-70 is named for steroids gobbler Mark McGwire
Ted T. Cable, who teaches conservation and park management at Kansas
State University, is a man who likes a challenge. He's written guidebooks describing the fun to be had taking
the interstate across Kansas (bleak) and Missouri (cluttered).
Cable's book about I-70 in Kansas (co-written with Wayne A. Maley) came out in 2003. He and co-author Luann M. Cadden have just released a book about the journey's eastern continuation, Driving Across Missouri: A Guide To I-70 (University Press of Kansas; $15.95).
Cable began each project with the knowledge that his subject does not inspire fondness. When Cable worked on the Kansas book, friends who live in Missouri described their preference to drive through Kansas under the cover of darkness in order to blot out the tediousness of the landscape. I-70 in Missouri is unloved for different reasons. "The challenge there is to help people see beyond the billboards," he says.
Driving Across Missouri's chapters are numbered by mile marker. The book explains how towns and creeks got their names, notes the uses of smooth sumac, and places the origin of the phrase "man's best friend" to a trial in Warrensburg in 1870.
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At mile marker 182, Cable and Cadden address the
issue of chronic roadside advertising. The authors blame lax Department of Transportation guidelines for the fact that billboards are three times as common on Missouri's interstates as they are in neighboring states. "From an aesthetic standpoint, anything that would be done to reduce those numbers would obviously help people see the landscape," Cable says.
Points along the interstate that Cable finds especially appealing are, moving from west to east, Arrow Rock, a once bustling river town; the area near Rocheport, where the interstate crosses the Missouri River; and
Graham Cave State Park.
One of Cable's favorite discoveries in the course of his research was getting to know the story behind a free-standing brick chimney east of Sweet Springs.
Visible from the road, the chimney was part of a house that burned in a electrical fire in 2001. Only the chimney and the TV antenna it supported remain. Cable talked to the woman who used to live in the house. "She still owns the property," he says. "She drives past that on the interstate every day on the way to work. It's just sort of a memorial or monument to her."
Cable guesses that he drove the length of I-70 in Missouri 15 times as he worked on the book. It's not as masochistic as it sounds. On several occasions, he extended the journey to Chicago, where his parents live. It's always nice to have a final destination other than St. Louis.
