Cape Girardeau History and Photos

Some of my friends who came from Cape have mentioned that don’t have the same connection with the area that I seem to. Maybe I’m lucky that the mental rubber band that connects the new with the old hasn’t snapped. I can still be pulled back into memories of growing up in Southeast Missouri as a kid.

I figure most of you will either be sleeping late or waiting for the holiday weekend to be over before coming back here, so I’m going to cheat and recycle the photo above that I ran just about a year ago. I call it SE Missouri from the Window of a Speeding Car. (They taught me in college that pictures sound more impressive if you give them titles and set the names in Italics.)

For nearly 20 years, I had this framed newspaper edition about Gordon Parks hanging on my office wall. Parks’ words do a better job than I ever could at explaining why I feel a kinship with the Midwest. The poem ran on the back of his funeral program March 16, 2006.

Gordon Parks

In this huge silence

The prairie is still in me,

in my talk and manners.

I still sniff the air for rain or snow,

know the loneliness of night,

and distrust the wind

when things get too quiet.

Having been away so long

and changed my face so often,

I sometimes suspect that this place

no longer recognizes me—

despite these cowboy boots,

this western hat and

my father’s mustache that I wear.

To this place I must seem

like wood from a different forest,

and as secretive as black loam.

This earth breathes uneasily under my boots.

Their odor of city asphalt

doesn’t mix well with the clean smell

of wild alfalfa and purple lovegrass.

It puzzles me that I live so far away

from our old clapboard house

where, in oak tree shade,

I used to sit and dream

of what I wanted to become.

I always return here weary,

but to draw strength from

This huge silence that surrounds me,

knowing now that all I thought

was dead here is still alive,

that there is warmth here—

even when the wind blows hard and cold.

I don’t know who these boys are, but the place has the feel of Cedar Lake to it. I see a fence on the left that’s going off into the water. I vaguely remember something like that from the half-dozen or so times I went to the lake. The boy on the right has on a Boy Scout T-shirt, but I don’t recall ever going out there with Troop 8.

If I recall it correctly, you’d pull up to a farmhouse and pay to fish. They must have had boats for rent. Jim Stone, Lila, someone else and I went out there once, and there’s a photo of Lila and me in a boat floating around (pardon the pun) somewhere. I don’t know if we rented it or if we just sat in it for the picture.

Lake looks free of development

View Cedar Lake in a larger map

This Google Map looks like the lake hasn’t changed much in the last 45 or so years. I’m surprised that there aren’t houses sprouting up all around it yet. I’m glad it looks pretty much like it always did. I’ll have to take a drive out there on the next trip home.

This may or may not have been close to the bridge where kids would cheat death.