Ragland

Hannibal, Missouri is like many other places in America. It is a withering old city whose height of prosperity left town about a century back. Today the center of life in Hannibal, like so many other small old cities like it, is the local Wal-Mart, a big-box abomination at the edge of the community. Though, even in decline, Hannibal has fared better than most places like it. The place is blessed with the great Mississippi River, which flows past its front door, and the was the hometown of perhaps the greatest American writer, Samuel Clemons. After all, what better place to go to find a writer's inspiration than to pay a visit to the wellspring of creativity, and boyhood home, of one Mark Twain.

Hannibal, Missouri. Home to Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher and Huckleberry Finn; the river and the memory of Mr. Twain have kept the city alive as a pilgrimage for tourists. The city calls itself "America's Hometown," and the tourists like to think it is, though it's a hometown of their imaginations, since they mostly now live alongside non-descript strip malls filled with Applebee's and Olive Garden's. Green lawn hells of MacHouses and ever-so slightly curving streets off the Interstate crammed with SUV's.

For its great tourist attraction, the boyhood home of Mark Twain, the city has thankfully been spared the Disneyesque treatment. You can still imagine a young Samuel Clemons in its streets, and pick out the actual locations he described in his novels. Beyond the tourist strip, it's a bleak place, this Hannibal. It has the smell of decay. Even its grand-river view is walled off by a massive levee and sea walls, barriers to the annual floods. It's an economic necessity, and the levee keeps places like Hannibal safe, though the grassy wall seems to darken the whole town.

The great river itself is still a wild thing, no matter how hard the Army Corp of Engineers has tried to tame it. The high April water has swept just over its banks, just enough flooding for the river to let you know that it flows by its own rules. South of town are Tom Sawyer's caves and wooded wild islands like dark sunken steamboats with names like Gilbert Island and Denmark Island. I wonder which of them might be Jackson Island. Does anyone read anymore?

Mark Twain's America was a nation on the rise, ours seems to be a nation in a spiral of decline. Funny how from his point to ours we haven't solved the issues of the day. The same damn issues of the day, his or ours!

At the edge of downtown looms a derelict Minor League baseball park surrounded by a huge limestone wall. It's a massive ballpark. It must be 500 feet to straightway center field. According to the sandstone markers at the gates, the place was once called Clemons Field, though its current owner, the City of Hannibal, has inexplicably renamed it Ragland Field. Behind home plate rises its great canopied grandstand of concrete and steel. The park once sat thousands. Once, when the place was the heart of the community. Now it is a rutted ruin with pits along the foul lines where light stands once stood.

This April, at least, I managed to bring Ragland back to life, if even for a few moments, though it was a slightly different bat and ball game. You see, I found my man, lurking on the river bank not far away, passing the time along the Mississippi, and lured him back to Ragland for a little late-night roll in the weeds in Center Field. I always wanted to get fucked in Center Field in some baseball park, and Ragland's vast outfield surrounded by stone walls proved more than perfect for such an occasion. Totally private, yet I out in the open enough to let me imagine a thousand fans looking on from the ghostly grandstand over the shoulder of my newfound friend's humping hulk on top of me.

Ragland Field. You must stop by some day. A fine old ballpark if ever there was.