Drive-Thru LA- - The Dead Saint Scrolls

The first stop on the trip wouldn’t be much of a change at all.  It would be more like a transition.  They were starting in St. Joseph County, Indiana, but would actually start their trip to California, like many before them, in St. Joseph, Missouri.  Carpenter was somewhat ignorant of the history of St. Joseph, Missouri.  The town was basically base camp for thieves and scoundrels alike, and of course, the infamous Jesse James.  He and others like him would see no point in listening to the Federal Government about gold reserves, when they could either head out West and find large chunks for themselves, or like Jesse, exercise their Second Amendment right to rob trains and banks and other various contraptions that the people of America invented to secure their wealth.1

Jesse James and the Forty-Niners failed to realize they were buying into the system that they were trying to escape from.  Even if they did get the gold, somebody else would eventually want it.  Even while people were leaving St. Joseph in wagons headed West, others were leaving New York in boats, preferring travel by sea to the dangers of traveling through Indian territory.  Instead, they chose various tours of “Latin” America.  2

One choice was to take the trip around Cape Horn, which was a bit dangerous, but there were many interesting stops along the way.  One such stop is the Cape of Virgins on the beautiful coast of Brazil. According to academic history, Magellan was much like other Europeans, and liked naming things after Saints.  As he traveled down the Brazilian coastline, he named every river and cape he came across after all of his favorite Saints.  He claimed he was honoring their existence by naming all of these places after them, but I can’t validate that claim.  Whether or not he was honoring the Saints isn’t the point.  According to record, Magellan arrived at a cape on the coast of Brazil on October 21st, and by some arbitrary aegis, October 21st is a day which honors St. Ursula and her eleven-thousand virgins. 3

But there remains a mystery behind the Cape.  Two of the ships in Magellan’s party disappeared for two days when they arrived at the Cape of Virgins.  Buddy Crawford tells a different story behind the name.  The San Antonio and Concepción were the names of the ships that “disappeared.”  Apparently naming things after Saints didn’t stop at places, it was applicable to all nouns.  Buddy Crawford claims that the San Antonio and Concepción didn’t disappear, and weren’t lost at all.  Like the two ships that mysteriously reappeared two days later, his story appears to hold water. Or is it the other way around?4

In Buddy’s version, the San Antonio and Concepción were on the verge of mutiny, and they didn’t share Magellan’s conviction.  They still believed him, they thought sailing around the world was possible, but their hunger for adventure was being depleted with each storm that moved in and threatened their existence.  On October 20th, they saw the storm moving in, and made their move.  They “disappeared” together, and planned to hide upriver until Magellan would have no choice but to move on without them, then they would go back up North and start a small colony in the Carribean.  But something happened when they got lost that caused them to change their minds.5

When they sailed into the Cape, and approached the mouth of the strait, the natives saw their ships coming out of the storm and thought they were giant creatures of the sea.  They subsequently sacrificed all of their virgins in fear of being destroyed by the “sea monster.”  As the rowboats broke away from the ship to scout the strait, naked young women came swimming up, in awe of their fair-skin and inconsequential facial features.  When they found the men on board the boats, they thought that the men had controlled the sea monster and saved them, so they sacrificed the virgins to the men instead.  After two days of spreading syphilis and regaining their thirst for conquest, the men decided to catch up to Magellan before he left without them.  They wondered if there were more Capes of Virgins along the way, and there probably were. They had learned from the natives that the strait could take them very far inland.  They told the natives that they would have to take a few ships, or “sea monsters,” into the mouth of the river to be devoured by beasts of the jungle.  They told the natives to stay out of sight when they brought the other ships back, because they were more dangerous in larger groups.6

The San Antonio and Concepción still had a problem.  Not all of the men wanted to go back with Magellan.  Some had grown quite fond of the women they were with, and wanted to stay.  The men who wanted to go on were a bit mad about this, but they decided to keep the secret, that is, until Buddy Crawford needed a story to tell.  After finding the women, they didn’t want to explore and find anything else.  They decided to take the San Antonio, and all of the men who decided to stay with Magellan got on the Concepción.  They reported back to Magellan about the river, and when they all headed for it, the San Antonio disappeared while “scouting” a nearby island.  They hid there for eighteen days, and sent lookouts ashore to watch for the other boats.  7

When Magellan came to look for them, they sailed slowly around the island, staying close enough to the shore that they couldn’t be seen from the other side of the island.  Magellan kept looking for awhile, because the San Antonio had the majority of the supplies.  The men who hijacked it were smart.  They knew they would need some supplies to last them if they were going to stay in the Cape of Virgins forever.  Soon Magellan grew weary of looking for a ship that could be in Atlantis for all he knew, and he moved on.  The men on the San Antonio returned to the Cape of Virgins after the other ships had passed, and the natives came back and accepted them, and helped them take all of the food and treasures out of the belly of the beast onto the land.  The men sailed the ship upriver as the natives followed along the shore, and when they were sufficiently far enough inland, they abandoned the ship and set a gunpowder charge in the belly, and celebrated with the people as the ship was blasted into flaming bits and carried out to sea in the strait.  They told the people stories of elemental powers, and how the power of fire was much stronger inland than out at sea. 8

The simple oppositions were all the men of the tribe needed to be distracted, and they listened as the men gave more and more syphilis to all of the women.  The good thing was this: syphilis wasn’t genetic, so at least all of the bastard children didn’t get it.  It didn’t take long for the natives to figure out  that the Europeans weren’t in fact Gods.  The biggest mistake was hanging around with the people too much, they started growing close to them and tried to embrace them.  Then the people started seeing all of the clumsy little things the Europeans did every day, how they couldn’t climb a tree to save their life, literally, some were killed by boars.  The natives saw this, and immediately stopped hunting the boars and killed all of the Europeans.  They were furious that they had been lied to, and even more furious that the men had desecrated the women, who were starting to be a little more than rosy-cheeked.  All of the virgins who had been sacrificed to the men were taken to the mouth of the strait with all of the men, and sacrificed to the great ocean.  They were washed out into the sea, and probably ended up in Atlantis for all I know.  The natives  made a fresh batch of virgins, and the small corner of the universe was back at a right angle.  No more obtuse Europeans, the newly acute natives made sure of that.9

Magellan made it much further than his licentious mutineers ever did.  He died in an island chain named for the King, the Philippines. Magellan’s destiny was one of mixed intentions. Sometimes he dreamt of sailing around the world; and then once there seemed to enjoy burning villages down quite a bit, and didn’t mind terrorizing natives either.  But when he died, his crew took his body with them, and finished the journey with his body on board. It was somewhat pointless for his body to make the trip, but it was symbolic. His soul had already made the trip before the first sail was ever raised.10

The Forty-Niners weren’t so lucky. They were soulless dogs in search of something material. Those who did set out West to accomplish something intangible were merely attempting to perpetuate their culture, which was based in materialism, so ultimately their culture ended up entangled in tangibility.  11

Of course, some documented what they saw.  The documenters were of particular interest because there was a virtue in what they did.  They could provide an account for people to read so those people could vicariously experience the same journey and sights.  At times, the language was better than the land.  But what the writers lived for were the things that they couldn’t describe– the breathtaking landscapes, which have now become little more than postcard material. Postcards are a mockery of how awe inspiring and breathtaking a serene landscape can be.12

The postcards actually started quite a craze, people in landlocked cities would get a postcard, or the postcard’s bastard cousin, the travel brochure, and base their dreams of travel on idealized images.  The problem was this: you couldn’t fit culture onto a postcard or brochure, so the travelers would bring their culture with them wherever they went, and make the place they were going suit their needs.  They weren’t really travelers, but more like lookers.  They would go places, look at things, take pictures of the things they liked to look at, and then go back to their comfortably numb culture-less world of ignorance.  They would look at the pictures and show them to their friends and say things like:13

“Look, looky here! Look at this, look, here is us at the  Smithsonian. Look, here is us in Hawaii. Look, here is an Indian Casino. Look here is a picture of Andrew Jackson on a twenty-dollar bill, look at the look on the dealer’s face when I change in Treaty!  Treaty, don’t you listen to me anymore?  Look, here is the trail of tears I left on the way out of the casino.” 14

This was the primary Anglo-Saxon influence on the West, the language of looking.  It was Locianic, this new culture based upon looking at things.  But they continued on, looking at thing after thing, until everything became a thing.  Somehow someone along the way had simplified the word “look” by repeating it so many times, it eventually lost its meaning.  No longer did people look at themselves, look at the world around them, or look to find new answers to old questions.  All they looked for were new things to capture their interest, and they would look and look and look, until the thing lost their interest, and they would look for something else to look at.15

St. Joseph, Missouri was a prime example of people moving on, but the community was held stable by a conglomeration of churches which even included a God-over the telephone “Dial-A-Prayer, (also available en Espanól!).  Now, it was more of a relic than a central hub of the Imperialist mission.  It provided a base for “Manifest Destiny,” a ridiculous doctrine that supposed that a: we base our political motivations on Martin Luther instead of John Locke and Plato, b: our "destiny" is manifest in the complete obliteration of the native population of the Western United States. 16

If this is God-given territory, then where do politics fit into that? I’m sure Locke had different intentions while designing our Government, but in the making of America, it was quite clear at times that the Government was powerless against the will of the Church, providing interesting parallels to the last great Empires of Britain and Rome.  But at the end of the day, the violence doesn’t add up.  This doctrine of “peace” that is so common in the rhetoric of religious leaders seems only to apply to peace within your own society.  They work with a blind notion of alterity, and only provide good will towards men when it best serves their interests.17

Somehow Carpenter and his family fit into the interests of the Motel Three manager in St. Joseph and were provided with two rooms, four twin beds total.  Money gave Carpenter power over the manager, and the manager smiled and handed over the keys to the rooms, purely out of good will, I’m sure.18

They had two rooms on the second floor, with a beautiful balcony that overlooked a spacious automobile garden, painted like a backgammon board, unconsciously honoring Greek design principles. Later that night, Chuck and I would play a giant game with some trash can lids we found in a nearby alley. He beat me pretty bad, because I was too lazy to run up the stairs after every move to see the board better, but Chuck was in much better shape than I was, some line about “survival of the fittest” or something that he was always talking about.  Anyways, it helped him that night, and my laziness hurt me.  But it was only a game, so it didn’t really mean anything in the end.19