Things are getting weirder than weird as the Republican National Convention invades Milwaukee, so two forlorn Milwaukeeans are choosing to follow Route 66 to remember, to recharge, and to take pilgrimage at the Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan Centers in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Is this evasive action wise? Will the road lead them to something better than the RNC? They have five days to find out… (Day 1, Day 2, Day 4, Day 5.)

Day 3: Tuesday, July 16, from Cuba to Carthage, MO

“There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false. I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?”

– Harold Pinter’s Nobel Lecture, “Art, Truth & Politics,” 2005

The following is an audio transcript from an interview between the author and noted RNC detractor Alen Dalmati:

KRIOFSKE MAINELLA: Welcome to “Where Does It End,” a fictional podcast, from which this is a transcript. Alen, as a citizen, when it comes to the RNC in MKE, do you feel compelled to ask, as Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter suggests, “What is true? What is false?”

DALMATI: As a citizen, I suggest the “truth” coming from the party that now claims to hoist the crown of free speech on their heads, who suggest they win endlessly without a popular vote win on wings of a demented phoenix, rising not from their own ashes but the ashes of everything.

MAINELLA: Demented phoenix? How does this relate to the truth folks who come to Milwaukee for the RNC might be seeking?

DALMATI: The sick truth is that they’ve co-opted Holden Caulfield and declared all things not Republican enough to be phony. Instead of being the Catcher in the Rye for saving children, the party that once baked casserole with a bible in both hands now believes in nothing. And that’s their ticket. They support the ticket of nothing. And guess what? That’s exactly what they’ll get.

MAINELLA: And THAT’S “Where It Ends,” Alen. Hopefully next time you’ll be willing to tell us what you really think.

We drive west down Cuba, Missouri’s infinite Fourth of July Main Street to Old Route 66, chasing the storm and catching it quickly. Barry directs us to a Springfield (Missouri) diner. Over breakfast we cook up two concepts for future dispatches: One, to use a transcript from a fictional podcast to air out some uncouth ideas (today, above). Two, to write a Woody Guthrie parody of RNC in MKE to commemorate our crossing into Oklahoma (tomorrow).

We thrift for a bit (hello $1 CD; not this time Sportflics). The store owner says we should see Wilson’s Creek Civil War battlefield. We complain about her abundance of James Taylor CDs, and Barry claims Taylor was a “city councilman” with a guitar.

Before I can improvise “Sweet Baby City Council Minutes” lyrics, we’re out of there, heading to the battleground. On the brief drive to Wilson’s Creek, we play the CD I bought for a dollar, which turns out to be a Vince Guaraldi Peanuts-style piano, only more maudlin. Barry and I imagine Charlie Brown asking Linus to ghostwrite his end days manifesto, but we let Lucy talk him out of it (5¢ please) by claiming he’d just mess it up. Let’s just say our imagining got dark. We’re blockheads. (Can you still say that?)

The Civil War battleground at Wilson’s Creek is quite the blow. Missouri was immensely divided during the Civil War, some Union, some Confederate, some had no interest. The battle was fought in the shadow of the Ray family house that became a de facto hospital when the killing at Wilson’s Creek concluded with the Union side defeated and the Confederate side depleted. The gist: eventually the Union won the American Civil War, in some ways, because battles like this weakened the Confederacy. The fields are preserved but the bloody horror is imaginable, and Barry and I hope the next time this country crumbles we simply set up different borders instead of losing 750,000 citizens.

View from porch at Ray House overlooking Wilson’s Creek Battleground

As if our day couldn’t get any more American Civil War adjacent, The Boots Court motel books us the room in which Clark Gable once (or twice) lodged. In the Carthage town square awaits Bob Dylan and The Statue of Liberty, along with an unimpressed cat.

Finally, we stop at the post office to mail postcards to our sweethearts back home. Once again Barry finds the silver lining in a diminished mine, marveling at the enduring artistry of the Carthage PO boxes. Before I can laugh at him, I catch both the sunset and Barry’s reflection in Box 573 and, at the end of a long day in America, return to truth with Harold Pinter:

“Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavor. The search is your task…”