BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… DARK TOWN SNOW. The painting hangs in the gallery, testament to a thousand small towns, a thousand Americas across the winter, a thousand winter nights. The weathered, lonely red bricks of an easily overlooked downtown, the black of the sky, white snow piled on old wooden steps. Unseen street lamp illuminates the street, the street also piled with snow. The afternoon has been cold, too cold to melt the drifts, snow crisply crushed by what little traffic traced Main Street today. Warm light glows from a house otherwise lost in the darkness. The old store’s upper windows darken with longing. Inside, the rooms are cold. Cold and lost somewhere in time.
This is the midwestern winter we overlook. The winter we would rather not have. The winter that haunts our pasts. Missouri has always been an in-between space. Contested during the Civil War, not quite South, not quite North. Even after the ravages of the war, there were pockets of gentility, hints of a grand old South, particularly along the wide and winding Missouri River. Tonight, the wide waters are cold and black, glistening in the winter’s night. This old southern land is haunted now by memories, memories covered up in soybean and cornfields. The grain elevators are giants, phantom sentinels frozen in dusty concrete. Red lights on the big bridge flash alone in the night, red stars not quite close enough to touch.
Far down the road, the Ozark Mountains rise in hills and hollers deep. But here along the river the rocks are harder to see, rare highway rock cuts made back in the old days when highway roads were new and government work crews recently enlisted. The story of Americana is a lonely one, lonely even in a crowded room. The spirit of independence is strong, individualism, agency, forever fighting against the crowds, forever against the crowded voices in the hot and stuffy rooms of the mind. Culture is again homogenized in the name of civilization. But culture is where we least expect and most often overlook. These gaunt buildings of a once-busy downtown are in Second Empire style, built in the 1880s by men who believed they could rule the world. Hubris is a funny thing, especially a hundred years since, and those men’s names now forgotten on shiny granite tombstones at the edge of town, in a graveyard nobody visits these days.
Down on the Arkansas River, the mountains are real, rising from the river valley dramatically, signaling change of scale, change of culture, roads winding into real hillbilly country. Up here on the Missouri, up here near Jeff City and Boonville and Marshall and Clinton and Hermann, the change is strange and subtle. The hills are too rolling, the fields feel like the Midwest. But this is the Ozarks too. Borders are weird things. This is crossroads land, liminal space, a place where two very contradictory things can exist simultaneously. North and South, Midwest and Ozarks. Tidy boxes are for simple people.
American exceptionalism has always been a tricky thing, a strange dance between the lone individual and our constant need for others, for the village, the town, the city, the civilization. Little wonder cowboys hold our collective psyche as they do, primal memories of Jesse James running roughshod over social mores. Steam trains replaced riverboats, highways replaced steam trains. The divided interstate replaced Route 66. Education re-educated us, yeoman farmer replaced by good company men, then good workers, then passably good “global” citizens. Education reminded us always to think but not question. Obey, but not look beyond. Mysteries behind the wizard’s curtain are for the conspiracy theorists, dangerous outliers on the world stage. Stay always where it’s safe, we are told, but safety is very relative indeed.
The wind is cold, the night penetratingly dark. Overhead, Jupiter is nearly as bright as the waning moon rising ominously in the east, a ragged, dirty witch’s moon lighting the sky in promise and warning. The lights of the gas station at the corner finally wink out. The last taillights of the night are red and distant, moving over a low western hill and then gone. The cold brushes the dry grass in the snow, the sound a slithery thing whispering in the edges of the mind. Far off, a coal train’s whistle blows. The world is reborn again, quietly, darkly, in the far-off reaches of a man’s heart, if only he is quiet enough to listen.
— Joshua Heston, editor-in-chief, StateoftheOzarks
© StateoftheOzarks 2026
