The oldest store on Route 66 in Missouri closed last month. I don’t remember the last time I visited. But I will always remember that it was the last time.
The Totem Pole Trading Post opened in 1933 and moved down the Mother Road until landing in the small city of Rolla. I was in Rolla to see a geology museum rumored to have minerals shaped like a Missouri breakfast — bacon and biscuits — but it was closed. I went to the Trading Post because it had always been there, and would always be there, and found that it was there no more.
* * *
The door was unlocked but the lights were off.
“Are you open?” I asked, confused, looking at a sign with a buxom redhead cooing “Y’ALL COME IN NOW” and the cavernous empty space behind her.
An old man sat on a bench, packing items in a box. The Trading Post is a junk store, or in local parlance, an “antique mall.” I am always buying crap — excuse me, treasures — at antique malls. The Trading Post was king of the road.
“We’re closed.”
“Today?”
“Forever,” the owner said. He sounded like he didn’t want to talk about it. “If you’d come earlier, you could have gone to the retirement sale. Now we’re done. Two generations. My father’s store.”
“I used to come here,” I said. “Not looking for anything in particular, just looking for a place to look around.”
The man looked bored. Unlike his wares, I was interchangeable.
“Not much to look at now,” he said, and motioned to the door, where I exited.
I stood behind rusted gas pumps and gazed skyward at billboards advertising moonshine and moccasins. Like other Route 66 landmarks, The Totem Pole Trading Post borrowed Native American iconography as the road tore apart indigenous lands. *
It might have felt like poetic justice that I’d found it shuttered on Indigenous People’s Day. But it didn’t. It felt like wandering into a wound.
The Americana icon had collapsed so gradually, no one noticed. Maybe no one was left to spread the word. Maybe I’d have known if one local newspaper, The Riverfront Times, hadn’t replaced its staff with AI robots and the other, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, hadn’t downsized into a shadow of its former self.
Antique malls sell serendipity and safeguard memory. There’s no organization, no order, no internet — just life after death. Bound books and free spirits: a return to the past, where possibility lives now that the future has been stolen.
I wander halls of history, radio waves tuned to a dead station. Sometimes a ghost plants an object before me, so I know what to do next. These secondhand store specters have been far more useful than my PhD in providing guidance.
I’m not joking. In 2021, I was in Prairie Archives, a sprawling used bookstore in Springfield, Illinois, browsing in a low-key panic. I had a book to write and no clue what to say. I was sick to death of Trump, sick to death of death, and needed a change.
“I’m going to cover my eyes,” I told my kids. “You two walk me through the store and put me in front of a shelf. Whatever page of the book I open, that’s what my next book is about.”
They did as they were told, guiding me through the maze of aisles and spinning me around for good measure. Eyes closed, I grabbed a book, opened it, and exclaimed “Oh, fuck!”
It was a Hunter S. Thompson essay collection from the 1980s. The page I landed on was about Donald Trump and Iran-Contra villain Adnan Khashoggi.
I bought it and spent the rest of 2021 writing They Knew, a book about real conspiracies from the 1980s and how they are marketed as “conspiracy theories” so facts are never found and justice is never served.
Missouri has no shortage of junk stores. But I wonder what I would have found at the Trading Post if I’d gotten there in time. Maybe something to tell me what to do, because I sure as hell don’t know when my country is dying the same way. No fanfare, no pinpoint. Slow and steady surrender, bit by bit — murder disguised as death.
Murdering the United States until it is so unrecognizable, even the mementos are gone.
