There is a place that is the embodiment of all that is good and wonderful, where those who are virtuous–those who have, through the diligent and conscientious effort to right thinking and a proper attitude, developed an innate sense of what is worthy and good for the soul–can one day hope to go. And it’s in St. Louis.

Upon fleeing Meramec Caverns, which according to a little-known tale was once used as a hiding place by Jesse James (or so I’m told), we made our way to the city of St. Louis, where we stayed the night with some friends of Claire’s. The next morning, while we had breakfast on the back porch and scratched a large and patient poodle behind the ears, they said “You are going to City Museum before you leave town, right?”

At that moment, I was still naive. I vaguely recall saying something like “Yeah, we talked about doing that.” Enlightenment was, for me, still several hours away, which explains the casualness of my reply.

After we had finished our buttered muffins and bid farewell to Claire’s friends and the floppity-eared dog, we traveled in a meandering fashion through downtown St. Louis. The museum wasn’t terribly easy to locate, even with the aid of a GPS gadget whose synthesized voice makes an amusing phonetic mess of the word “Washington,” or as it says, “Waaaaaashingtorn,” as in “In five hundr’d feet, turn llleft on Waaaaaashingtorn Avenue.” But we eventually wiggled and woggled our way there, and parked in a small nondescript parking lot on a small nondescript block.

At this point, enlightenment was mere minutes away.

We rounded the corner, and the entrance to all that was good and wonderful stretched before us, as glittering and magnificent as the pearly gates of myth, only cooler–poetry written in curved rebar and patterned steel.

I still was not quite aware of what lay beyond, but at this point, I was beginning to have a dim sense that this would be an experience by which all future joy could be measured.

Part of that dim sense was sparked, no doubt, when I looked up. It’s not every day that one encounters a building with a hollowed-out airplane glued to it, with tunnels snaking around and through the superstructure.

We passed through the gates and gave money to St. Peter, who turned out to be significantly less expensive than the more traditional depictions might lead one to believe. From there, we passed through a wide stone hallway, cast-iron lamps mounted to its walls, and out into a vast, tiled chamber decorated with sculptures of all sorts of strange and bizarre sea monsters. The ceiling was entirely hidden by strips of–I don’t know, foil of some sort?–which moved constantly in the air currents, in ways this image can not convey.

Enlightenment was roaring toward me like a freight train whose engineer, coming off a four-day bender of cocaine and a bevy of Brazilian hookers, had fallen fast asleep at his post, his hand firmly on the throttle, urging his great iron horse to an exuberance of speed far in excess of what was safe or sane, and…oh, god, that sentence got away from me a bit there. Sorry.

What you can’t see in the picture above is the ceiling, or more precisely the tunnels in the ceiling.. Most of the statues are hollow, and there’s a network of tunnels fastened to the ceiling which you can get to by limbing up, around, or through the fishy sculptures. It’s awesome.

Above the ceiling is a crawl space, about four feet tall or so. The crawlspace itself, accessible only through the tunnels, is a warren of more tunnels, strange spaces, sculptures, pipes, and little little maze-like things that bring the explorer out abruptly into unexpected metal balconies.

By now, the eight-year-old inside me, who as I have probably mentioned really isn’t all that different from me, was just absolutely singing with delight And we hadn’t even started to scratch the surface of awesome yet.

City Museum is like a candy bar made of awesome. Beneath the milk chocolate coating of awesome is a creamy center of nougat filling made of awesome, with a rich caramel layer of sweet, sweet awesome carefully folded on top. No matter how far you explore, something even more awesome is awaiting the next…um, bite.

Upon crawling down out of the ceiling, we found ourselves in another huge room, dominated by an awesome staircase of awesome up to the second floor, which was made all the more awesome on account of being flanked by a gigantic slide coming down.

A gigantic slide! Running all the way down the stairs!

“Giant slides” is actually something of a standing theme at City Museum. At one point, we discovered a narrow space on the second floor with a small trap door that descended into darkness. Claire hopped into the hole and found a long, dark slide that drops down into the basement, where a narrow slit in the wall brings one back up into the Land of Weird Fish Sculptures It’s hard to imagine, even with all the faculties of the human mind, anything more fun.

But I digress.

The top of the slide that hugs the stairway looks like this:

Midway down the slide, this is the vista which presents itself to the rapidly descending visitor.

I want that giant round cage, oh yes I do. The things I would do with it would contravene at least sixteen international treaties. Oh, yes. I even have the perfect padlock for it…

We spent a couple of hours running (and sliding) around with glee, and then we decided to head up to the rooftop, which is also part of the museum.

And were blown away. As cool as everything we’d seen so far was, the rooftop was even more awesome. If the inside portion of City Museum is a candy bar made of awesome, the rooftop is a candy bar made of awesome being fed to you by a gorgeous houri dressed in nothing but awesome while you recline on a bed of awesome while being fanned gently with fans of awesome that stir the sea breeze of awesomeness all about you. If paradise is a place of joy unimaginable by mere humans, the rooftop of City Museum is that place.

That bit, however, will have to wait until next time.

I have never quite understood the romanticization of famous criminals.

I mean, I just don’t get it. People look at, say, the Mafia, or serial killers, and make them out to be some sort of romantic mythic figures, blazing their own path through life, heedless of the laws and mores of ordinary folk and occasionally feeding ordinary folk into wood chippers. I’ve heard that imprisoned serial killers actually get fan mail, often from women who offer them sex or marriage or both, and frankly I find it all bewildering (and just a touch unsettling).

Take Jesse James, for instance. What is it, exactly, that was romantic about this guy? As near as I can tell, the man was an illiterate, slave-owning, narcissistic sociopath who discovered a taste for killing people as a mercenary for the Confederacy and, after the war, privatized his former government service job by robbing banks and murdering clerks, students, tellers, and random passers-by–sometimes while dressed as Ku Klux Klansmen.

Just the sort of person you want babysitting your kid, right?

I mention Jesse James because some hours after leaving the Glore psychiatric museum, and with brains still reeling from the experience, we opted to stop at Meramec Caverns in the once-Confederate state of Missouri.

Meramec Caverns is a large cave system that’s noteworthy for a number of reasons. It’s geologically unique, sporting some of the largest-known limestone formations in the world. It was a part of the folklore of the Osage tribe of Native Americans, who used it for shelter. The cave system was said to be used as a waystation on the Underground Railroad prior to the Civil War.

And apparently, Jesse James hid in it once.

Of all these factoids, it’s the last one that gets the most press. In fact, as soon as you arrive, there’s no question at all about what you’ll be getting for your entertainment dollar:

I quite like cave systems, so when the idea of stopping in Stanton to check out the caves was floated, I offered an enthusiastic “yes” vote. We arrived just before closing, and bought our tickets from a fairly indifferent park ranger who explained to us that the caves were once used as a hiding place by Jesse James. From there, we proceeded through a huge cavern that’s been turned into a gift store to the tour entrance, where another park ranger told us he’d be taking us on a guided tour and that the cave system was once used as a hiding place by Jesse James. In case we were wondering why the cave was famous, a neon sign helpfully advertised the little-known fact that the cave was once used as a hiding place by Jesse James.

We walked past a model of a small wood cabin that was, apparently, similar to a cabin once stayed in by Jesse James, through an enormous chamber that was in times past used as a ballroom, and then brought past a couple of statues which, the tour guide explained, were placed on the spot where a sheriff had discovered boxes known to have been stolen by Jesse James.

Occasionally, I consider the fact that more people know about small-time thugs like Jesse James than about Norman Borlaug, the dude who got considerably less fame by saving the lives of over a billion people, but I digress.

The cave is actually quite lovely. In a lot of ways, it’s absolutely the perfect, Platonic ideal of a cave, with huge chambers and small passages and even an underground river. An underground river! How cool is that? Our guide explained that when Jesse James holed up there, the local sheriff cordoned off the entrance, but Jesse James was able to make his escape by swimming down the river and discovering a heretofore-unknown exit.

It’s quite dramatic all on its own.

Apparently feeling that the natural wonder of sparkling, crystal-clear water rushing underground along a path that’s dripping with all manner of limestone formations isn’t enough, the cave’s owners have put in a bunch of colored lights, to make it even more dramatic.

I do have to admit it’s pretty.

The cave is altogether lovely even when it’s not being lit like a bad 80s hair metal band.

The passing time was freaking our travelling companion Erica out a bit, as she doesn’t like driving at night, but Claire and I had quite a lot of fun on the tour. At least those bits of it that weren’t about Jesse James, who as I may have mentioned was a murderous, sociopathic thug with bad hair and in whom I am almost entirely uninterested. I got a lovely picture of Claire some way through the tour.

Shortly after this photo was taken, we arrived at the end of the tour.

I have no pictures of what awaited us there. If I did have any pictures, I would be reluctant to share them with you, Gentle Reader, on the grounds that, unlike Jesse James, I am not a violent, sociopathic thug with bad hair, and I bear you, my blog-reading public, neither malice nor ill will.

Indeed, it is with some trepidation that I even describe the horrors that await those who take the tour in mere words, for the experience is not for the faint of sanity.

Imagine, if you will, a vast, bowl-shaped chamber upon whose sides have been poured many tons of concrete, to better accommodate the stadium seating set therein. Imagine that this seating faces a quite lovely, and very large, waterfall of solid rock, the slow accumulation of limestone carried by the endless drip of water over a period of hundreds of millions of years–a breathtaking example of nature’s subtle and profound beauty.

And now imagine the part ranger–the one who talked to us about Jesse James–playing a tape recording of what might once have been stirring patriotic music, many many decades ago, while presenting a light show against that magnificent backdrop of rock, complete with projected images of the American flag, by…

…I swear I am not making this up…

…furiously toggling a large panel full of light switches to make colored lights flash on and off.

It’s a spectacle that I don’t think could be found anywhere else on Earth besides a cave in the American South, a simultaneously cheap and cheesy display of faux patriotism that’s almost, but not quite, a parody of itself, and so very, very, desperate in its sincerity. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it, and the memory of the spectacle has, I feel, filled a much-needed gap in my life.

I’m not quite sure how we left the cave. It’s entirely possible that the combination of lights and sounds to which we were exposed had temporarily stunned my ability to form short-term memory, my brain seeking some Freudian mechanism to cope with the essentially un-copeable. Or, and perhaps more sinister, it’s possible that we were exposed to some highly advanced form of neurobiological programming, planting the seeds of behavioral conditioning deeply into our psyches, awaiting only a television ad for Fruity Oaty Bars to transform us into unstoppable killing machines, unwitting foot soldiers for the new Confederacy or something.

Our behavioral conditioning for our new Jesse-James-loving, cave-dwelling Southern overlords complete, we headed out into the night. The next day would bring with it an experience that the eight-year-old in me will never forget.

I’m a little surprised, whenever I think about it, that human beings were able to successfully treat, much less cure, any disease whatsoever prior to…oh, I don’t know, about 1977 or so.

Seriously, whenever one picks up a history book or (God forbid) a book on medical technology, it seems that before the advent of Star Wars all we had were superstition, stone knives, and dried tiger penises. In fact, even to this day, many people’s sum total understanding of basic biology scarcely extends beyond stone knives and dried tiger penises–but I didn’t come here to talk about the alt-medicine crowd.

Instead, I came here to talk about Boston. Err, not Boston itself, you understand, but our journey toward that fabled (and by now near-mythical) Xanadu, where my friend Claire had been accepted to a university or a Thunderdome or something. By this point, it was all getting a bit blurry, what with the heat and the prairie dogs and the Jesus of Wheat and all.

When we next set out, with Erica driving and me trying with only modest success to deal with a client’s crisis of some sort about something or other, the temperature was already nudging toward the triple digits. Frankly, I’m sometimes a bit surprised that any human being successfully survived summer in the Midwest prior to the invention of air conditioning. We had determined days before to make a stop at the Glore Psychiatric Museum in St. Joseph, Missouri. We had a book which called it one of the 50 “most unusual museums in the United States.” I’m not quite sure who made that list or on what criteria it was based, but the Museum of Spam (the quasi-meat product, not the email full of Nigerian princes and penis pills) is on the list, and that’s good enough for me.

The Glore Psychiatric Museum is housed in what’s left of Missouri State Lunatic Asylum No. 2–yep, that was its official name. Now, I’ve seen a number of Hollywood films involving a small number of friends who happen to be traveling alone across the country. All of them recommend stopping for a time in the ruins of an old lunatic asylum, so stop we did.

The first thing one sees upon entering the museum is this old newspaper illustration, apparently dating back to the time of the asylum’s founding, which depicts life in an insane asylum as a rather proper Victorian affair replete with formal tea and, I don’t know, Badminton games or something. “I say, old chap, after our noonday repast, would you fancy a stroll through the park, followed by a rousing cricket match?” “That sounds delightful, dear fellow, but I rather think we should postpone the afternoon meal until after our sport.” “After our sport? I say, are you mad?” “Quite so, old sport!”

We ventured farther in, where we were met by a cheerful gentleman who assured us that no psychotic, supernatural offspring of crazed serial killers bent on bloody vengeance had been seen ’round the grounds in almost a fortnight, so we were confident that our stay would be pleasant and free of the bother one normally can expect from such things.

It doesn’t take very long to realize that anyone unwise enough to be crazy prior to the age of Pac-Man was in for rather sorry treatment at the hands of his fellow man. The museum has a floor full of devices which had previously been used to “treat” mental illness, and to my (admittedly untrained) eye, rather a lot of them looked indistinguishable from the sorts of devices the Inquisitors might use. Take these gadgets, for example:

The chair on the left was used to calm patients by restricting their mobility. Sometimes, apparently, for weeks. The gizmo on the left was designed to confine a person in a very small box which would then be spun ’round at high speed until the unfortunate occupant passed out or threw up, or both–presumably on the premise that a vomiting mental patient is better than a mental patient who…um, isn’t vomiting, or, err, something. The precise details of the therapeutic modality are beyond my grasp of the art.

And the definitions of “mentally ill” were as all over the map as the treatments. In ages past, an unmarried woman who wanted children might be confined to an asylum, as might a married woman who didn’t. (True fact: the dude who invented the diagnoses of “nymphomania” included diagnostic criteria such as a fondness for chocolate and a penchant for reading works of fiction, I swear I am not making this up.)

It rather seems, all in all, that the considered opinion of the entire medical establishment over a very long span of time was that the mentally ill were just being stubborn, and merely needed a few nasty knocks about the head to get them to cut it out. This seems to your humble scribe rather like saying a legless man is simply being lazy, and all he needs is a good swift kick in the pants to get him on his feet again…though I didn’t come here to talk about the Republican party, either.

The general theme of “knock them about a bit ’til they learn to cut it out” as a treatment modality for cognitive and emotional impairment continues through quite a lot of the medical equipment on display:

Some of the items in their collection would look, I have to say, right at home here in my dungeon, and I wouldn’t mind building something like that long cage on the left…but only for people who are of sound and willing mind. I may be a mad scientist, but I’m not, well, crazy, you know? At least not like the folks who actually thought these things would do some good.

A number of other displays commemorated the sometimes colorful and occasionally fatal eccentricities of a few of the hospital’s more outstanding patients. Take this one, for example, which is just kind of weird until you know what it is, at which point it becomes weird and gross.

This bizarre work of art was made by hospital staff, not by a patient, out of the materials found in a patient’s…err, stomach. The patient in question, you see, had what would today be called obsessive-compulsive disorder, but the particular manifestation of her obsession lay in eating any little bits of sharp pointy metal things that she could get her hands on. Which, as you might expect, eventually killed her.

See? Weird and gross. I did try to warn you.

This guy, on the other hand, was straight out of the X-Files:

The story, as near as I can remember it, is that there was this dude who was completely convinced he was sane, while all the people around him thought that he was stark raving mad. He was utterly convinced that there were railroad box cars containing evidence of his sanity being kept at an undisclosed location, and he wrote about them obsessively. Somewhere along the way, he also became convinced that the television set in his room contained a secret mechanism by which he could send messages to the vague and sinister forces hiding the box cars from him, or perhaps to agents opposing those sinister forces (it’s not entirely clear to your humble scribe) so he wrote long, rambling, incoherent letters about box car numbers and train routes and railway schedules and stuff, or something, and tucked them inside the television set, until it eventually quit working.

Which, I reckon, wasn’t actually the outcome he had hoped for. It’s bad enough when a secret conspiracy has plotted to conceal evidence vital to your sanity in railway cars; it’s even worse when you can’t watch next week’s Gunsmoke on television.

This next bit is a tiny section of a huuuuuge piece of embroidery, created by hand by a patient on what I believe to be a hospital bedsheet.

We puzzled over it for quite a while. Reading it is rather like trying to track a coherent thought through a untrodden jungle the way a traditional Chinese doctor might track a tiger across the savannah, following its telltale traces in the slightest disturbance of underbrush, before shooting it in the head and drying out its penis to make phony aphrodisiacs that are sold in small glass vials from musty shops whose owners don’t really give a toss about the extinction of a noble species for the sake of superstition…but I digress.

This display one was one of my favorites.

One should not court another man’s wife if one wishes to avoid a sticky fate. You heard it here first.

The basement of the old hospital, where we ended up after we decided to separate and explore the ancient lunatic asylum separately just as Hollywood has taught us to do, bore a large steel door with these markings:

It is unclear to your humble scribe exactly what sort of disaster supplies one keeps in the morgue, or indeed what eventuality those supplies are intended to ward against. I can only imagine it’s not a zombie-related disaster, as keeping one’s zombie-related disaster supplies in the same location as the corpses of the newly dead is likely to result in a certain inconvenience.

We fled the museum through the gift shop, where many commemorative items were available for sale (“Relive the experience again and again!”), and then were once again on our way to Shangri-La. There were by now only a couple of adventures left before our encounter with the Guatemalans and our renewed appreciation to the full fury of Nature’s watery wrath, but those tales will need to wait for another telling.