Mysteries of the Katy Trail, Part 3 of 3

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CHAPTER V: Tempting Fate
With the civilized world doubting our exploits and discoveries, we were left with one option…to take them with us and go back. We’d go back to New Franklin, back to the Katy trail, back to McBaine…and back to the mysterious bar. Then they’d understand…they’d have the good time we had and we’d be the heroes that had claimed McBaine, MO for Ames.

The gods of the Katy Trail knew we’d be back…their warnings continued.

The trek from Ames was very similar to the first…we left late and drove through the evening…in the dark. Once again, we approached New Franklin in a massive thunderstorm. The rain poured. The thunder pounded. We had to set up our tents in the rain. The first night was misery.

But like the first trip, we woke up to a beautiful morning of bright sunshine. I stood at the picnic table, sipping my coffee, with an uneasy feeling. This had been the very definition of deja vu.

“I bet Lewis and Clark had days like this,” I thought, letting the warmth of the mug heat my hands. I looked across our much larger group, packing their bikes up, readying for the trip to McBaine.

“So young, so innocent.” They had no idea what was coming. They hadn’t seen the trail, the caves, the bluffs or the town. They had no idea what they’d face in the next 20 miles.

We loaded up and started down the trail, stopping frequently to maintain our hydration. We stopped at a restaurant along the way for lunch, after passing through a long, damp tunnel…Built in 1893, the tunnel was still charred black from a 100 years of soot.

We passed by the Moniteau Bluffs, staring down upon us. A derivative of an Indian word meaning, “Great Spirit,” the Moniteau Bluffs were to the gods of the Katy Trail what Olympus was to Zeus. A cold breeze suddenly blew across the Missouri River and into my face…As I thought about the “Great Spirit,” a dark cloud rolled across the top of the bluff.

We suddenly encountered a massive portion of the trail that had completely washed out. Gone.  A sign read, "Rough conditions ahead.  Proceed with caution."  Never before had the gods of the Katy Trail spoken so directly to us.   

Carefully, we found our way across the cavernous gorge, and continued. A couple hours later, as we grew closer to McBaine, Cory and I began to again tell stories of McBaine, the bar and our previous exploits. Not understanding the bounty that lay just around the bend, our fellow explorers were growing tired. Our tales encouraged them on.

We came around the bend to the sight of the first trailers dotting McBaine. We looked down the hill to point out the massive two story building that made up the entire McBaine skyline…

It wasn’t there.

We stopped in our tracks. Stunned. Our fellow travelers asked, “Where is this place at?” We were speechless.

We continued down the streets of town. Again, not a living soul in sight. No cars, no life…of any kind. We pulled up to where the building once stood, or so we thought.

Gone. Completely gone.

As the gods of the Katy Trail had warned years earlier…we had now discovered what weren't looking for - and what we didn’t want to find.

Cory and I turned back to the group…who had all dismounted from their bikes and were staring at us.

“It WAS here!” Cory, pointing towards the ground, exclaimed to a very skeptical mob.

As good friends do, I backed him up. I walked around the parking lot, outlining where the building had been. There wasn’t an old foundation, pile of bricks or wood. There wasn’t a burned out shell of a building. No signs, no lights, nothing. There was literally no evidence that the building – or a building – had ever been there. Only a gravel lot.

We walked to our bikes and opened up a can of PBR, leaning against a telephone pole. “This just doesn’t make any sense. It was right here!”

Or, was it? As I stood in the gravel lot, I looked up and thought about Daniel Boone, the thousands of hobos, Lewis, Clark and all the explorers that had come before us. I thought about the Katy mainline, Thomas Jefferson and the Louisiana Purchase. We were standing smack in the middle of one of the greatest exploration highways of all time! Then it hit me. The only logical conclusion…

Aliens. They were explorers, too.

I turned around to see the rest of our friends leaving us. They had called others who had not come on the bike trip to come and pick them up. Soon, it was just Cory and I and our bikes standing in the parking lot. Except for Heather, everyone had abandoned us. Eerily though, Cory had drawn similar conclusions as me.

“The building was abducted by aliens. That has to be it,” he speculated.

“Or…it wasn’t a building at all,” I replied. “That bar was the alien mother ship! We were in it! This isn’t a parking lot…it’s a launch pad!” It all made sense now. “Why else would there be a huge, massive bar – with no name – in a town with ZERO people? Why else would it be two stories tall? Why else would it have blast doors on it? What else explained the weird long ramp into the main room? The butt numb-ers? The David Allen Coe on the jukebox? The aliens were just following in the footsteps of thousands of explorers who had come right down this trail before them. They weren’t any different than us.

Slowly, Cory lifted his head towards the heavens, pondering the possibility. It began to rain softly. The gods had spoken.

We finished our beers, got on our bikes and began the lonely ride back. Wiser. More worldy. More out-of-this-worldly. It rained the entire way.

Twenty miles later, Cory and I pulled into New Franklin to the sight of all our friends feasting gleefully at a local steakhouse. Wet, tired and exhausted…we joined them.

Except for Heather, who had been there, none of them ever believed us.

EPILOGUE
I realize to some, this story may seem…farfetched. One more shred of evidence…Of the five people that went on the original trip to the alien mother ship, one of the individuals has, to my knowledge, completely disappeared from the face of the earth. Another has gone on to become, not so coincidentally, a NASA scientist at Cape Canaveral studying top secret “stuff.” The three others are Cory, Heather and me.

None of us have returned to McBaine since that late summer’s day in 2002. But I’ve told you this story so that I can tell you this…we’re going back. This summer, we’re preparing to mount an expedition back down the mysterious Katy Trail. Many mysteries still remain. Among them, is Daniel Boone buried along the trail? The legend says he is. What has come of McBaine, MO since the aliens left? Had the aliens been there before? Indian carvings written on the bluffs seem to indicate they were. Have they returned? Did they ever leave? The time has come to dare the gods of the Katy Trail once more.
The End...?