I take Twitchell Island Road to work now because I’ve seen or heard about too many fatalities at the intersection of Jackson Slough Road and Highway 12. The frequent occurrence reminds me that when I first moved here, I came upon a fatality that had just happened a few minutes before my car reached the intersection. Tired fire fighters stood protectively over a prone human. Someone gestured me around the debris. I drove across the highway with a sick feeling.
In eight years, I’ve seen or heard of probably a dozen deaths at the same spot, possibly more. I remember an intersection in Kansas City like that, not far from many of the places that I lived or work in my thirty years there. Some of these road designs invite folly. But I can avoid it, so now I do.
You reach Twitchell Island Road by turning left over the Owl Harbor bridge at the spot where my road becomes private. A lazy right turn puts you on one of the most broken surfaces in a county of badly tended streets. But I don’t mind. My RAV4 navigates it well and I have new shocks so my body doesn’t feel it much.
Twitchell Island spans to your left as you drive alongside the tangle of hyacinth below the levee. Water fowl rise from the slough’s surface as the car passes. I hover between stands of overgrown trees and gaze at them. A pair of swans; egrets roosting some distance from each other; a heron on the far side, alone in the eddies.
Yesterday I got a clear look at a hawk. My phone’s camera can’t get a money shot but I did what I could. I felt its gaze. The hum of my engine made no difference to it, from its perch overhead. We sat and stared at one another, a pane of glass and decades of evolution marking the impassable distance between us. I felt old. Every ache in my bones sneered; every torn muscle and dry joint made themselves known. Still I sat, my car idling, the hawk gazing down at me without concern.
There must be hawks in Missouri but I have no memory of them. Here they treat the humans as inept interlopers. They land on our highwires, fluffing their feathers with the edges of the warning signs. While I navigate the pocked levee at the slowest of speeds, the hawk swoops from the tree and cuts across the sky over the harvested pasture filled with sheep standing head down to the newly mown surface. I’m left to continue my journey, to the job I must work, and the hours I must toil, and the noise of a small inconsequential town where I must ply my trade. The hawk pays me no mind. It has already reached heaven and will soon find another tree from which to gaze on the vibrant expanse of its domain.
Mugwumpishly tendered,
Corinne Corley
The Missouri Mugwump®
Photo © M. Corinne Corley 2026