I'm not particularly interested in literary pilgrimages. Reading is itself a form of travel, but I'm not one of those people who likes to invert the process by visiting the homes of authors whose books I've loved, or the landscapes they re-create within their works. Nevertheless, on Sunday morning I was in a car, driving through the depressed landscape of Central New York State, heading past signs for the Village of Wampsville and Bee Bee Bridge Street, on my way to Chittenango, birthplace of L. Frank Baum and, among others, Dorothy and Toto.
When we arrived in Chittenango we parked beside the yellow brick road. The yellow was more yellow-brown than the yellow-gold of Technicolour, but that seemed entirely fitting given that the road had been transplanted from the fictional to the real, which invariably results in a certain loss of colour. The road was also not really a road, more just a pavement. But never mind. It meandered along the main street of Chittenango, heading past Auntie Em's Place.
We stopped in at Auntie Em's for breakfast. There were displays of Wizard of Oz figurines along the walls, which was both predictable and disappointing. The table cloths were, of course, chequered in blue and white, the place mats were yellow.
But on the wall I saw a framed newspaper article with the heartbreaking title: Yellow Brick Road Fades. Inset, was a photograph of the ex-mayor of Chittenango, who had spearheaded the drive to restore the road to its former glory. My friend drew my attention to an elderly diner patron. It was the ex-mayor himself. He bore a resemblance to Mickey Rooney, which made me think that Mickey Rooney would have made a very fine Munchkin.
A woman came to take our orders. She looked like Glinda the Good Witch, grown older and altogether wiser about her wardrobe choices.
At a table across the room were two men who could have been the Lollipop Guild boys grown up.
No sign of Toto, but on the walls were Georgia O'Keefe-esque framed paintings, for sale. The artist is a dog, who paints with its paws.
One of the men I had pegged as an aging Lollipop Guild-er stood up and walked out of the restaurant. He favoured one leg heavily, and the result was a lopsided walk much like that of the swaggering Lollipop Boys.
"Maybe Frank Baum based his characters on people he knew here," my friend suggested.
I prefer to think the people here have based themselves on the characters from The Wizard of Oz.
After a satisfyingly greasy (and inexpensive) breakfast we stepped out of Auntie Em's Place and noticed that the house opposite was listing slightly, as though set down by a cyclone.
We followed the Yellow Brick road, of course. It ended in front of the Environmental Compliance Management Corporation. No sign of a man behind the curtain.
