Can’t comment on the first of those two but definitely know the second is true. I make that drive (as far as STL) multiple times a year to care for an elderly aunt. I spent my first 22 years in Missouri and so much has changed, some for the better but far more for the worse.
As for the wild places and the hunting grounds of our youth, I’ll let a real writer speak to those:
“I came by there five years ago and where I shot that pheasant there was a hotdog place and filling station and the north prairie, where we hunted snipe in the spring and skated on the sloughs when they froze in the winter, was all a subdivision of mean houses, and in the town, the house where I was born was gone and they had cut down the oak trees and built an apartment house close out against the street. So I was glad I went away from there as soon as I did. Because when you like to shoot and fish you have to move often and always farther out and it doesn’t make any difference what they do when you are gone.”
Ernest Hemingway - Remembering Shooting-Flying
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