The Missouri Cave Bat 500 Mile TT

Jim Roche, The Missouri Cave Bat 500 Mile TT, 2006, graphite and color pencil on paper, 36 x 48.25 inches.

JR: How I love Missouri! The thing about Missouri that you have to know, everything in Missouri is, you are either at a cave or going to a cave. It’s all caves. On this one, by this time in the drawings, I began to really get more detailed. You can see all the intersection hash marks and anything else on them. I begin to put more information on them, where you had the mileage between markers. You had all the caves marked. So here, we have five together. To show what the texture is along the road, the only line, which is a black pavement line, is the actual pavement.

You’re on the Arkansas / Missouri border in the Mark Twain National Forest. You go to different parts of the country for different reasons. This is one where it is up and down hills all the time. You have curves, and the real thing is that they don’t mind just sending you right off of a hill right into the nowhere land on the other side. It’s a rocky terrain, very interesting roads that demand a different type of attention, really isolated. Any time you are in Northern Arkansas and Southern Missouri, you are out in it. There’s very, very little in this part of the country.