Deep in the hills of northern Missouri lies a flea market called Rutledge.
Rutledge sprawls across sixty acres outside the town it was named for, which has a population of 86. The gate sign calls it “Missouri's Oldest Largest Consecutive Flea Market.” I haven’t fact-checked this, but note: they don’t claim to be the “best” or “highest quality.”
It’s a hundred miles to Rutledge from where I live, down two-lane roads through tiny towns. The hills of northern Missouri are like the hills of southern Iowa — deceptively deep and rolling, still flat enough for crops and livestock but slowly turning into timber as the people disappear. Unlike Iowa, Missouri has never cared about road maintenance. Crossing the state line from Iowa yields an immediate worsening; Missouri’s roads are awful and their hills feel treacherous.
It’s a beautiful drive in July, though — corn starting to tassel, ditches filled with purple thistles and orange tiger lilies, old wooden barns teetering on the edge of oblivion. The Rutledge flea market is open one weekend a month from April to November, and I convinced my brother to go with me one Friday last summer. I believe it was our first consensual trip to Rutledge. I don’t recall having a choice in the matter as a kid.
There are no admission fees at Rutledge. There are also no parking attendants — just grassy fields and some directional arrows. We made our own parking spot in one of the loose rows of vehicles that had formed before our arrival.
The vendors are more organized. Standard vendor spots were $50 per weekend last year, although it looks like they’ve dropped to $40 per weekend in 2024. There are repeat vendors whose setups are more permanent — booths fashioned out of trailers or scrap metal, with locking doors to store merchandise between meets.
After my brother and I parked, we walked down the first gravel lane. Tables and trailers were lined up on either side of us, curving along a bend that hid just how big the flea market was.
The first stall was a classic Rutledge hodgepodge. Old VHS tapes. Vintage Fisher Price Little People toys. Several large purple letters in an odd font, each four or six feet tall, stacked haphazardly in the grass. My brother has an eye for this kind of mystery. He realized it was a deconstructed “Gordmans” sign from a now-bankrupt chain of Midwestern department stores. The logo was torn apart and each letter was priced individually, optimistic that someone might come along and need random letters the size of a person.
The next stall contained the unwanted remnants of a shuttered Bed, Bath and Beyond. Half-opened cardboard boxes were strewn everywhere, still to be unpacked — or left packed as though the vendor knew nothing would sell that weekend.
Someone else had a permanent shack filled with thousands of pairs of ceramic salt and pepper shakers. I knew a bit about antiques as a kid, thanks to the unusual ways my parents used to make money. I felt the old pull to browse and look for deals. But most millennials don’t collect ceramic salt and pepper shakers, so I don’t think this is a growth sector.
Another vendor, looking a little too put together for Rutledge, had a lovely display of custom steel yard art. Metal birds and butterflies floated on stakes above the scraggly grass, price tags waving. The art was beautiful, but it wasn’t selling — it was priced for Etsy instead of Missouri.
Silent men sat with shotguns of unknown provenance, ready to make a deal.
Other vendors gestured to wire cages tucked back in the shade. The cages held peacocks, turkeys, guineas, ducks, quail, chickens, bantams, rabbits, puppies, goats, and other small animals. I was tempted by some white peacocks, but it’s too early in my timeline to embrace my bird-owning heritage.
There’s no rhyme or reason to the order of things at Rutledge. It’s a jumble of people and products trying, lackadaisically, to get your attention. Many vendors ignored us and everyone else, sensing that no one was buying. They sat on lawn chairs at the back of their assigned lots, grilling hot dogs on portable campstoves.
My brother and I walked down the long rows, pausing as golf carts drove by and stirred up dust. A couple of teenage boys roamed ahead of us, picking up every gun available and pulling the triggers. I saw a surprising number of used microwave popcorn poppers, an unsurprising number of new t-shirts with MAGA slogans, the usual pyramid-scheme home goods (Scentsy seems like a scam, no?), and table after table of items that might have been antiques or might have been garbage.
I overheard vendors speculating about whether they’d make back their $50 lot fee that weekend. That, of course, didn’t include their merchandise costs, or gas for hauling everything in and out, or all the work of unloading, setting up, and packing up again.
I used the bathroom, perhaps ill-advisedly. It was an upgrade over the old porta potties. But the cinder block building, with opaque plastic shower curtains instead of stall doors for privacy, still wasn’t up to my bougie adult standards.
By the end of the first row, a quarter-mile from the entrance, I felt a little sick. Not the carsickness I always fall prey to on Missouri’s roads, or the aftereffects of the grape kool-aid I drank as a kid.
It was a different kind of nausea — like I’d been sailing through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and despairing for what we’ve done to the earth. Where did all this stuff come from, and where would it inevitably go?
And beneath it, a feeling coalesced into something between anxiety and a deep urge to look away.
Something that said, this could have been you.
Something that threatened, this could still be you.
In the summer of 1988, when the Farm Crisis had hollowed out the Midwest and the people who remained didn’t quite realize that their towns were already dead, I was six. My dad was thirty-one. In the short years after my birth he had gone from a relatively prosperous young farmer, to auctioning off everything to avoid bankruptcy, to trying to feed us with jobs cobbled together in the ruins of the local economy.
He had other jobs in 1988 — insurance adjuster, local cop, real estate agent — but he took a chance on selling turkeys. My great-uncle Fred owned a hatchery. As feed prices skyrocketed and poultry prices plummeted that year, Fred’s customers canceled their preorders for hatchlings. He told us that he was killing thousands of birds as they were born since no one wanted them. My dad, seeing an opportunity, said he would take as many as he could.
Over the span of a few weeks, we met up with Uncle Fred several times. He ultimately gave us 3000 days-old turkeys, as well as a dozen wild turkeys, a few ducks, and sixty matched pairs of bantam chickens.
I won’t go into detail today about the mechanics of turkey raising. We only had them for a summer, but let me tell you — their lives and deaths made an impression on six-year-old Sara. We kept fiftyish to eat, but the rest were destined for Rutledge.
My dad acquired a used yellow and beige pickup. We had picked up all the baby turkeys in the trunk of our family sedan, but Dad felt we needed an appropriate ride to fit in with the Rutledge crowd. The previous owner had put bald eagle + American flag decals on the doors. My dad nicknamed the truck the “Status Symbol.”
It was probably still too nice for Rutledge in 1988.
The pickup bed had a rusted stock rack attached to it, which Dad tarped to shade the turkeys in the back end. He would take my mom, my brother, and me to Rutledge, along with a cooler full of bologna or fried egg sandwiches and kool-aid. He would also take as many baby turkeys as he could fit in the truck.
We spent a few weekends in 1988 trading turkeys at Rutledge. My dad preferred to get money for the turkeys, of course. But he also traded turkeys for shepherd’s crooks, which he gave to my granddad for his flock of sheep. He traded turkeys for ducks, and ducks for a box of wooden hammer handles. And while my dad traded turkeys, I would look at nearby puppies for sale, or wander near the timber that marked the flea market’s outer limits, or sit in the Status Symbol and drink kool-aid and wait for it to be over.
I went to Rutledge last summer looking for something — catharsis, maybe, or memories. Definitely not Scentsy or shotguns.
But I also went with the scummy-feeling voyeurism of someone looking for a story. Rutledge long ago became one of a string of anecdotes I would tell at parties, as though it was funny. As though trading turkeys was another of my dad’s entertaining quirks. As though it all happened in someone else’s childhood.
But the disquiet, the nausea, that I felt while pawing through people’s stuff has stuck with me for months.
It’s the sense that everything we collect, everything we buy, everything we attach meaning to…much of it flows through questionable supply chains to get to us, and much of it disappears into hidden communities and economies after we toss it.
Rutledge is one of those hidden communities, hard to find and easy to judge.
When I visit cities now, I see all the same Instagrammable design choices, replicated endlessly, until every hotel lobby and restaurant looks exactly the same. But trends change. These spaces will all be redone in a decade. And then what happens to all this moody marble, all this terrazzo tile, all this Scandi/Japanese/coastal grandma/2024 Pantone Color of the Year, all this brass and bronze and gold?
It will filter out through salvage companies and landfills.
Some of it will be bought or traded, on and down, until it reaches the lower bounds of the economy.
And maybe in thirty years someone at Rutledge will be the last seller of quartz countertops in America after they’re banned elsewhere for causing incurable lung disease in countertop installers.
But it’s easy to lean into my rage about the supply chain. And anyway, I’m part of the problem — I hoard everything that I love.
The real core of what I felt at Rutledge was fear.
I can tell myself it’s absurd, intellectually stupid — a pathological fear I should work to cure. I can tell myself I went to the best university, worked at the best company, did the best best best in ways that should protect me.
But the thriving small towns of the 1960s and 1970s were destroyed, seemingly overnight, by macroeconomic factors beyond anyone’s control.
It only took a few summers of drought and impossible interest rates for an entire generation of young farmers to disappear.
One lesson of my childhood was that individual best cannot stop the grindstone of history. Sure, there are people selling things at Rutledge now who I probably wouldn’t want to be friends with. And there are other vendors and buyers who love making deals and trading things; they would go to Rutledge regardless. But there are a lot more people around here who ran into a series of unlucky events and didn’t have generational wealth to fall back on.
So I hoard paths the way I hoard things. I keep trying to let go of the corporate path, the San Francisco path, the avaricious tech money path. I know, intellectually, that they stand in the way of fully embracing the writing path, the path toward openness and community, the path toward telling the stories I need to tell.
But I can’t entirely close them off. Lurking somewhere in all the infinite paths of the future, there’s one where I’m selling ceramic salt shakers at Rutledge.
There are many more where my small town continues to die, and Iowa’s state politics get too toxic, and I have to leave.
So I keep paths open that no longer fit me, just to give myself an insurance plan against the paths that end in disaster.
//
When my brother and I were done at Rutledge last summer, I bought a Rutledge t-shirt and then said goodbye. I don’t think I’ll go back there again. I’d rather not be reminded of what that particular path could have looked like for me.
I should have bought the Gordmans sign, though. I realized later that I could have spelled “orgasm,” which would have made an amazing yard ornament. And as a romance writer, I might have been able to write it off as a marketing expense.
Cheers,
Sara
Thanks, as always, for reading! If you haven’t subscribed yet, please do — it’s a free and easy way to learn more about these rural spaces and support my work.
And if you have thoughts, please leave a comment or email me at dearsara@sararamsey.com. I would love to hear from you!
Hi Sara, I heard about your writing from my friend Carolyn Crooke in Minneapolis. The connection is even deeper - I, too, grew up in Iowa on a small family farm outside of Zearing. (North of Ames about 30 min) Population 500! Wrangling with all this when you have escaped it, or made your own way, is potent stuff. Thank you! Alecia Stevens
This was absolutely wonderful!!!Love your way with words, thoughts ,visions you made my day, Sarah thank you.