They Spell ‘Love’ as R-E-S-P-E-C-T

There are two distinct presences on the Current River this afternoon, more prevalent even than the turtles sunning themselves on slimy logs.

First are the cottonwood seed puffs. They drift from the sky like a blizzard of snowflakes and traipse across the water, too wraithlike to get wet.

Then there are the Sniders.

There are Sniders in canoes and Sniders in inner tubes. Fat Sniders and skinny Sniders. Tan ones and those turning crawdad red.

And if you listen to Mike Snider, who planned this big family reunion, you almost get to thinking that those airy seed puffs just might be Sniders too.

Family reunions are big this summer. Across America you see them announced on Holiday Inn marquees and campground bulletin boards. They’re advertised in newspapers and they’re all over the Internet.

It was there, on the Net, that we ran into Mike. We were looking for reunions as part of our summer-long attempt to examine the state of the American family. Mike was casting about for Sniders at a site called the Roots Surname List. So we e-mail-invited ourselves to his four-day bash in the Ozarks.

Notorious party crashers, we Sipchens were pulling on swimsuits minutes after we arrived at the Rosecliff Lodge here in the southern part of the “Show Me” state. With Mike’s sister Shirley (Snider) Sisco guiding us, we threw our tubes in the back of the resort’s pickup and were ferried through forest and farmland to a sandy beach. Then we waded into the river and let gravity take its course.

The banks of the Current are lush with pines and hardwoods. The water is cool and the air, hot, though the temperature free-falls 10 degrees or so every time a cloud passes. Occasionally an aluminum jack boat goes slapping by, full of teenagers flush with the freedom of a 60-horsepower Evinrude. Otherwise we hear only bird song, water toppling off mossy rock walls, and our own chatter as we spin slowly through eddies and slip over riffles.

At this pace it’s hard to remember the day-to-day frenzy of Los Angeles and easy to drift into the sort of reverie where the past and present reconnect as part of a whole.

This is country through which Sniders have flowed for generations, and this summer more than 100 of them have come from 20 states, including strangers who never even knew they had kin until Mike shook them out of their genealogical trees. An 84-year-old man drove in from Denver. First cousins who haven’t seen each other in 50 years hug and sob. “It was like we picked up from yesterday.”

What Pam and I talk about on the river (after gaining a measure of peace by showing our children that there will be swift and merciless retaliation for any breech of maritime etiquette) is, “Why?”

Why do people who haven’t stayed in touch for years, or don’t even know each other, feel connected?

Why does geography have such magnetic pull?

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Shirley gives us a little insight. Born in 1932, she was the oldest child in her family. Mike, born 18 years later, was the youngest.

The clan’s father worked for General Motors in St. Louis. But his forebears had come to rural Carter County before the Civil War. When Shirley was 13 and Mike pure potentiality, their parents decided that the city was not a fit place to raise children and moved their brood back to the tiny town of Ellsinore.

The younger children took to the country life, farming and logging on the weekends with their father, who still worked in St. Louis during the week.

But Shirley resented it. “Had I grown up not having electricity or running water it might have been different,” she says. Eventually, the currents of circumstance carried all five siblings off to other parts again--Oklahoma, California for a while. Shirley went to the St. Louis suburbs, where she now serves as an elected official on the county council.

All did well in whatever they tackled: farming, real estate, telecommunications, entertainment management. “We all got lucky,” says one Carter County transplant. “And the harder we worked, the luckier we got.” Even Shirley thinks the landscape here shaped the family’s values, and as the reunion blossoms, the notion that Carter County somehow got into the family blood begins to make sense.

“There are honest, hard-working people” in this part of the country, Mike says. By coming back to Carter County, he figures, the family is tapping back into a source of strength.

That night, the entire extended clan drives five miles to Big Springs State Park, where the largest spring in the nation produces about 800 million gallons of water a day. They spread out under a park shelter and on tables and chairs arranged on the riverbank. Pam and I and our kids--Ashley, 12, Emily, 10, and Robert, 7--get in line and heap paper plates with fried catfish, hush puppies, cole slaw, freshly made potato chips and hot apple fritters, with big cups of cold lemonade to counter the languid air.

“My mother has always talked about fried catfish and hush puppies,” says Zee Zee Matta, 32, from Mountain View, Calif., showing appropriate appreciation for those Ozarks staples. “She hasn’t been back here in 40 years. I was real eager to see her reaction.”

Eldora (Snider) Xanthis is another Californian visiting Missouri for the first time. “Dad was always going to go back to Missouri. It was sort of a theme in my family,” she says. “But for some reason it never happened.”

So she and her mother are doing it for him, and, like Matta and her mother, they spent the morning cutting through cow pastures and fighting off chiggers to visit weed-strewn graveyards where their grandparents and great-grandparents lie.

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Families, like people, tend to have personalities. Some are introverted, clanish. Others are outgoing, inclusive. The Sniders are of the latter personality type.

The Sipchen kids are total outsiders here. Yet they all say these moments in and alongside the Current has been their favorite stop. Why? Because Shirley treated them kindly and made them feel welcome. Because a teenage Snider descendant stayed up late with them playing checkers.

“If you don’t have your family, you have nothing,” says Stacey Spencer, Mike’s and Shirley’s niece.

She and sister Marsha both went through divorces, and both say it was the family that pulled them through. They found out too late, they say, that their first husbands, while embraced by the clan, lacked some intangible but integral character ingredient that keeps Sniders tight.

Marsha’s 18-year-old daughter, Andrea, an honors student at the University of Missouri, comes closest to pinning down the quality that binds this family.

“It’s respect,” she says.

Andrea looks across a table to where her grandparents stand talking to newfound kin. “I would never do anything to let these people down,” she says.

In a sense, respect is what drove Mike to put in months of planning for this reunion. “My father and his brother did not get along,” he says. “We lost contact with his brother’s side of the family.” But Mike knew that his grandfather had fought and struggled to plant the family in this new soil, following the example of his parents and grandparents.

“I see this as a chance to heal,” he says, “to come together as a family again.”

Often during the reunion, as newfound cousins or nieces twice-removed thank him for his effort, Mike gives credit where he feels it’s due.

“This reunion was put together by someone else,” he says. “A whole bunch of someone elses. I think my grandfather had a lot to do with it. He would have been absolutely overjoyed. I tell people this and they get goose bumps, but I think the ancestors planned this reunion.”

* Thursday: A tale of two musical cities.

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ON THE WEB

Visit the Sipchens on the World Wide Web at https://www.latimes.com/trip/ for maps, journals and sounds from the family’s trip.