Jeremiah Tolbert

Prepare your­self.  I am about to make a bold state­ment that will most likely cause many of you to ques­tion my sanity.

I like–no, even love– dri­ving across Kansas.

It’s a hard drive, eleven or so hours in length, depend­ing on traf­fic in places and how much I stop along the way for gas and food.   Weather at this time of the year can be a seri­ous haz­ard.  It began to snow in Fort Collins not long after I left yes­ter­day, and by this morn­ing, 8 inches had accu­mu­lated. The storms con­tin­ued march­ing from the west to the east and arrived here tonight in the form of dis­tant thun­der­storms to the north.  I’ve been sit­ting on the couch lis­ten­ing to the thun­der and watch­ing the light­ning light up the sid­ing of the house next door through the high win­dows in my par­ents 1920s Arts & Crafts Bungalow-​​style home.  Everything here is hard­wood, rich and brown, stone tiled fire­places, antique fur­ni­ture.   It’s a nice and wel­come change from twelve hours in the plas­tic and vinyl womb-​​like space of a mod­ern car.

But the drive itself is peace­ful if noth­ing else, but also full of his­tory and the kind of beauty only some­one who grew up on the plains can appre­ci­ate, per­haps.   I hit the free­way south to Denver at 8 AM and made good time around the metrop­o­lis and onto the Long Shot east.  The first hour of the drive is typ­i­cal Colorado dri­ving.  On my left, farm­lands and fields stretch­ing to the hori­zon.  On my right, the foothills give rise quickly to the Rocky Mountains, wreathed in heavy clouds that her­alded the snow.

Past Denver, the moun­tains recede into the rearview mir­ror as quickly as the traf­fic.   If I were to drop you on a ran­dom spot between Denver and the Kansas bor­der along I-​​70, you would not be able to tell whether you were in  Kansas or Colorado.  You’d prob­a­bly say Kansas.  I wouldn’t blame you.

Eastern Colorado is eas­ily my least favorite leg of the trip.  The towns and the farms are few and far between.  The range here is just empty and flat, the kind of flat every­one asso­ciates with Kansas even if they’ve never been there.  Nebraska-​​flat.  It always takes me longer to reach the Kansas bor­der than I expect.

Seeing the small “Welcome to Kansas” sign next to the weigh sta­tion at the bor­der never fails to make me smile.  It’s not osten­ta­tious  like the much larger and browner “Goodbye from Colorado” sign that her­alds it.  It’s small, just big enough for the words, and easy to miss (although I never miss it).  The sight never fails to relax some hid­den tensed mus­cles inside me, per­haps imag­ined mus­cles.   I almost feel like I have been hold­ing my breath since Denver, and can only take my first deep inhala­tion once I have passed Kanorado, Kansas.

The first third of the drive through Western Kansas is not so very dif­fer­ent than Eastern Colorado, as far as the grand vis­tas.  The dif­fer­ence I feel is purely psy­cho­log­i­cal.  Few trees, many fields, and towns announc­ing their pres­ence on the hori­zon with either the steeple of a church or a grain silo (or both).  At this time of the year, I see my first green fields near Goodland.  Winter wheat, I sus­pect, planted many months ear­lier, already turn­ing into a ver­dant car­pet over the slightly rolling landscape.

It is on this part of the road that you had have an audio­book or a music album that you can lose track of your­self within.  The dri­ving is not chal­leng­ing.  The land­scape is inter­est­ing only to the most Kansan of Kansans and the afi­cionado of grain silos and early 20th cen­tury church archi­tec­ture.   But as you progress east, things begin to get more inter­est­ing to the dis­cern­ing eye–such as mine, trained by the drive I’ve been mak­ing in some form since I was 7 years old.

Once you pass a series of farm com­mu­ni­ties, it’s open land until Hays, a small col­lege town in Postrock coun­try.  When this area was first set­tled, wood was in very short sup­ply, but yel­low lime­stone was free to quarry from any hill­side.  As you grow closer to Hays, Kansas, you begin to notice these weath­ered, warped, and worn stone posts, non­func­tional relics that define prop­erty lines but are backed up by the more tra­di­tional barbed wire fences.  It is here in this part of the state that the grass seems to grow more wild, and you begin to see the aban­doned farm­steads.   Every fifty miles or so, you can catch a close-​​up look at the rel­a­tively unchanged remains of a lime­stone farm­house, or a rot­ted and dilap­i­dated barn.   Old-​​fashioned wind­mills turn on the wind beneath the tow­er­ing alabaster blades of their power-​​generating descen­dants.    traf­fic on the road is light,  and the road is so straight that even alone, you can soak in the sight of desolation.

They told us sto­ries in grade school about the fron­tier­swomen who set­tled out here with their fam­i­lies and were dri­ven mad by the soli­tude and the wind.   From the aban­doned struc­tures,  I won­der if ulti­mately, the wind and soli­tude drove them all away.

The other object of inter­est to keep your eyes from slip­ping closed are the hand-​​painted signs.   Some help­fully remind you that “abor­tion stops a beat­ing heart” with a crude red heart painted next to the words.   Others adver­tise an upcom­ing road­side attrac­tion that includes the world’s largest prairie dog and a five-​​legged steer among var­i­ous other ani­mals, no doubt kept in tiny pens  and half-​​starved.  Billboards have been errected here and there adver­tis­ing the ser­vices and restau­rants of towns some­times as much as two hun­dred miles ahead. Somehow, prob­a­bly per­haps due to the lack of stim­u­lus, you still remem­ber those signs when the adver­tise­ments arrive in your path.

You pass through Hays quickly enough, per­haps catch­ing sight of the statue of a ptero­dactyl, or see­ing the 100,000 dome of the Sternberg Museum, one of the best col­lec­tions of kansas ocean fos­sils on the planet.  You see, the real­iza­tion that livens my drive every time as I cross the nearly bar­ren expanse is that all of this, from hori­zon to hori­zon, was once a giant inland ocean, and home to some of the dead­liest aquatic preda­tors that ever lived on earth–the mosasaurs.  One of the great ironies of Kansas is that so many of its res­i­dents flatly deny evo­lu­tion and beleive in a 2,000 year old Earth while, directly beneath their feet through­out most of the state, are 30 mil­lion year old ocean fos­sils that can only be explained in their belief sys­tem by accus­ing the stones of being planted by Satan him­self to make the hard-​​working folks ques­tion their faith.

Kansas here, in this mid­dle part, is one giant fos­sil to me.  I can­not help but pic­ture behe­moth forms sail­ing through the air above me, of mas­sive hub-​​cap-​​sized clams open­ing and clos­ing in invis­i­ble cur­rents along­side the road. I am dri­ving along the bot­tom of a ghostly ocean here.

Hays passes almost too quickly, and here is where the land­scape begins to grow more rough.  Once Salina is fad­ing behind you, small hills begin to rise from the land­scape.  Rivers weave between them, dressed in the fringes of trees only just now begin­ning to have a haze of green upon their branches.  If you were to swing south to Witchita, you would drive through a series of hills impres­sive to even a Colorado res­i­dent.  The Flint Hills were what I thought moun­tains looked like when I was younger. they’re not really that far off in some ways, up close.

I do not swing south, but con­tinue to the east.  The trees grow denser.  The hills rise and fall, form­ing ridges along­side the road.  I pass Fort Riley and its Army-​​green heli­copters with blades echo­ing the giant wind tur­bines from hun­dreds of miles back.  then Manhattan, the “lit­tle apple”  as adver­tised in bill­boards, and home of Kansas State University.  Purple-​​colored Wildcat ter­ri­tory.  And then, not so long after that, some­times more quickly than I expect, the urban blight of Topeka stretches out before me.  I say blight, because I know the city’s heart, and it is rot­ten to the core, a dirty, filthy place with few redeem­ing val­ues.  As I pass through, even from the inter­state I can see boarded up houses on the fringes of the emptied-​​out down­town.   It’s not so bad as decay­ing metrop­o­lises like Detroit, but it smells like death just the same.

Then the turn­pike, a toll-​​road to Kansas City, which I only take as far as Lawrence.  From there, I cut around the edges of town, past Clinton Lake (not named after the pres­i­dent), where I spent dozens of early Saturdays as a teen wish­ing with my father and my brother and sis­ter in my father’s boat.

Somewhere just out­side of Topeka, the mem­o­ries begin to take effect, and I see not only things as they are, but how they were when I was younger.  The growth and expan­sion shines brightly in my minds eye,  bright that hurts and makes me ache with an emo­tion I can only call nos­tal­gia.   Lawrence is where the mem­o­ries begin to crowd out the real­ity of things, and the way things were seem more sub­sta­nial than the way things are.

Lawrence whizzes by, the hill where Kansas University tow­ers above every­thing else in the area shrinks until it is no big­ger than you thumb, and I swing south on Highway 59.  Here, I think about my friend Niles and how I would take this road to his house nearly every week­end when I wasn’t work­ing in high school.  He was the first friend I ever had that could see through the bull­shit we tell our­selves and tell me what I really wanted or thought.  Such a skill is valu­able as a friend.  Last I had heard, he’d fled to Canada to escape jail in NYC.   I pass his home and wince to see that what was once a house on five acres is now crowded by a dozen more houses.  Even here your neigh­bors are closer than they were twenty years ago.

I’ve never taken this road before beyond Niles’ house, I real­ize, and soon I’m dri­ving a glacially slow 30 mph through Ottawa.  A county seat, it fea­tures an aston­ish­ingly beau­ti­ful cour­t­house from the Victorian period, dot­ted with stat­ues of lady Justice and spires and weird tower struc­tures.  I’ll try to take pic­tures when I pass back through again later.

Just past Ottawa, I turn east again, now on the mythically-​​named John brown Highway, push­ing towards the Missouri bor­der.  Here, I see even more aban­doned build­ings crum­bling and decay­ing.  I see old school houses with their bell tow­ers col­lapsed, burned out homes, and barns lean­ing so far that you would think a horse stomp­ing its foot would turn it into a pile of rub­ble.  I roll down the win­dow to smell the sharp tang of grass­fire as farm­ers clear away the growth on fal­low land to allow the green to come through with the rain.

I see all this in the golden light of a low sun behind me.  The land­scape now  has turned bril­liant green.  It reminds me of noth­ing so much as the English coun­try­side.  My mother first made this obser­va­tion on the road to Bath from London a few sum­mers ago while think­ing about how her father, a desert-​​raised boy from Arizona, sta­tioned in England in the mil­i­tary, had come to set­tle down and raise his fam­ily in Topeka.  Our Kansas is not so dif­fer­ent from that place in appear­ance, as strange as it sounds.

Soon, John Brown Highway deposits me in the slowly dying town of Osawatomie, sur­rounded by rivers prone to flood­ing, once a thriv­ing town home to the state men­tal hos­pi­tal.  Now, many of its store­fronts are closed or boarded up, and the homes up for auc­tion, or for the lucky ones, just for sale.  Osawatomie wears the state of the econ­omy on its face like a domino mask.  I have arrived.

A good sound­track makes it all go by faster, and good con­ver­sa­tion even faster.  I don’t like mak­ing the drive alone very often, and I dread it up until after the sec­ond or third hour, and then I remem­ber.  I’m going home.  These road­ways might as well be the veins in my arm, I know them so well.

It feels good to come back.  Most peo­ple could never under­stand why I would ever want to come here at all.  Its beauty is not loud.  It is under­stated, like that sign at the bor­der.  All along the way, it whis­pers “wel­come home,” in a voice as soft as the wind blow­ing through the corn. I can’t really blame you if you can’t hear it like we can.