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.
