March 24.

Hold it. We are still in Kansas, Dorthy, and it’s not like I thought. The sky is grey—much thicker than yesterday when sunbeams penetrated down to earth periodically and color from the setting sun brought spectacular definition to individual clouds. This weather is perfect for me because if I saw  bright sun on these massive green fields in or a bright colbalt sky that arcs 180 degrees from one nearly flat horizon to the other might change how I’m supposed to feel about Kansas. I might realize that I like it here. 

For the first few hundred miles I swear everything was cultivated. Anything once wild had been killed or covered. I accused those few conifer trees I saw of being planted (I’m sure if I’d stopped to look I would find them growing in straight lines). Besides the Arkansas River, most of the water was in human constructed canals. Everything seems to be in straight lines in Kansas. Pigeons were the only birds I saw, which, although I couldn’t see their silver leg bands were probably renegades from someone’s coop. I spent an hour looking for the Finney Bison Range outside of Garden City because I needed to see something natural. There, I stood up on a platform and saw unlimited, what I would call prairie—I’ll know better today once I experience The Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve.  No bison.

Further east the massive fields—those I’ve seen from planes—take on edges they share with taller, more diverse, more interesting vegetation. Hawks (buteos?), and smaller brown, finch-like or sparrow-like, or even fly-catcher-like birds pass in front of me in pairs or threes. One bird may have been a prairie falcon but I doubt it.

Still, life in Kansas seems focused on what the landscape can offer people. This was the theme I left Dodge City with. I went there almost unconsciously as if drawn by some psychic magnet. Looking back, I think this is some remnant from Marshal Matt Dillon and Kitty on the series Gunsmoke, which I discovered ran throughout my complete youth, from 1955 (I was three) to 1975, the year Terry and I got married and I “put away childish things” (1 Corinthians 13:11).

I stood inside Dodge City’s Long Branch Saloon and wandered Boot Hill Cemetary (what’s left of it.) I’m glad I went as it solidified my thinking on Manifest Destiny. America’s focus in the mid-nineteenth Century was to get settlers out west. This meant dealing with Indians who sensing the potential devastating effect this would have on their lives and their culture, wanted to kill white people. The American government discovered that their frontier fighters were no match for the Indians, chose to kill all the bison, on whose lives the Indians depended. The government recruited thousands of hunters who killed tens of millions bison. Indians who didn’t starve to death were forced onto reservations. The railroad soon followed. Then, conveniently, domestic cattle who wouldn’t need to compete with wild bison for forage. Much of this converged upon Dodge City. The rest is history. Actually, it’s all history. 

 

 

 I wondered: if everything in Kansas is altered for use by modern humans, then what would people living here have to compare to? Do they sense a wild world beyond their own, a life-force which includes but does not favor them over any other life? Do they look out on those broad fields filling the full view, with no mountains or oceans to contain them, and unconsciously feel that feeding and fueling American people is all that matters? Highway 50 through Kansas is a tour of America's storeroom: oil and gas (fields, equipment) cattle (range, feedlots, auctions), crops and the gear to produce them.

Fortunately, this applies to renewables as well. On the outskirts of Garden city, I passed a football field-sized yard filled with wind turbine blades. Then, a few miles beyond Dodge City, Highway 50 passes through miles and miles of the turning turbines, themselves. I had the sense that the wind there was constant and those turbines never stopped. 

I'm writing this morning from my room at the Country Inn Motel in Marion, Kansas. It's a bit north of Highway 50 but it's all I could find, as the Refinery in nearby McPherson is being upgraded and 1500 temporary employees have filled every available room in a 50 mile radius. Or so this inn's proprietor tells me. He's a very gentle friendly man, born to hospitality, although he'll soon retire from the oil and gas industry. After owning the Country Inn for 18 years, he and his wife (thegrand-daughter works with them) are ready to sell. As a joke, I send Terry a picture and a message about moving to Marion to run this place and disappear for a year or two.(see my instagram for this and other photos: brookusi. )

This morning walking for coffee, I saw a number of small rhinos decorated as if for a fund raiser. Don't ask. I didn't. Here are three of them: 

Now, it’s raining lightly. The weather woman I heard late yesterday said it might rain today, that it would be colder (she’s right about that, too) and to expect some hail, “but nothing larger than golf-ball-sized” she said. I hope she’s wrong, there.