Day 29: Blackwell, Oklahoma, to Kansas City, Kansas

Monday 21 October – Awaking to an Oklahoma drizzle, I shuffled to the Econolodge breakfast room and ironed my own waffle.  A local TV station’s Storm Watch was playing above the tables where we few late-departing travelers ate, and the reporter took a good bit of time to announce, essentially, that there was no hint of storms for the next seven days.  It was an interesting glimpse into the local psyche, though; I got the feeling that folks in northern Oklahoma and southern Kansas take their storms quite seriously – as, I guess, they should well.  I’m afraid I’m disinclined to take much precaution against storms, meteorological or personal, until they’re very close indeed.  Evidence?  Two months out of Blackwell, I’m back in Virginia surrounded by packing boxes I never really expected as I prepare to leave my beautiful, cozy little house forever.  And oh, I am so sad.

and a grasshopper you can barely see against the grass

The memories of Blackwell and environs are happy, though.  I recall well swimming oddly lumpen approximately circular laps in the little pentagonal pool at the motel, and hitting the Kansas state line, it seemed, minutes after getting in the car.  Kansas welcomes drivers with a seat-belt law and the proud announcement that it was 34^th US president Dwight D. Eisenhower’s home state, plus a five-mph increase in the speed limit – to 75.

I don’t know what radio station I’d found, but the music ceded to some kind of farm report not long after I crossed the border.  The news was mixed:  corn and soy prices both down, but wheat prices increasing as Brazil, the world’s third-largest importer of wheat, had increased its US order by six times, given weather issues in Argentina.  There were big wheat orders from China, too – but given those corn and soy markets, everyone still needed to exercise care.  No wonder factory farms exist, when farmers have to do hard physical work, hostage themselves to changeable weather, manage the financials of a business, and keep up with international events and plan long-term investments according to short-term fluctuations in those events.  Crikey.  I’d Drift to the Towns if confronted with all those demands.

Looking back is sometimes rewarding; I may do it too much, though.

Unless the beauty of farm country was enough to offset the crazy-making stress of being an economist, gardener, manager, meteorologist, accountant, mechanic and etc.  For instance, as I crossed a toll plaza (cross fingers the Easy Pass works in Kansas!), an enormous flock of small black birds rose in front of me like smoke from an overactive chimney.  The flock is, of course, composed of hundreds of individuals, and they operate to some degree independently.  But together, they form a single entity, like the magnetic filings in a Wooly Willy.  They clumped together into a ball, then narrowed to a thin line, which split as if by otherworldly force and resolved into two balls, and then I was past and gone, and resisting the temptation to turn and keep watching.

There were deer crossing signs again, and a dead deer resting against a Jersey barrier on the median.  The fields were mostly the stubble of some dark brownish-red plant, edged with tall, deciduous and still-green trees under a huge, pale blue sky.  I passed a combine (I think that’s what that machine is called) harvesting the crops – one of very few displays of human activity in all the thousands of miles of fields I’ve passed.  There was also a display of tiny pumps (about the size of a very large tractor), steadily rising and falling in one field.  Oil, maybe?

North of Wichita, south of Topeka

I just think it's gorgeous.  Not mesmerizing, but
energizingly gorgeous.

A patch of water called El Dorado Lake caught my attention for its near-impossible blueness, Paul Newman’s eyes blue, or deeper than that.  The lake was very still, and seemed to be a graveyard for a small stand of trees.  There was a dead, branchy trunk sticking up from the water every few yards.  When I wrote my poem ‘Cross Country’ in 1993, I imagined Kansas as flat and mesmerically unchanging.  Driving through it, I decided that hilly, grassy, tree-rich Kansas in early autumn under its gigantic blue sky is glorious.

So I stopped to take some photos.  I picked one of many narrow, unmarked access roads to fenced rangeland, parked the car by a gate, climbed said gate and did a bit of exploring.  The gate, incidentally, led to a second gate in an interior fence, so I wasn’t mucking about where the bull might be, just getting into the buffer zone where I could see farther.  My pictures don’t do the landscape justice, but I think my memories do – and the pictures help with that.

After re-climbing the gate, I got back into the car and turned around to head back onto the turnpike.  Before I got myself into first and onto the road, a state trooper pulled in next to me to ask if everything was okay.  I assured him the car and I were both well, and his state beautiful.  We waved and wished each other good days and parted.

"Your state is glorious," I tell the nice officer.

I’m glad he didn’t arrive as I was clambering about on fences and private properties.  The screaming headline in Blackwell’s paper that morning was, “Burglary Suspect Captured,” which is a long, sedate road from the headlines that feature in Washington, DC’s local news.  I wonder if police work is less stressful in a rural area like this – though I know it’s always hugely stressful – than on the wicked metropolitan coast.  I know they’re supposed to have meth labs all over the place, and biker gangs, but with so dramatically fewer people there’s just got to be less crime overall.

It’s a pretty straight shot from Oklahoma to Topeka on two superhighways, and I got to see more machines, and their implied people, working the fields.  Getting closer to the big-ish city, trees in early autumn colors began to dominate the landscape.  At one point, a highway worker ran across the turnpike in front of me – I went from 80 to 44mph in about three seconds.  I imagine that most of the time, south of Topeka, it’s fairly safe to run around the interstates.  There’s just not that much traffic.

That changes on Route 70, heading east from Topeka to Kansas City.  And KC itself, at rush hour, is a sprawling spaghetti storm of turn-offs and access roads and interconnectors with just a skosh more traffic than one likes.  By the time I get to M.N.’s neighborhood, the gas gauge is on one bar and the hunger-meter is on it’s-way-past-lunchtime, and there’s nothing but upscale malls full of home decorating and clothing stores.  Finally I locate a gas station and quiet the panicked low-fuel warning light, and then a grocery store where I can calm the nutritional warning pangs.  And there, in the grocery store, is M.N., picking up squash for tonight’s soup!  After a bit of squealing and huggery in the produce section, and a promise of quick hors d’oeuvres, I followed her to her house and settled in at the kitchen counter to snack and watch her prepare dinner.

Get this brilliant idea:  M.N. roasts the squash and onions and stuff before throwing them into the soup and blender-izing them.  I have done that a few times since, and it is reliably delicious in a rich, sweet way that one doesn’t usually get with squash soup.  You might like to try it yourself.

Nothing but blue skies for M.N. and the mister.  And oh,
what a blue.

M.N. and I also swapped stories of our recent romantic upheavals.  Hers involves meeting a charming man who fell for her on their first date, and she for him not long after.  Mine, of course, is rather less fairy-tale happy at present, but almost as dramatic.  Professionally, she is clocking along just fine, with occasional jaunts on the corporate jet, where they know to stock tequila for her.  More often she flies commercial, which means once or twice a year she jets to Chicago for a weekend lunch on her own nickel in order to keep her status level up.  I don’t know about you, but when I was a frequent flyer for work, that status thing was a real benefit.  There’s something about knowing you’re going to be able to carry your carry-on on that makes travel significantly less stressful.

So catching up was great fun, dinner was delicious, and meeting Mr. M.N. was – well, a bit thrilling.  M.N. is younger than I, drop-dead gorgeous and a brilliant business success, plus she just ran her first half-marathon, but I choose to believe the happiness she and the mister have found together is possible for us all.

The guest room showed no trace of mutual friend M.L.’s recent visit to run the full marathon.  I plunged asleep feeling a bit smug that both my host and hostess would be at the office before I bothered to get out of bed.