Road Trip – Austin, Mn. to Liberal, Ks.
1.
My father grew up in a small town in central Nebraska. Every year, his father, a Lutheran pastor, took the family to a Bible camp in Estes Park, Colorado. Those trips, I think, provided a template for my father’s experience of travel by car.
A good day’s progress over the highways was about 300 miles. My father imagined “good time” (as he put it) consisted of making about fifty miles per hour. When he was a young man, people traveled along two-lane highways, passing through small towns on the plains located about 15 to 20 miles apart. Each small town required the visitor to slow down to 30 miles per hour (25 in some places) and, usually, stop for a minute or two at a traffic signal controlling the place where two rural highways intersected in the village, generally between blocks of old red brick buildings raised up when the railroads first came to town, in 1870's in Nebraska and, later, farther west. The route through town passed a school, grain elevators, a motel with identical doors opening along its facade into the oil- and transmission-spattered parking lot, churches, and the Carnegie library. Then, it was back to the open road, winding over hills with the road’s hatched center-line aimed straight for the highest point in the terrain. At fifty mph, 300 miles was six hours travel, a long enough day behind the wheel as far as my father was concerned.
2.
On Wednesday, February 26, 2025, I left Austin at 4:41 in the morning. For Minnesota, the weather was calm and temperate, 36 degrees. Near the edge of town, where the road crosses Turtle Creek, a lone deer slipped across the two-lane blacktop, nudged into a trot by my headlights. On the radio, a broadcast journalist was talking about something called “risky play” – that is, allowing elementary-age students to engage in “rough-and-tumble” play during recess. A pilot experiment in “risky play” (different from “hazardous play” which is not recommended) was underway at three schools in Wichita, Kansas. I paid close attention to this segment on the morning news show. In eight hours, if all went well, I would be driving through Wichita.
I had planned to start my drive at about six a.m. But, when I awoke around 4 in the morning, further sleep eluded me. “If all went well...” was the aspect of the drive that troubled me. The world is vast and full of dangers and it’s not necessary for “all to go well”. In fact, a host of things can go wrong.
3.
By 5:12 a.m., I was at the border with Iowa, not much of a trip since it is only about 30 miles to that location from my home. Northern Iowa was dotted with cold spots along the Interstate Highway, places where the temperature dipped suddenly, for no apparent reason, to 27 to 29 degrees according to my dashboard. What was the explanation for these pockets of cold air? I know that paranormal investigators sometimes encounter cold spots, places with clammy temperatures that they attribute to the presence of ghosts. But why were there so many ghosts along these empty pre-dawn stretches of straight, flat, featureless freeway?
I observed another odd phenomenon: some sort of mostly imperceptible mist hovered in the air and, when the glare from my headlights grazed the white hypen-shaped center line on the freeway, the beam reflected upward into the air. Each striped hatchmark on the road cast a pillar of white light above the center line. It was as if I were driving beside an endless palisade of marble-white columns standing upright between the lanes.
But, then, the eastern sky brightened, pale bluish rays sculpting the edges of purplish clouds erect like motionless sentries against the horizon and the flat, snow-streaked landscape of northern Iowa revealed itself, not as strip-tease or peek-a-boo, but as shapes slowly sharpening into edges and corner. Behind a cloud, the sun shone and the haze escarpment now shed jets of light, fingers of radiance drooping down to caress the frozen stubble in the fields.
4.
I passed along the edges of Des Moines, continued south, and crossed the border into Missouri at 8:32 in the morning. (“Making good time” as my father might have said.) I skirted Kansas City around 10:30 and, from Leavenworth, followed the turnpike toward Wichita.
When I have come this way before, travelers on the Kansas Tollway were issued tickets punched to mark the point of their access to the turnpike. Upon exiting, a fee was charged, calculated on the basis of mileage incurred on the toll-road. But times have changed. There were no toll-booths, no attendants anywhere to issue cards, no fee-collectors at the exit ramps. Signs indicated that Kansas drivers could use their EZ pass for road access or that charges could be paid on the internet at a certain website advertised on official-looking signs. The assumption, of course, is that every driver will have several thousand dollars worth of computer equipment readily accessible or will be driving with an expensive smart-phone. I’m not sure that these assumptions are necessarily accurate.
I exited the turnpike at Wichita, driving a long commercial boulevard south of the city. The center of town was marked by a series of solitary-looking low skyscrapers, glass towers of an unprepossessing height standing a mile or so north of the road where I was driving. A dozen stoplights slowed my passage along the edge of the city. I imagined that beneath those crystal ramparts, there were schools and schoolyards where children were squealing with delight as they engaged in risky play.
5.
(My transit of the Kansas tollway has a sequel. Eight days later, I began to get text-messages on my phone ordering me to pay incurred “EZ pass charges” or risk forfeiting my driver’s license. I had no idea how to make payment, a confusing matter since I was driving when these belligerent messages appeared and unable to attend to them. I called my office and found that my paralegal who had gone nowhere near a turnpike in the past three weeks – for, at least, eight days she had been in Merida in the Yucatan – had received the identical message. Later, I discovered that my wife, left alone in Austin to care for our dog while I was traveling, had received the same texts demanding payment. Obviously, the messages were a part of some kind of scam, a fraud that I escaped, primarily, because I’m not sufficiently computer-literate to have paid the alleged toll. The internet is a sewer of fraud and criminality. In my case, the scam had a certain plausibility – after all, I had, in fact, driven on a famous toll-road authorized to charge fees for my use. The charges asserted by the text-messages were only $6.69, certainly a cheap enough “ask”, although I presume that the gist of the fraud is to secure access to a credit card number used to make the payment. A couple weeks later, the actual charges from Kansas tollway reached me by mail – it was something like $18.19, including a $1.50 service charge for the toll road.)
6.
About fifty miles from Wichita, the landscape billows into vast expanses of treeless, rolling prairie, an area called the Flint Hills. The center of the hills is an elevated ridge called the Bazaar Cattle Pens, a place where some wooden corrals crowd around an exit to nowhere. At this time of year, the landscape is brown, barren-looking with cold water reflecting the white sky cupped in little terraces and potholes on the hillsides. The ponds shiver in the wind, scaled with flecks of reflected sunlight and the more sheer sides of the hills are eroded, cut banks of wind-blown loess flaking off in the breeze. Some black-faced cattle are ascending a draw. The sky is huge and as empty as the land beneath it. On the radio, a classical station is playing Beethoven’s fourth piano trio, a work that adapts a popular tune from the opera The Corsair (Weigl) for the chamber piece. The trio in B-Flat is called the “Gassenhauer”, that is, “the street song” since the music’s jolly theme was often sung impromptu by revelers departing the bars; the theme carries the operatic aria title: “Before venturing this awesome task, I need to eat a snack.”
At El Dorado, an oil refinery glints dully in a scaffolding of tubes and pipes. A sign tells me that I am passing the exit to Tonganoxie and Eudora. (Tonganoxie, a word meaning “shorty” in Delaware, was the nickname of an Indian chief who once lived in this area. Eudora was the daughter of another Indian leader, Chief Paschal Fish, a Kansa, who sold the site of his village and lands in 1856 to a German emigrant group. Quantrill’s raiders rode through this area on their way to the bloody raid on Lawrence, Kansas. The good folks of Eudora thought it would be a good idea to warn the community at Lawrence of the advancing marauders. But their good intentions didn’t match their equine abilities. The two men sent to Lawrence to warn of the attack both crashed their horses and ending up dying on the road.)
7.
At Greenburg, a group of Mennonite women are shopping in a convenience store after filling up their pickup truck with fuel. A sign tacked to an utility pole advertises the “Big Well”, a hand-dug pit cut down through the soil and rock to a vein of water in the ground 109 feet below. Next to the Big Well sign, an arrow pointing to the south “three blocks”, there is another placard showing a plump chef with a cleaver: “Kock’s Meats.” I am forty miles from Dodge City, the infamous cowtown where Marshal Matt Dillon presided as sheriff on the longstanding TV show, one of my father’s favorite programs.
8.
The dilapidated, bare trees scattered in forlorn shelter belts across the prairie remind me that it is a terrible thing to be a tree in the winter. The branches look aghast and the trees throw up their limbs and boughs as if in contortions of horror or agony.
9.
The territory to the north of the east-west running highway breaks into badlands. The choppy terrain is grey and brown, steps in the prairie linked by little ramps of fallen gravel. Oil wells are working among the pits and fissures.
10.
Years ago, when I traversed this same terrain, I recall passing a railroad trestle on my right (to the north). The sun was setting at that time and the grid of wooden timbers comprising the trestle caught the reddish light and held it confined in little cells suspended over the dry gulch. Today, the sun is still high in the sky. In this light, the old trestle looks like a military fortification of some sort.
11.
It’s warm enough here for the grassy fields to glow with a bright emerald light. The fields are covered in smooth, lacquered, green carpet.
12.
I have supper in the Cattleman’s Café along State Highway 54 in Liberal, Kansas. The decor is tornado-themed. Huge mural-sized photographs show intimidating black and bruise-blue clouds darkening the sky and trailing thick serpentine cyclones. Another big picture shows the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz brandishing her broom like a samurai sword. The bars along the side of the road have names like “The Twister Tavern” and “The Storm Cellar.”
13.
Around the outskirts of the cheerless little city, there are lots full of debris from the oil-fields: big rusty tanks, complex valves and pipe-joints, as well as hammer-head pumping rigs knocked over on their side.
14.
The drive from Austin to Liberal took me 12 hours behind the wheel.
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