18 April, Salina KS

Left around 6 this morning after another night in the car. Winds to the west of Pike’s Peak discouraged another experiment in wind dynamics and aeronautical engineering. Wind has stayed with me all day, sometimes crossways and sometimes, mercifully, astern, and after six hours of what often feels like driving in circles I feel a mite twitchy.

Kansas is not just flyover country, it’s drive-through country. A great deal of effort seems to be spent trying to entice the driver off the road, though coming in this direction it’s more than little pathetic. Westbound travelers will not have to unconsciously weigh the world’s largest prairie dog against the Black Canyon. Salina finally got me, although this had more to do with my hope of finding a cell phone tower owned by T-Mobile, than with their advertising campaign, which began about a hundred miles back with a sign that read ‘Salina: Now More than Ever’. It is still not clear to me, even now that I am here, to what substance this quantity refers. In general the state seems to have a slight inferiority complex. As one of many examples, take Wilson KS, population something like 500, advertised as the Czech capital of Kansas. The imperial ambitions of the Austro-Hungarian dynasty have come down in the world.

I will not deny the shock descending into the flatlands caused me. I briefly wondered if I would go mad with nothing to look at but the dashed and solid lines of the interstate. I learned so much going into the mountains: how they are shaped, built, and eroded, and how they give rise to such a diversity of ecosystems and adaptations. As with all such understandings, having more to do with feeling than formalism, I found myself in love, and the prospect of this flatness surrounding me for the next 1100 miles, and indeed the next three years, was yet another difficult separation.

But even Kansas is not flat (Illinois is much flatter! -ed.) It has its own history of construction and erosion. Anyone seeking to see past its apparent emptiness should remember it was once covered by oceans and glaciers, and that it has collected great dunes of dirt and dust blowing off the Rockies and indeed from all over the world. Rivers carve it too, if at a leisurely pace, and all of this has resulted in a soil whose fertility is probably matched by only a few places in the world. In eastern Colorado I saw in the distance a field a shade of green utterly foreign to my eyes, far far deeper and lusher than anything in the desert, and possessing a certain blueness even California cannot match. I wonder what it must have looked like with native grasses and herds of bison so large the eye could not compass them.

(cdm, in ContinuingEastwards | 18April2006 )