Along a Deserted Kansas Highway

“Where are you now?” our friend texts.

“Kansas” we reply.  “What’s in Kansas?”

“A road to the Southwest,” and it is as unfair as it is true, 

but how can I capture my recent discovery for this state in one pithy text? 

While crossing the Great Plains it’s easy to get the impression that they occupy the middle of our continent, just for the sake of occupying it; as if their only job is defining either side by keeping them apart.  Like a vast ocean of featureless gray water, we imbue the far shore with a level of beauty that it hasn’t necessarily earned – we’re just so glad to see the limitless horizon broken up by something else.  The front range of Colorado benefits from this, especially as you approach it from the east. 

Yeah okay, it’s stunning, and I fall for Boulder’s Flatirons every damn time I see them, but the beauty there is made more so because we’ve traveled across the great grassland.  They stand there completely confident in their aesthetic, “go ahead, take it all in.”  As a young man from the Midwest flatland, I fell under the mountain’s spell in my twenties.  I often found Kansas lying directly between where I was and where I wanted to be.  So, I did what most people do – get on I-70 and go as fast as I could.  In fact, I got my last speeding ticket on that highway.   

Why did I even need to contemplate Kansas?  I have no family there, no friends moved there recently, I’d been through a couple of times, and I thought I knew what there was to know – but that was the younger me talking.  Then I started driving an old truck while hauling an even older camper.  “Travel,” Mark Twain said, “is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrowmindedness.”   It is significant that he said “travel,” not simply “arriving,” for many people arrive somewhere without really having traveled.  The interstate makes the miles fly by in an inhuman pace of pavement, tractor-trailers, podcasts, and bad gas station pizza.  I didn’t even really know that I had something against Kansas, and loosing it now makes me wonder what else I might be carrying around with me that might be dead wrong. 

We left the interstate just before crossing into Kansas, and immediately started to relax.  Along highway 50, a nearly deserted two-lane gently sloping toward the southwest corner of the state, we wander through a landscape interspersed between farmland, grazing pastures, and wetlands.  It is a perfect habitat and fly over rest stop for a multitude of birds. 

We might as well have called this “Raptor Alley” because in one 50-mile stretch we saw hawks, falcons, and bald eagles spread out along the power lines, trees, and fences at an even quarter mile spacing.  The presence of apex predators likely means that the ecosystem, at least how it operates after almost 200 years of farming, is in good health.  We simply have never seen such a concentration of raptors anywhere we’ve travelled, and each one had me pointing it out and trying to identify its species.  Is that a Prairie Falcon or a Merlin?  The trouble with identifying birds is that there are so many similarities between the species, and color morphs within each, that drive-by id’s are nearly impossible unless you see the big red tail flash of our country’s most common hawk as is circles right in front of the windshield. 

Turning south toward the Oklahoma border, we come across an interesting road sign.  It’s a common enough sign – two directions, two town names; only the towns names here are “Freedom” and “Protection.”  It’s an interesting choice and spawns a fascinating conversation in the front seat. 

The road west rolls through the Gypsum Hills of southern Kansas, causing me to lose my concept that all of Kansas is flat.  We park near a kiosk for the scenic highway to stretch our legs and the interpretive signage really brings the significance of the area home.  “To understand America, you must understand the Great Plains,” the middle is so much more than just a space separating the Rockies from the Mississippi.  But for the moment, we take in the rich red-soiled buttes capped with white gypsum at a slower pace on our own two feet.   The cattle grazing along the open range don’t exactly know what to make of us.

So much of Kansas was turned to the plow in the 1800’s that the story of the Cimarron National Grasslands is forever linked to government intervention.  Here as farms and ranches failed during the Dust Bowl era, the federal government stepped in to buy up land for folks who wanted out.  By reclaiming the land, reestablishing native species of ground cover, and managing grazing, the concept of soil conservation was implemented on a large scale.   

We’ve made it far enough west and south that this National Grassland has a campground open during December.  After a series of busy Walmart parking lots and truck stops, this quiet place was a needed relief.  Going out for a sunset stroll around the campsite, we witnessed the migrating flocks of Starlings tucking themselves into the dry marsh grass for the evening.  But Starlings don’t do anything at once or simply.  The flocks move like thick smoke blown back and forth in heavy cross winds.  They fly from treetop, to the sky, then dive low over the water to vanish completely within the rushes as one living entity.  Their seemingly random and indecisive movement appears to lack any intention, but within minutes their frenetic movement ends, and all becomes quiet over the marsh, just as the sun goes down.  Like the Starlings, the non-native species who has made so much of our continent its home, we suddenly feel at home among this wide, expansive horizon – and there’s no place like it.  

Thanks for the reminder, Kansas.