I’ve Been Thinking . . . About Life Off the Interstate

Brown. . . .  Dirt.  My son and I were engrossed in a rousing game of “I spy with my little eyes.”  Tan. . . .  Tumbleweed.  It was the fourth Wednesday of November.  We were on our way to Boulder to join my wife, his mother, for Thanksgiving.  Western Kansas in November . . . not a lot of color, not a lot to see.

More recently, Nancy and I were making one of our almost-annual trips to the Colorado Rockies.  Another, more recent trip across western Kansas, I texted our son, Brown; his immediate reply, Dirt.

I don’t know how far we had driven.  The mile markers seem to click toward infinity, without any discernable progress toward our destination.  But each of us, at this point along the way, needed to find some relief – i.e., pee!  It was a several miles, but I took the next exit.

I anticipated it was a small town, but small doesn’t begin to describe its scale.  What someone might refer to as the hub of the city were buildings flanking the road for three- or four-hundred yards, just off the interstate.  The buildings appeared to be oriented toward business uses – storefronts, offices, some with second and third floors – but there was absolutely no sign of activity, not a stray dog or cat, not a tumbleweed, no cars, no people, nothing. 

The buildings didn’t appear to be in the sort of disrepair I would expect as the result of abandonment; no swinging saloon doors hanging by one hinge. But I envisioned it as some sort of ghost town: no gas station, no convenience store, no sign of current human population.

We continued driving until we found a Catholic cemetery with a field of a couple acres conveniently located next to it.  After completing our relief visit in the field, we decided to stretch our legs and cross the field for a stroll through the adjacent cemetery.

The road into the cemetery was straight and narrow, just as the path any good Catholic should be on (sorry, I couldn’t resist the metaphor). It effectively split the graveyard in half.  Many of the headstones on the north side had been replaced with new stones and markers; most of the markers on the south appeared to be the originals.  We couldn’t discern a reason, but the demarcation of the road seemed significant.

We also noted an inordinate number of deaths around 1920, give or take a couple years.  At first puzzled, we then connected it to the Spanish Flu. This town that seemed to have outlived its usefulness was not far from Junction City, where the Army’s Big Red One infantry division is headquartered. It’s unclear the genesis, but the Big Red One was associated with the early spread of the Spanish flu, whether they exported it to Europe during the first world war, or imported it as they returned.

As we have made these trips to Colorado over the years, I’ve often wondered about the small towns along the fringes of the Interstate. Billboards promoted such captivating tourist attractions as the world’s largest ball of twine, a five-legged cow, a two-headed snake, even the yellow brick road. Honestly, I’m surprised no one saw an opportunity for bus tours. Okay, not honestly.

I admit I found two things captivating. One is an eight-mile stretch of Interstate 70. It has an official highway sign designating it as the first section of the United States Interstate Highway system to be completed. It had to be somewhere, but I can’t pretend to understand why it was there.

President Eisenhower, who initiated the Interstate system was from Kansas, but it’s not particularly near his birthplace and home in Abilene. You can’t really peg it to the state capitol in Topeka because, well, you just can’t. It’s not close enough to the Big Red One base. It’s not close enough to Kansas State University, the state’s Land Grant university. It simply is not near anything that makes sense. Why? Don’t know. Perhaps the bus tour guide will explain on the way to that big ball of twine.

Coincidentally, the other thing that captivated me was near that eight-mile stretch – a zebra was grazing in a field along the highway. Yes, a zebra!  In Kansas.  After seeing it again on our return home, I did some research. I wasn’t hallucinating.  Some rancher had a zebra that he occasionally let out to graze.  I never saw the zebra again, though I search the fields on each trip as we pass.

I’m not alone in my assessment of vast expanse of Kansas.  I recently ran across the following descriptions.
In Christopher Leonard’s book, Kochland, he describes what it was like when Senate investigators flew into Wichita to depose Charles Koch, and others, about consistent and significant underreporting of oil taken from Indian reservations.	In an article in The Atlantic, Peter Brannen describes riding across Kansas with geologist PhD candidate Jonathan Knapp, as Knapp is taking Brannen to see a 250 million year-old geological formation.  Knapp, who has been researching the area, has a much greater knowledge of objects along the highway that aren’t brown or tan.
“It is almost awe-inspiring to fly into the Wichita airport. During the daytime hours, airplane passengers can look out the window and see the Kansas Prairie stretching away toward the horizon like an impossibly long tabletop covered in green. Wichita itself seems miniscule and stranded within this wide expanse, a small jewel of white buildings surrounded by residential neighborhoods and factories. Outside the city limits, the emptiness looked like the far edge of America.” (p. 27)	Western Kansas is crushingly boring to drive across, but a little less so when you realize its flatness belies a former life at the bottom of the Cretaceous Interior Seaway, an inland ocean filled with 50-foot-long killer mosasaurs. Knapp can convincingly hold forth on virtually anything you point at—which is exactly what I did as we drove through the long, drawing board-flat monotony of the heartland.    “Natural gas compression station,” he said, as I pointed to an anonymous facility in the distance.     “Natural gas pipeline transfer station,” he said, when I indicated another.     And another.     “Unconventional well pad,” he said. “It probably goes down a mile and then goes over two miles.”

Despite the historical significance of that eight-mile stretch of highway – sort of the Interstate origin story – it is an arduous trek to the mountains.  Personally, I recommend a fast rail system. 

That I would dream of a fast train to cross Kansas underscores a socioeconomic problem that has slowly been sounding the death knell for small towns throughout the country.  

As the Interstate system has woven itself into the fabric of travel, it allows travelers to speed past the small towns that existed along the old highways and byways.  As more people took to the Interstates, fewer rode the train, slowed by the many stops along the journey.  As rail ridership began drying up, so did the number of those stops.  Eventually, routes were cut.  A significant lifeline for small communities was disappearing.

The growth of air travel, with its hubs scattered around the country’s perimeter, has exacerbated the problem, relegating the heartland a cluster of flyover states.  The states even damaged their reputations among air travelers by applying their states’ liquor laws to planes flying through their airspace (for example, Kansas restricted the sale and consumption completely, and for some odd reason South Dakota restricted flight attendants from serving alcohol to “spendthrifts”).

In The Atlantic, Brannen begins to see the value of the flyover states, and the essential role they play in our lives and society:

In the hubbub of a New York City or San Francisco one gets the intoxicating sense that the city streets and skyscrapers are where the business of the country is conducted—that that’s where the action is. But driving around the heartland with an oil geologist you realize these glitzy coastal diversions are a facade. The unassuming, diffuse infrastructure of flyover land is, in fact, the country’s circulatory system: unmarked metal boxes on the side of the highway, inscrutable pipes and polished valves behind fences at the edge of the prairie. This is the inconspicuous hardware that delivers the glowing screens and cheap meat of modernity.

The road trip reminded me that the coasts are separated by a sea, just as they were a hundred million of years ago, but this one is made of corn and soy rather than seawater. These amber waves of grain are fed by fertilizers synthesized from fossil fuels. The artificial bounty is then transformed into the millions of cows crowded on the vast, sweeping feedlots of western Kansas and eastern Colorado that we passed along a 150-mile stretch of road that smelled like shit, even with the windows rolled up. In some of these roadside tableaus the entire modern life cycle was in view, with oil pumpjacks bobbing up and down in the middle of the vast cattle multitudes, whose farts account for a more than a quarter of US methane emissions. Knapp noted that the road we were driving on was made of asphaltene, the heaviest component of crude oil. Food, livestock, electricity, pharmaceuticals, roads, plastics—it’s fossil fuels all the way down.

Kansas City is a good place to live.  But we generally express the feeling that, in order to get anywhere we want to be on a vacation, we have to drive 600 miles.  And during those drives, as I admitted, I often wonder about the towns marked by the exits; and about the unmarked towns farther away.

Blue Highways, by William Least-Heat Moon, is one that captures in flowing and descriptive prose, his journey through the afterthoughts of America.  In his introductory quote, he explains what he sets out to see.

“On the old highway maps of America, the main routes were red and the back roads blue.  Now even the colors are changing. But in those brevities just before dawn and a little after dusk — times neither day nor night — the old roads returned to the sky some of its color. Then, in truth, they carry a mysterious cast of blue, and it’s that time when the pull of the blue highway is strongest, when the open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.” 

Now that we have an RV, our road trips will take us to new places.  Though I imagine most of our miles will be accumulated on the highway, we plan to stop more often; and I anticipate that these stops, and the people we meet, will provide us with new insights.

Already, we spent a night at the Cedar Valley RV Park near Guthrie, Oklahoma.  Guthrie, we learned, was the starting point for the Land Rush of 1889, when 10,000 people decided to make it their home; it was created a couple years earlier as a railroad stop.  Once the city was incorporated, it was designated as the state capitol.  The population of Oklahoma City mushroomed after it became a rail hub, and they successfully lobbied to become the capitol after winning a statewide vote.  A representative from Oklahoma City retrieved the state seal from Guthrie, despite a restraining order.

A storm was hurling across southern Oklahoma and northern Texas that night.  We decided that Guthrie was the best stop at balancing the competing objectives of getting north of the storm yet stopping early enough to set up our RV before the rains started.  It worked.  And we had the good fortune of a thoughtful park manager.  Without asking, she looked us up and found that we are Good Sam members and applied their discount.  She also selected a site that she said should provide us with the most protection if the winds were strong.

The next morning, we knew we chose well.  Just the light rain and wind on the fringes of the storm during the night.  A thoughtful campground manager.  The sun was shining and the sky was blue as we made our way through a surprisingly delightful small town just off the interstate.