KANSAS
The morning grew warm early. Eight a.m., I wasn’t going to sit and work on bringing the journal up to date; we had to get rolling and turn on the air conditioner. In a half hour we suddenly crossed over into Kansas driving along Highway 400 westward. Two years back when we were escaping the Hot Mess we had made a beeline across Kansas in one hundred degree heat for the mountains of Colorado. I didn’t want to do that again, Colorado that is. It kept working on my mind as I drove. We would need fuel soon. The next town was Parsons. I had been there before with Sinbad to camp…somewhere. In town I filled up and made a decision (hopefully a good one for a change); we would head north. First I ought to eat. A Subway sandwich sounded good. There was a Subway in town somewhere but I couldn’t find it due to my outdated Garmin information. The downtown looked all newly revamped with streets going every which way. I gave up and headed out of town to see what we would come across along the way. The drive was nothing but farmland yet nice flat traveling. That is why I have always liked Kansas. Why I didn’t want to go to Colorado. I wasn’t into mountain driving this year.
We came upon the small town of Erie and pulled into a church parking lot with a covered picnic area. I fixed a sandwich and tried to get Beans to be patient until I ate my sandwich, then we’d go out. Outside she had fun exploring. The temperature was a pleasant ninety-one degrees; so much better than that soul-sucking humidity of Mississippi and Louisiana regardless of the degrees reading. Yes, this we could do as long as there is some shade and a breeze. I knew I had made the right decision…finally. We were on the right track. Northward it shall be.
We reached the even smaller town of Moran (population barely over five hundred) where the sign on the outskirts stated HOME OF DEBRA BARNES − MISS AMERICA 1968. Wow, how cool was that? Miss America came out of this little town. I looked her up online. She was still alive at seventy-three. While setting there on Main Street resetting the GPS for our next overnight stay, straight north to Ottawa where I didn’t have to worry about Claire messing with me any, a long funeral possession came down the street towards us. I sat there out of respect reflecting−live everyday the best regardless what the weather is. If someone says “We only live once” tell them they are wrong. “We only die once. We live everyday.”
We made it to a nice Walmart Travel Lodge in Ottawa that had a large lot to park in. No problems here. Nearby was a Freddy’s Steakburger, a fast food place formed in Kansas. I have had their burgers before. They are unlike regular burgers elsewhere. Yep, that would be dinner for the evening. Well dinner wound up early as I was in there at five p.m. At the counter the person took my order and I soon realized new employee who seemed shy, unsure and spoke very softly. The thing was half the time I was in there I kept trying to figure out male or female? The Goth look confused me. I eventually decided female. Either way she was cute but I didn’t think she’d last long at this job. As I walked back to the RV a semi (minus the trailer) roared in and parked right next to us. Good grief! You’ve got the whole damn parking lot to choose from and you park there? Maybe he was going into Freddy’s but if so why was he messing around inside in the sleeper part of the cab? I wasn’t going to stick around and see what he was going to do. I moved back along the side of a Walmart with a grassy area behind and no traffic. This was a nicer spot. Thank you rude truck driver (He did end up staying all night). After enjoying my sandwich and still working on my vanilla shake I took Beans out for a walk. She likes to walk around the base of buildings and did so here going along the wall into the loading dock area. Soon a bunny rabbit bolted from the corner and took off across the field. Why would this rabbit be over there in the corner of the chain link fence and the loading dock? I walked over and there in a hollow of the cut grass was a nest with three little baby bunnies. I figured mom would come back. Sure enough the next morning I went and checked. She had moved her babies out. The nest was empty. Why did she pick that spot in the first place with all the activity going on there daily?
I set the GPS for our destination in the morning and took off for an oddity site I had marked on my map from years ago when Sinbad and I explored this part of Kansas but never made it this far. Now Beans and I would. Traveling straight north until we hit Lawrence then Claire had me turn onto a toll turnpike heading west. Oh well. Just before Topeka we left the turnpike, gave the lady in the toll booth a dollar twenty-five and worked through the capital city. Soon we were going north again on a double lane freeway. This seems odd. I checked the map. Drat! Claire did it to me again. We could have gone a straight line up from Ottawa to our destination but nooo…she had to lead us onto a turnpike going twenty miles out of our way! I really needed to start double checking her directions. Oh well, I missed seeing some small towns but the drive was still enjoyable until…
I had been watching the ominous dark wall of clouds up ahead grow larger and blacker. Suddenly the phone blared at me−scared the bejesus out of me. I picked up the phone and looked. A tornado warning: TAKE SHELTER NOW. “If you are in a vehicle move to the closest substantial shelter and protect yourself from flying debris.” Like where? I am out here in the Kansas farmland with nothing around! As soon as I thought that bullets of rain started peppering us soon followed by a horrific wind that was all I could do to keep the RV going in a straight line. This all came upon us with the suddenness of a broken shoelace. Mercifully less than a quarter mile ahead was the Kickapoo Nation Tribal Casino. I pulled in and backed into a spot facing into the roaring wind. Then the shit-storm really began. The RV was buffeted from all sides shaking more that I was comfortable with. I figured this was it. We’re done for. I sent a couple messages so someone would know where our last location was before we got blown away to Kansas (wait…we’re already in Kansas) and shot a bit of video. I could no longer see the casino in front of us only a hundred yards distant. Outside the water on the asphalt blew in a way reminding me of scenes I have seen of snow blowing across the frozen ice of the arctic. Beans was gone. I thought she had went down into her hidey-hole on the floor where the passenger seat used to be but now is the spot for her litter box cabinet. No she wasn’t there. Finally I found her just sitting in the overhead looking at me. What a brave little girl. The storm was pretty much over within an hour. I think that was the most scared I had ever been from a weather event. In fact the experience had worn me to a frazzle (keep in mind I was born and raised in California so this type of weather event is not something I am used to) I decided we were done for the day. We would spend the night at the casino. Later I reflected on how lucky we were in that there had been no hail.
The next morning beautiful blue skies greeted us. You wouldn’t have known the fury that had engulfed us the afternoon before. I found a campground with showers online in the nearby town of Horton. We would go check it out. On the way I could see some of the effects of the storm. Tree limbs were down here and there. Entire trees also but hard to say if they had been down already or from that storm. One cornfield with corn about two feet tall now stood at a forty-five degree angle. I saw a series of four wood poles for power lines lying down along a cornfield with lines still attached. Had they just fallen? Another cornfield had strips of twisted metal roofing lying in amongst the corn. A little further on I saw the small barn where the metal roof had once been. The campground in Horton looked like it had long term residents in it packed close together. Nowhere did I see a building that might have showers. We left Horton heading for the Mount Hope cemetery in Hiawatha.
John Miburn Davis was a wealthy farmer in the area. His wife died in 1930 and he was old and childless. People in town started asking him what he was going to do with his money. They felt he could leave it to the town to build a hospital, park or swimming pool. He never liked being told what to do so he built a grave. Not just any old grave, but one with a fifty-two ton slab of granite over the burial plots for he and his wife. He commissioned an artist in Italy to create life-size statues of him and his wife out of marble. He was so impressed with the results he had more statues made of themselves at various periods of their fifty-year marriage. “It’s my money and I’ll spend it the way I please. They hate me in Kansas.” That is what we came to see.