Kansas
Some reflections and photographs from a recent visit to relatives there (with more to come?)
Space is different here. The rules have been changed, property measured in square miles—“sections.” Everyone knows which way they are facing—north, south, east, west—driving directions given in compass points. “Go north when you come to the Dairy Queen.” I think they need this as a kind of grounding mechanism given the emptiness in all directions. Your eyes are forever asked to look well beyond normal New England distances, especially as you come upon a slight rise in the landscape, the horizon receding still more unimaginably far away than it was a moment earlier. The dots of cattle or wild horses or bison, yes bison even, like so many vanishing points, grounding dots on this vast graph of tall-wild grassland, fenced pasture, Flint Hills.
Everything sits alone here. A lone tree. A lone farm. A single oil well pump, its big steel head rolling, heaving up and down, up and down, in steady, lazy rhythm. Abandoned cars…
.
A tall, rusted “Aermotor” windmill water pump no longer pulling up the precious groundwater, now just another object, a sculpture standing alone on this endless canvass of grass and dirt and sky—steel scaffolding, still-now fan blades tall above the farmhouse where for generations people have worked hard to live simple, rugged lives. With so little to see, every object takes on more significance, seems as if it is on display, occupying a whole room in its museum of prairie, like the tree I photographed, the only one for miles, standing near a small pond set against the rolling hills, the glare of hazy Indian summer sun.
Down a long, gravel road, my wife’s uncle’s big pickup skidding, kicking up the bigger chunks of dirt and rock against the underbody, a 50 mile-per-hour, hot October Kansas wind pushing us sideways, the dirt and dust we stir up sent in a long contrail out across a brown, harvested field, we finally arrive at Teter Rock. It’s a 20-something-foot tall arrangement of native limestone, the rock that lies beneath this endless backdrop of soil and grass, the bed of the Permian and other seas that were here and vanished long before any human voices called out against the wind. It pays tribute to a town that once stood on this high rise of land from which you can see for miles and miles out across the dips and folds of the plains dotted with wild mustang and cattle, what may be a silo in the far-far distance, the only sound the steady hiss of the wind. We can lean nearly all of our weight into it, feel as if the sky itself is holding us in its palm.
The town is utterly gone now, without a trace. Just an occasional, concrete cornerstone, some twisted metal remain. The wind makes me imagine it has been blown clean away off this high rise of land, tumbling out toward the horizon.
From any height, the sunrise and sunset cast their reds and oranges and purples and pinks across the vastest of spaces, and like so many things here, you feel your perspective shift as you step back to take it all in, but that does little to stave off the enormity of it all—your own, concurrent feeling of smallness and insignificance.
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What an extraordinary landscape. Your beautiful words paint a vivid picture and the photographs are stunning.
Great pix!