Summer in Kansas: Tour de Goathead

Spring has come early to western Kansas, as it has to much of the West - temperatures in the low 80s, gentle breezes at about 20 nautical miles per hour, gusting to 35. Nothing to keep an old man off the bicycle - quite the contrary. If you can't rack up elevation gains during the daily bout of cycling, wind resistance is the next best thing - if, that is, you can master the irritability that comes of riding section lines along sandy roads on a windy day.    

I don't actually reside in Kansas, but it's the wind out here that brings me down from the Colorado highlands and gives me my daily bread in this Martian landscape farther east. I'm spending my days in a field office, set among greening fields of winter wheat alternating with corn stubble, making daily forays on a mountain bike of venerable years and aspect just to keep my tone up and my native affability in some fettle. Not a bad life for a geezer, if like me you prefer solitude and the company of curlews to that of commissioners, counselors, clerics, counts, cardinals, carpenters, cornhuskers, contortionists, confidence men, costermongers, curates, commercial travellers and constables.

Long-billed Curlew (J.J. Audubon)

Rural Kansas does have its drawbacks. For one thing, the place is carpeted from one end to the other, town and country, with the dreaded Tribulus terrestris. In the spring the new plant is benign enough in aspect, if a bit stringy.

But "tribulus" is a dead giveaway. This is a branching, flowering, low-growing plant, one of the Ten Plagues of Egypt along with frogs, locusts, boils, hyperactive children, surveillance satellites, installment funerals and robocalls. Like the Evil One, its names are legion - bullhead, burra gokharu, caltrop, cat's head, devil's eyelashes, devil's thorn, devil's weed, goathead, puncturevine, tackweed. A caltrop is one of those three-legged pronged thingies that an unsuspecting enemy is intended to step on and be disabled from further combat, thus:

The Romans, who used them in antiquity, called them "tribuli," - hence the name of the plant. I've always known it as goathead, all the while acknowledging it as the Devil's own handiwork. The flowers give way to fruit . . .

 . . . which dries in the summer sun to an incorruptible, indestructible, everlasting, omnipresent hazard the size of a small pebble with the half-life of plutonium. The thorn never decays, never disintegrates, never entirely dissolves its substance into something organic and benign. It litters fields and farm tracks, piling up generation on generation; farm machinery drags it into roadways on its tires; the county road grader pulls it into roadways while grading the verges. The work of Satan is everywhere to be found, lying in wait, seeking the unwary whose bicycle tires it may devour.

Several weeks ago, on an unseasonably warm February day, I ventured out on my old bicycle across the rural landscape, found myself about seven miles from the field office at a dead end. The only reasonable course, short of simply backtracking the way I'd come, was a two-lane farm track that cut along a half-section to the next county road a mile to the north. I took the farm track and in a quarter-mile of careful riding both my tires were fuzzy with goatheads. 

I pulled one, heard a slow sussuration of escaping air, so I pulled the rest. It took me 15 minutes to clean both tires of them, by which time both tires were flat. Midway through the operation it dawned that my tire pump was still in the office. But the insides of the tire casings bristled with the broken ends of countless spines - even the tube I carried in my pocket would have been flat in a second. After a five-mile walk and within two miles of the office a school bus driver heading back to the bus garage finally gave me a lift.

Today's ride was uneventful. Even riding along a clean, packed dirt road, I picked up an occasional thorn. But I had taken care to replace my standard inner tubes with "Goo Tubes," tubes filled with some sort of green slimey polymer that immediately flows into a puncture. So far, so good. 

I was a scant mile from returning to my start point, thorn free, flat free, when I passed a final farmstead which I knew to be the residence of two charming little Mennonite sisters and a pair of  overly zealous and prosecutorial dogs. Sure enough, there were the sisters tearing across a field on a tiny red motorized four-wheeler, waving madly, long gowns aflutter. And there were the dogs, at a disadvantageous distance to be sure, but eager to close on me, which they promptly did to the futile remonstrances of their small mistresses. The larger dog was a bit lugubrious about the pursuit, not wishing to run quite so hard for his sport but spurred on by his partner in crime, a miniature schnauzer whose demeanor seemed considerably less . . . predictable. Summer is returning to Kansas.

Never asleep, never on a leash

God Is My Running Back

I was in southern Kansas Monday last, a scant fifteen miles north of the Oklahoma line, planted in front of a television screen as Oklahoma State University's football team narrowly defeated the Kansas State Wildcats in a 52-45 donnybrook that edged the Cowboys up into second place in NCAA rankings. I'm not a football fan, scarcely ever watch a game, but this was the game to see if you only ever see a game or two each season - a fast-forward sequence of kickoff returns, interceptions, breakaway downfield scampers, long arcing pass completions, quarterback sneaks - all the right ingredients for an adrenalin-draining heartbreaker. I'll say no more - this isn't really about football. 

I was in a southern Kansas farmhouse, as I think I said, and the Cowboys and the Wildcats had scarcely desisted from this near-equal exchange of ministrations, the field of endeavor still warm, the turf still scuffled, when I went upstairs to bed. I rested for a moment in precarious monopedalian equipoise, gingerly removing one leg from a trouserleg, when the lampshade began to rattle, then the blinds, then the whole upper story of the old manse, undulating slowly like a waterbed in a clapboard railway hotel.

So, Oklahoma State wins an absolute squeaker over Kansas State and Oklahoma has an earthquake plainly felt in Kansas. Coincidence? I thought not. Yes, God had spoken through the earthquake. God, as we know, speaks through earthquakes, although in fairly general terms so you're never quite sure in what you (or more likely, everyone) may have erred - like when your second grade teacher used to drag you along the playground by one ear muttering, "You know very well what you've just done, young man!"

I scampered back down the stairs to find that everyone in the house had congregated in the kitchen and dived into the popcorn and soda pops in a fizz of nervous, giggly eating, all oblivious of the internet admonitions of Pat Robertson. We all agreed that being spoken to in an earthquake was preferable to being spoken to in a tornado or in a house afire, we all agreed that we'd gotten off easily this time and vowed to be better persons in future.

But surely, I reasoned with myself, these events - an earthquake coming on the heels of an OSU victory - cannot be coincidence, particularly where fervent prayer is . . . well, does one deploy prayer, or merely employ it? In any case, football has become, more than ever, the arena within which good Americans show their worthiness of divine benefactions, where God in his turn reveals his will to those same good Americans and pronounces his judgments favorably upon them. Unless you're a Penn State fan.

Football, having supplanted baseball as the national waste of time, has become the latest and most visible devotional space. I can't imagine a professional cycling team on the godless socialistic European circuit kneeling in prayer before a stage or a meal or at bedtime. They know that God doesn't see them doping. Even Americans haven't always prayed over their sports; the practice seems to have started somewhere in Texas and spread like a gastrointestinal parasite into the more susceptible Southern states across the Hookworm Belt.

"Thank you, oh Lord,  for this oxycontin."

"Heave an egg out of a Pullman window," H. L. Mencken wrote back in the 1920s, "and you will hit a fundamentalist almost everywhere in the United States today." Heave a bottle onto the playing field at Sports Authority Stadium at Mile High and it's just as likely. The devout Tim Tebow, inventor of "tebowing," quarterbacks with mixed success there of a Sunday in autumn. For now, at any rate.

Tebow has either riled or inspired by example his colleagues in the National Football League. Except as a matter of mild curiosity, I don't understand why anyone cares one way or another about Tebow's mostly ostentatious devotionalism - his "oppressive piety," as Frank Bruni nicely puts it. He has replaced the celebratory endzone "spiking the baby" with this . . .

"Thank you, oh Lord, for my open receiver."

A New York Times article reports that, "Supporters have reacted to criticism of Tebow as an indictment on religion, while detractors seem to delight in every wayward pass." Both sides, of course, assume that God gives a shit about football. Or Tim Tebow. The French and Italians all realize that God can't ride a bike anyway.

 IF God rode a bike . . .

For my part, I'll take a good earthquake. Even if I can't quite understand the message, it makes me sit up and pay attention. The only thing that could make a football game more of a snooze is praying during a football game.

Bowling for Kansas

I'm just back from Kansas, where the heat has broken, at least temporarily, and everyone is as happy as they could be for having just lost the better part of both their wheat and corn crops.  (And as the secessionist and Texas Guvuner Rick Perry might have said, if he hasn't already, thank the Umighty Lord for federal farm subsidies and crop insurance.) Yep, if it weren't for God and Gummint (in any order you choose), them farmers would have been living in some hellish Cairo slum since a long while back.

"It's not much, but at least we don't have to take farm subsidies."

And while I'm at it, here's a handy site where you can look up your neighbors to see who's cheating on their libertarian Tea Party credentials - search "Bachmann" (deceased) in Buffalo County, Wisconsin (as in "Michelle Bachmann") just to see how slick it works.

But among the many things I really do enjoy when I'm in Kansas (besides everyone I know there) is the self-imposed news blackout. In the darkened caverns of my motel rooms I can watch Turner Classic Movies (when's the last time you had to watch a Lew Ayres' "vehicle," willingly or un-?) instead of CNN or the charade of Faux News. Selective hearing, in a way, but relief nonetheless. When I speak with people, it's about genuine concerns like whether it will rain or exactly when their wells might dry up or whether there's enough water deeper down to sustain their farms. They're as chary talking about politics as I am, and being farmers, just as socialist as I am whether they know it or not. Probably they don't talk about it for the same reasons that I try not to write (much) about it (unless by innuendo), like we don't go into details about train wrecks.

So the climate in western Kansas is congenial to me in a way I never imagined it could ever be - in the summer it's bloody awful hot, it's dry and it's almost always windy (which of course is why I'm there anyway). Nonetheless (and given a modicum of air conditioning), I like it. But more than that, the people, as conservative and evangelical as their reputation and as much so as I am the contrary in every respect, seem to be possessed of a common sense that transcends the idiocy of their elected representatives and hired clergy. They are capable of conversation that does not degenerate in anger. On most topics, they are clear-minded. They can bowl together without rancour.

When among them I always feel welcome. I am admitted to the Mennonite ladies' Tuesday Sewing Circle, where in the church basement they prepare a lavish weekly Kansas farm lunch for their working husbands and sons in the off-seasons of fall and winter; have a standing fishing invitation at a marina in Oklahoma owned by a friend in the neighborhood; have standing invitations across two counties to stop by for dinner or supper (those being successive, seperate meals in Kansas); standing invitations to go pheasant hunting - a sport I've never tried nor been drawn to.

"Oh, dwat - sowwy."

I like it out there in the flat spaces with the curlews and the hawks and the coyotes and the Mexican restaurants and the oversized hamburgers and every grocery store bragging "the coldest beer in town." It's a forgotten place where the only tourists come for the tornado season. Bummer.

"Oh shit, Dorothy, we're in Kansas!"

Summer in Kansas: Riding the Pig

It's a Saturday, nearly the last day in July, and according to the kaleidoscopic electronic hotel marquee out along the highway on the eastern edge of town, it's 100 honest-to-god degrees Fahrenheit at noon in Ulysses. (Update: by 5:00 p.m. it was 104 degrees, two hours later, a degree cooler.)

 100F - read it and weep

I walked the sidewalk around the lake ("Reclaimed waste water - do not drink or swim") in the municipal park earlier this morning, where I found a smallish three-foot bull snake coiled loosely on the concrete walk in the shade of a tree, as sound asleep as a snake ever gets, a mouse-sized bulge somewhere amidships. It was still there when I returned thirty minutes later. I don't know which I'd rather have tried to eat for breakfast - that mouse or a pretty lively bluegill that a heron was shaking into submission before swallowing entire, a finny little devil that made me wish the heron good luck with that, sucker.

As both images set a certain tone for the morning, I forewent breakfast myself - not to mention that the buffet room at the hotel sported a preternaturally large double-tiered cake stuccoed in opaque white and blue (it's a boyexclamationpoint) frosting while a family group decorated for a baby shower, spangling the place in lavender and white crepe like an Italian funeral. But those are Kansas State's liturgical colors as well, and the parents were evidently hoping to implant prenatally their own loyalties, as western Kansas is rabid (if that's the word I want) Wildcat country. (To the credit of all Kansans everywhere, I have never seen a single bumper sticker that reads, "If God isn't a Wildcat/Jayhawk/Chiefs/Royals fan, then why is the sky blue/grass green/sunsets orange/mud brown/cowshit wrinkled . . . . ?")

Last evening I went over to Sublette for the Haskell County Fair's annual 4-H livestock sale. I went as a buyer, which gave me entree to the "buyer's appreciation dinner" in the fairground's main meeting hall, which was much like an ageing, linoleum-paved church basement with a few windows. I do not mean to disparage the elderly municipal and county buildings in southwestern Kansas, as many of them are now air-conditioned - true oases in the heart of an otherwise furnace-like landscape. The meal was mainly a semi-circle of homegrown steak, large enough that I had to pry a hubcap off a Packard in the parking lot to accommodate it.

 1935 Packard (with hubcaps)

The table for beverages was separate, manned (if that's the word I want) by a cadre of tiny 4-H-ers who offered everyone a cup of cold drink - "did you want water? - or tea?" - poured it out, then carried it to your place at the table for you. All through the meal they plied the crowd steadily, like flies in a feedlot, with pitchers of the same - "did you have water? - or tea?" A nice boxed wine, I thought, might have made the livestock bidding to come a bit more brisk.

Four-H livestock auctions, a feature of every county fair, are a way farm kids raise money to finance their animal-rearing ventures and learn the business of animal husbandry. Local businesses bid on the animals, their designated bidders gamely raising the stakes as parents and grandparents conspire against them. Four-H parents are the rural equivalents of suburban Little League or soccer parents, except that since everyone is a neighbor and there's actually money involved they seem much kinder and less grim about it. It's a low-stakes game in which everyone knows one another and understands the rules. I was there to buy any animal that was affordable because the company I work for does business in the county and has always been a good local citizen.

After everyone had eaten and I'd threatened a table of county commissioners and feedlot owners (acquaintances all) that I was only there to drive up the stakes, everyone ambled out to the auction shed, got settled in the metal bleachers, listened to the litany of thank yous from the county agricultural officer, and then the chicken auction commenced. Not poultry - chickens. After one round of chicken bidding I heard a deep whisper behind me (no lie) - "I tell ya, if I was a kid I wouldn't shed a tear over a $600 chicken." I thought, if chickens are bringing that much, what will the beef bring?

I never figured that one out. Fortunately, my friends Katy and Kevin were there as interpreters, cultural emissaries and consiglieres. Their successive generations of offspring have shown and sold 4-H livestock in two milennia and they are versed in the finer points of bidding, judging, buying, selling and raising it. After the chickens were all sold, the rules of calculation became arcane - beef was auctioned "by the hundredweight," which meant some calculation based on the current market value, which dictated the convenient figure of $1.07 per pound as the base price, and (I think) the serious bidders started from there - most of the year and a half old steers were 1400 pounds plus, so add $400-$800 to that).

Pig bidding was different yet (never figured that out either). The pigs on offer displayed some considerable personality, as they were the only animals not haltered and had generally been raised by small humans, who stood only twice as high as their backs and whom they outweighed by a factor of about five. The wee folk control (if that's the word I want) their pigs kindly, with a pointy rod like a long whippy riding crop, but the pigs spend their time either heading back for the chute they entered or trotting for the farther chute they seem to recognize as an exit. They either ignore the auctioneer's vastly amplified machine-gun staccato and loiter along the runway to investigate, or become rapid and agitated and head for the nearest visible exit, which (they generally seem to realize without prompting) may be behind them. They out-man (if that's the word I want) their young handlers with the insouciance that comes of possessing both bulk and brains (occasionally a human attribute as well in the evolutionary scheme of things).

 "Perfectly serious, kid - just tell me what you'd like me to do, heh heh."

Kevin and Katy's three-year-old is already famous for showing his pig, Howdy, at 4-H events, as he forsakes the show routine for domestic familiarities, riding Howdy literally piggy-back around the arena. He's only three, but some of the judges take show protocol more seriously than do Howdy and his young handler.

Finally came the goats. Given my meager corporate livestock stipend, Kevin figured the goats were budget paydirt. So, prompted by his whispering "Hold it up!" I held up my numbered bidder's card and bought the first goat from a young lady named Cheyenne for "Four hun-ned dol-lahz!" Which was not quite as much as I had to spend, and which I quickly learned translated as four dollars per pound of goat. As it was an 88-pound goat, I spent about $350 of the company's hard earned money ($400 X .9 = ~$350). I just surrendered the remaining $150 of my allowance at customs.

 "Heerd you was holdin' money fer me."

Summer in Kansas: The Lower Depths

How did this happen? I forsook those 100-degree days on the Colorado Front Range (elev. 6214) for 110-degree days in the lower altitudes (elev. 3237). 

In short, my retirement was curtailed by the importunings of my previous employers, who have reassigned me to a former reassignment, persuading farmers and ranchers in southwestern Kansas to do what I ask them to do and like it. When they do, it's mainly because they like me as much as they like the idea of having a wind farm in the neighborhood.

Strange to admit that I've left the mountain fastnesses, the trout streams turgid with mid-summer melt, and the fragrant ponderosa slopes for the desert and its cottonwood oases, but I can't say I ain't happy about it. Summer in Kansas is no picnic (more on picnics in a moment), but the lovely montane passes of Colorado are clogged with the usual extravagant toilet barges . . .

"Ten miles an hour - I swear they're barbequeing . . ."

. . . and hefty tourist couples plundering the outlet malls like modern-day pirates. Freedom isn't free, as current wisdom goes.

( . . . and don't forget America's retailers.)

But when I got back to the hotel in Garden City, I found Curtis and the two Jakes, the company's field crew, having dinner in the bar and - handshakes and felicitations all around - it was as though I'd never retired. I've worked with the locals here for over two years, and I've always stayed in Garden City because it's the only city between Wichita and Denver, which even in the day of interstate auto travel is a bit of a yawner (and not counting Dodge City as a real city, which no one does unless for its mediocre state-run "gambling facility" which you may remember more easily as a casino). Garden City has a single hotel with the only decent restaurant in town, and air conditioning that works unfailingly, which you really need to depend on in a Kansas summer.

"Whichever asshole booked me into Liberal is dead."

But I've moved my operating base south to Ulysses, where the desert begins or ends (hard to say), and where the bright lights go off at 9 p.m. 

 Ulysses, ca.1929 and still about the same

Towns in Kansas all have the green highway signs at the city limits, listing elevation (which never changes). The population remains unstable, the steadily perishing old white folks being replaced at an uneven rate by Mexican-Americans (and a few of their relatives who are often just Mexicans simpliciter, but are more than willing to do the nasty work that's available out here). In any case, signs listing elevation rather than population are a more responsible use of municipal funds.

Still, Kansas has its charms, believe it or not. I see and hear things out here I rarely see and hear anywhere else, like the meadowlarks in the mornings, or the mockingbirds and the brown thrashers speaking long conversational arias in the treetops, or scissor-tailed flycatchers on barbed-wire fences hawking bugs in the midday heat . . . 

. . . sandpipers, yellow-legs, killdeers and long-billed curlews stalking tilled fields for grubs and hoppers, eastern and western kingbirds together on fence lines, kestrels diving for meadowlarks that outbulk them, the red-eyed Mississippi kites as thick as crows on utility lines along the roads, a hovering Swainson's hawk at last outdone by fewer than a half-dozen territorial blackbirds, a vulture picking at a dead rattlesnake in someone's driveway, old pickups smoking along dusty county roads carrying a spikey payload of long-horned Watusi cattle skulls, or just parked along the highway, a derelict cell phone ringing on the passenger's seat while the driver has a cold beer at Good Times . . .

So I have a different routine now that I'm in the countryside. There just isn't an eating place left in Ulysses that I'd want to frequent on a regular basis. The best restaurant in town burned down from a grease fire not long after I arrived and the owners decided to leave it, burned and down. It's a metaphor for southwestern Kansas in a way, and I don't like it but I can't fault them for giving up a losing battle.

So I buy a sandwich and park my old Toyota pickup in the local park, where I can watch the herons sail over the lake and the kingbirds harass each other in the cottonwoods. The young Mexicans from town come and play volleyball on the sand - they pull their pickup trucks to the water's edge and tune their radios to the same station. 

 Only in my Mexican dreams

While I sit in the picnic pavilion with my Subway sandwich I can hear them rallying one another, and the music on their truck radios - the lilting, harmonious music of Mexico, pleasant enough on the evening air until, like popular music everwhere, it inevitably turns monotonous. But it sounds like I'm at home in a changing American landscape, where the irrigation wells are drying up, wheat is no longer easy to grow, where everyone will eventually figure out how to get along and find something else to do.

Noodling With the Saints

I mentioned catfish noodling in a rather offhanded way in my previous post. I do not wish to leave the impression that the sport lacks its refinements and its esoterica. Ignorance of the fine points can end in impairments temporary or permanent, including wrinkled skin, "muddy water pallor", psychic trauma, lost limbs, time away from family and the office, even death. Noodling is considered "extreme sport" everywhere except in Alabama, where it is considered "nontaxable income", in Texas, where it is a cornerstone of Governor Rick Perry's "statewide job creation initiative without President Obama's he'p", and in Louisiana where it is simply "Cajun dating."

  

"His Cajun date"

I have a brother-in-law who grew up and still lives in the precincts of the "Ar-KAN-sas" stretch of the Arkansas River south of Wichita. He is a wealth of local catfish lore and an unfailing mine of accurate information on the topic. From him I learned that, historically at least, rivers oftentimes harbor large catfish because those rivers, and by extension their resident catfish, were receptacles of sewage. Time may be the river I go a-fishing in, as Thoreau would have it, but Oh Lord preserve me from eating what I catch (or catching what I already ate). "There's a good reason those catfish are so big," Dave concludes sagely. All in all, the catfish noodler must feel a lot like a dog chasing a car - what do I do with it if I catch it?

 

"I'll mount her, and then I'll take her to Branson."

The way Dave tells it is (and this is pretty much as it came from the horse's mouth): 

"Every weekend, this old boy at the office would go down to the river where they dumped all those old junk cars, and noodle for the catfish that would hide out in the cars. And there got to be some pretty big fish in there, and every Monday he'd come to work and talk about these big catfish he was catching. Well, this other fella got interested and kept after him to go down to the river with him and show him how it's done.

"Now the way it's done is, you get down on the bottom and feel around in the water and when you feel a catfish lying there in the mud, you slide your hand in under its belly and you rub its belly back and forth - sort of relaxes the fish. When the fish is relaxed, you slide your other hand into its mouth, hook your fingers in there behind the gill plate, and slowly bring the fish up out of the water. They'll come right up real easy until they break water, and then they just go crazy. You've got to be sure your feet are on the bottom and that you're not over your head. People have been dragged under and drowned by big catfish - that's why noodling was illegal in Kansas for years.

"There are two kinds of catfish in the Ar-Kansas. There's flathead catfish . . .

and there's blue catfish . . . 

"Any catfish will have these gristly little sharp teeth along the jaw. When you bring up a flathead, he'll just flop on your arm. But when you bring up a blue, he'll spin around and shred your arm with those teeth. Now these boys go out on the river together one weekend, and the next Monday Earl comes into work with his arm all bandaged up. We asked him, Earl, didja have a good time noodling? Oh, yeah.

"So we asked Carl what happened, why was Earl's arm all bandaged? Well, it happened that every time this old boy felt around on the river bottom and found a flathead, he'd get his hand into it and bring it up. There, he'd say, that's how you do it. And then whenever he'd find a blue he'd say to Earl, OK, here's one, now you try it."