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.

Back in the Saddle Again

From every indication, my recent retirement is coming to an end, my solitude shattered - at least for now. My people have been talking to their people . . .

"Miguel who?"

 

. . . who have expressed a certain tepid interest in my talents and minor achievements, and have further expressed a tentative willingness to give me some money for doing something or other of the same ilk. This is not a case of returning by popular demand to the acclaim of a grateful public . . . 

 

. . . so much as an offhand nod to my own importunings. But never look a gift horse in the mouth, as I remind myself every time someone hands me a horse. 

 

From a Grateful Nation

If everything goes as planned, I am off to Virginia City, Nevada to resume my duties in the wind industry, or "windustry". This endeavor will require enough driving about the countryside, leaving a carbon hoofprint sufficient to offset whatever ecological advantages may accrue to any greener world I might otherwise have left behind me.

Nevada is a place much like Utah with fewer Mormons, a fabled land devoid of "tabernacles" where a "ranch" is as often as not a brothel . . .

. . . which in turn is often indistinguishable from a "poultry installation" . . .

"Helloooo-eww . . . ?"

Without seeming to protest too much, I will be all business while in Nevada, neither having any taste for the demimonde of Mormonism nor that of the Playmate Ranch.

I couldn't have chosen a more appropriate place than Nevada in which to reemerge as a bona fide member of the labor force. First, it is a perfect Gene Autry backdrop where anyone worth his (or her) salt can always saddle up and ride again.

And I am not the first person with literary pretensions to have landed willy-nilly in Nevada. In fact, Virginia City furnished Mark Twain with much of the grist for "Roughing It," his memoir of travel to the Nevada Territory in the heighday of the Comstock silver district. 

 I mention this because Twain's memoir contains a succinct description of the wind in the Washoe country whose exploitation I am commissioned to assist. It's one of my favorite passages, one I wish I had written myself:

". . . [A]ccording to custom the daily "Washoe Zephyr" set in; a soaring dust-drift about the size of the United States set up edgewise came with it. . . . the vast dust cloud was thickly freckled with things strange to the upper air -- things living and dead, that flitted hither and thither, going and coming, appearing and disappearing among the rolling billows of dust -- hats, chickens and parasols sailing in the remote heavens; blankets, tin signs, sage-brush and shingles a shade lower; door-mats and buffalo robes lower still; shovels and coal scuttles on the next grade; glass doors, cats and little children on the next; disrupted lumber yards, light buggies and wheelbarrows on the next; and down only thirty or forty feet above ground was a scurrying storm of emigrating roofs and vacant lots. . . .

"The "Washoe Zephyr" (Washoe is a pet nickname for Nevada) is a peculiar Scriptural wind, in that no man knoweth "whence it cometh." . . . . It is a pretty regular wind, in the summer time. Its office hours are from two in the afternoon till two the next morning; and anybody venturing abroad during those twelve hours needs to allow for the wind or he will bring up a mile or two to leeward of the point he is aiming at."  

I can't say I'm sorry to return to the fray. I suppose I just haven't been retired long enough to get very good at it. Doing it properly, as I've mentioned elsewhere, requires a modicum of attention and practice. I know people who can fill their time by going off to Belize or Tobago or Tierra del Fuego and build schools and water systems. I had a late uncle who spent his dotage proseletyzing the Haitians back when there still was a Haiti, doling out tips in exchange for being called "bwana." But I lack the missionary spirit, whether for indoctrination or for infrastructure.

Going off to the river for a few days of fishing is, for me at least, a generally absorbing affair that fills my requirements for solitude. But if that's pretty much what there is to do when you require to relieve the mind of more pressing matters (like the lack of revenues flowing into the domestic oeconomy), then the pleasures begin to pale and the days seem empty of significance. On the other hand, maybe missionary work is easier than it looks.