Points West, Part 1: Rolling Into Red Carpet Country

It was two weeks ago today that I hit the road running at the ungodly pre-dawn hour of 5:00. With bags already packed, showers taken, and duties designated to a handful of friends and neighbors, all my partner and I needed to do was roll out of bed, jump in our clothes, load our things into a car, and take a leisurely 25 minute drive to Ft. Lauderdale Airport for a 6:40 a.m. flight to the hinterlands. Yes, it sounded easy, even for two notorious latecomers such as ourselves, and with the prep work completed in advance, there was no reason why we shouldn't arrive at the airport with plenty of time to spare. And yet--even though everything seemed to be going according to plan, even though the car taking us to the airport was mechanically sound and making perfectly good time, even though there was a mere smattering of traffic on I-95 at that hour--it all seemed to be happening in slow motion. The rest of the world moved with its usual cadence and rhythms while we slogged through Karo syrup. I can't explain it but, when we arrived at the airport, the guy at the counter told us that we may have missed the window of opportunity allowing us to board the flight; in other words, despite our best efforts, we were late. The counter guy was able to check us in--by the skin of our combined teeth, no less, and because we weren't checking any luggage--and we went hurtling through the airport towards the Air Tran flight already boarding for Wichita. More about Air Tran later. Much more, I promise.

We were flying out west for a week-plus tour of duty with my parents, combining this with my dad's bi-yearly family reunion on the New Mexico border, my partner's visit with his cousin in Albuquerque, and a stopover for me in Texas with my mom's side of the family. My parents live at the very beginning of the Oklahoma Panhandle, a short drive from Texas, and within spitting distance of Kansas. That being said, they are also approximately three and a half hours from the nearest major airports--Oklahoma City, Amarillo, and Wichita--placing them in the exact middle of nowhere. To be precise, they are in what is known as "Red Carpet Country", I guess either because of the friendliness of the natives or the red dirt prevalent in that area of Oklahoma. At any rate, reaching them is a bit of a haul.

As there apparently are no direct flights from Ft. Lauderdale to Wichita, Amarillo, or Oklahoma City, we laid over in the Atlanta Airport, a place for which I have no love. Although I've heard many good things about Atlanta, the city, Atlanta, the airport, is a vast, hostile labyrinth full of treacherous obstacles and the least accommodating service workers this side of South Florida. Luckily, our time there passed quickly, and soon we were loaded aboard yet another Air Tran flight, this time bound for the city of Wichita.

The largest city in Kansas, with a metropolitan population of just over half a million people, Wichita was recently voted, in one poll or another, as one of the top ten places to live in the United States. Because of the number of aircraft manufacturing facilities, and the presence of McConnell Air Force Base, it is known as the "Air Capital of the World". Even so, I have always found the city's lack of skyscrapers puzzling, and a little bit disconcerting.

As expected, the economy car that we had reserved at Budget's online site turned out to be a Dodge Journey, which is about the size of a tank. The chipper Budget woman at the counter explained that the economy cars were all taken, but we were getting an upgrade at no extra charge. After no small amount of discourse, in which my partner futiley attempted to explain that, with gas hovering at $4 a gallon, a free upgrade to a gas-swilling tank was not an acceptable trade, we loaded our bags into the Journey and set off for Points West, towards the High Plains, and home.
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The thing about Kansas is this: it has maybe the cleanest highways of any of the fifty states, which is a good thing, considering the huge distances between its towns and cities. During the 180+ mile drive from Wichita to my parents' house, we may have passed through four towns. So, a passenger in a vehicle traversing these roads will spend a good deal of time looking out the car windows at these clean roadways, and the many farms beyond. Kansas towns are also extremely neat and well-kept. Largely developed during the cattle drives of the 1800's, these town's are proud of their heritage, and a traveler is apt to see many old dwellings that are in remarkably pristine condition. There are trees in these towns, green lawns, and lots of American flags waving in a breeze that never seems to stop.

When we went through the town of Greensburg, Kansas, we got a reality check. The site of a particularly vicious tornado last year, Greensburg was practically wiped off the map. I had been through the town a couple of months after the tornado, and it, literally, looked as if an atomic bomb had been detonated. Century old buildings had toppled, homes were flattened, trees uprooted and torn apart--and yet, mercifully, with the modern early warning systems that are now in place, few people had lost their lives. There had been an eerie stillness in Greensburg when I went through the year before. Now, it appeared to be coming back. There was new construction going on, a sense of purpose among a surprising number of people we saw going about their business. To be sure, the evidence of destruction was still rampant, but there was also hope, and there was obvious progress being made in the town's reconstruction.

Following Greensburg, we turned south and proceeded through a long stretch of nothing as the High Plains country surrounded us, affording us unlimited vistas of prairie and purple, treeless hills. In the far distance, we could see a stark reminder that we were entering a new, energy-efficient age. Spreading across the hills like a line of determined soldiers, were dozens of eight-story tall wind turbines, reportedly used for generating electricity to places as far away as New York. With a little luck, my mom later informed me, she would have some of these on her land within the next couple of years. Apparently, they produce a lucrative income to the landowners.

Arriving at my parents' house at the approximate time I'd given them--a miracle that I still haven't quite figured out--we dumped our bags in the "little house" out back and busied ourselves catching up on family gossip. The little house is a two room guest house that has a working bathroom and a non-working kitchen. The bedroom/living area is cooled by a free-standing air conditioner that has a hose attached to the outside window. It sucks the moisture out of the air outside and does a nice job of cooling the inside of the house, except when the water bucket fills up and the cooling mechanism shuts off. Consequently, the water bucket requires frequent emptying during the hotter times of the day.

We went over to the home of my sister and her family and did a quick look-see of the garden, which was surprisingly bountiful, given the lack of rainfall they've been experiencing. The only problems seemed to be a preponderance of squash, which was out of control, and the taste that the local deer had developed for the okra.

This town, where my family moved a year after I graduated high school, is not particularly beautiful, clean, or well tended, but then, Oklahoma towns aren't like Kansas towns. This town is old, and on some famous trail--maybe the Chisholm Trail--and is still used by many truckers hauling cattle to Dodge City, and the sprawling feedlots of the southwest. Main Street is a couple of blocks long and there aren't many businesses left open. This part of the country was hit hard by the oil bust of the early eighties, and gradually, people drifted away to start new lives in other places. There's one old building on Main Street that's been vacant for almost as long as I've had family there. It's a three story building that takes up the better part of a block. Once there was a bank in it, as well as a dentist's office, domino parlor, and a dress shop, all long gone to the ravages of time and change. A few years ago, my sister bought this building with the intention of restoring it and turning it into a bed and breakfast inn. Along with a historical structure and the crumbling woodwork and the broken skylights, my sister also got a ghost in the deal. She was in the building alone and cleaning out the area that had been the dentist's office one hot, summer day when she felt something cold on the back of her neck. She turned around to see this older gentleman wearing a white smock standing behind her. He then proceeded to vanish before her eyes. It gave her something of a turn but my sister is an indomitable spirit and not one easily cowed. She co-habitated peacefully with the ghost until she finally realized that the cost of restoring the building would be far more exhorbitant than what she'd originally planned, and sold it. However, on some occasions, the ghost was seen in the upper window--the dentist's office--by passersby on the street below. Before she sold the building, my sister and one of her daughters were digging through a pile of old newspapers and came across his picture. He had once been the town's dentist and his office had been in the building.

On the morning after our arrival, we drove to the small ranching community of Freedom, Oklahoma, which is notable for having a (tiny) Main Street in which all the businesses have log cabin-type facades. Just outside of Freedom is Alabaster Caverns, which snakes into the earth for three quarters of a mile, and is the largest natural gypsum cave in the world that is open to the public. Of course, there's alabaster there, too, in different colors, including the rare, black alabaster. As the temperature was 104 degrees outside, the interior of the cavern was enticing, maintaining a constant temperature of fifty-eight degrees. There are also several different species of bats in the caverns, and I'd briefly hoped to see their nightly exodus as they emerged en masse to feed on the many insects in the area. After exiting into the inferno outside the caverns, I only wanted to sit in front of air conditioning turned up on high.

Back in the little house, where the portable air conditioner's water bucket had filled up, the temperature hovered at around 100 degrees. Upon our return, this required my immediate attention, preempting anything else I thought I may have needed to do. Once the little house had cooled off--some five hours and another bucket emptying later, we settled down for bed with the nifty invention known as Dish TV. I'm not a big television watcher, so watching Dish TV was an unusual and unique experience for me. With several hundred channels, you can choose to watch anything your little heart desires, or you can drive yourself crazy trying to select something from the sheer abundance of programming. I almost succeeded in doing the latter before settling down with, of all things, "Basic Instinct 2", which I think was a selection made out of sheer exhaustion. Trashy as it was, it managed to catch my interest before I inexplicably fell asleep. The following week in the little house, I managed to see Andy Warhol's "Flesh for Frankenstein" (actually directed by Paul Morrissey) before decamping back to Florida. I have to say that I was shocked at the level of realistic blood and gore present in a movie produced in the early seventies. It was well ahead of its time and rated X when it was released. Udo Kier, who will apparently appear in almost any movie offering a paycheck, played Dr. Frankenstein, and Monique Van Vooren, a Euro starlet who parlayed her notoriety into some serious social standing, played his wife. Despite the bloodletting and copious nudity, the movie was somewhat boring. Joe Dallesandro, as a randy servant, looked really good, although his New York accent was a jarring contrast to the Transylvanian setting, and the accents of the European cast. Whatever happened to him, anyhow?

The next morning, we rose early to set upon our journey to my dad's family reunion on the Oklahoma/New Mexico border. That would involve navigating most of the Oklahoma Panhandle, and entering into a world that is also known as No Man's Land. As it turns out, there's a reason for calling it No Man's Land.