Off the Beaten Path: The Kansas Prairie

  

Not all road trips are created equal.  I mean, the drive from Arkansas to Boulder is nothing like  Highway 1 on the California Coast.  But there are highlights: the stockyards / slaughterhouses right after you cross the Arkansas River into Oklahoma, the one island on the Muskogee Turnpike where my dad always stopped for a Coke, the Tulsa tollbooths, the truckstop at the Kansas border with pay showers in the bathrooms, Wichita's lonesome canal, the woods at the rest stop near Salina, the windmills when you first turn West, the Starbucks near Colby, the strip with the fake palm trees, the first sight of the Rocky Mountains.  That about covers it.

Early February, I got behind the wheel of my mother's car.  I had my girls in tow as well as a sense giddiness that did not seem to match what lay ahead.  One year, despite a sense of urgency to move forward fast, I turned off the Interstate.  It was summertime, and I had my kids but no husband.  I felt free to cut a corner before turning South.  We came across a dam, which led to a beach and a state park.  We threw on our bathing suits, swam and made castles in dirty landlocked sand for hours.  

This time, when we reached that same exit, we knew a storm was coming from the West.  I even anticipated camping out in a hotel for a couple of nights.  But, we turned, without regret. 

Instantly, the plains became bigger, and smaller at the same time.  They were someone's land, with evidence in the hay bales, the fences, the houses, even the deserted houses. We turned off our book on tape, cracked our windows.  Instead of cruising at 75 m.p.h., I pulled over time after time for photos.  Clara took out her camera.  June just got out.

In the photos, everything is big white sky, big brown field, and then some desolate figure in the bottom corner.  Against the greedy landscape, everything looks like bones:  tree bones, house bones, hay bale bones, windmill bones, even playground bones.  In life, there were thousands of birds.  It was a postcard for the Nature Conservancy prairie effort.  Plus, the wind carried the sound of all those birds.  It shook the grass to life and made energy to spare through those turning windmills.

Sometimes I think that I shouldn't take my kids off the beaten path so much.  They need predictability.  I mean, we were already on a long road trip, disconnected from the other half of our family, unsure of weather ahead.  But, I had to show them, and I had to see.  Maybe someday they will read or even write Willa Cather.  As long as they don't get lost on the backroads, even the backroads of their minds as my sister once wrote in a song, I think they understand that the reward can be worth it all.