garden city, ks and tribune, ks and lance woodbury and limon, co and kansas and colorado and western diary

One of the joys of growing older as a teacher is that you sometimes keep in touch with former students who are now living their own lives in new contexts with confidence, skill and intelligence. And, to make matters even better at times, they attribute some of their later success to your influence. This is the context to understand my one day foray from Denver to Garden City, Kansas from June 21-22, when I broke away from the Renovare Conference in Denver.

Getting to Kansas

People often mention that the longest, dullest, most trying part of the drive across the country is the 600 mile stretch ffrom Denver to Kansas City. The common refrain is that there is "nothing there" between those two points. This is "flyover country," that vast part of the heartland that holds no promise, offers no life, suggests no meaning and has nothing going on.

As long as you look at life from the surface dimension, you may have a point. Even the back roads through the small towns, which normally yield all kinds of interesting finds, seem at first to lead to a series of "nowhere towns," such as Limon, Hugo, Kit Carson, Eads, Chivington and Sheridan Lake, CO and Tribune, Selkirk, Leoti and Scott City, KS. But, as William Least Heat-Moon pointed out so eloquently in his Kansas novels of the 1990s, if the surface of Kansas seems placid, the 'undersurface' is teeming with life, not simply in a biological sense, with 'pusillanimous creatures that slink their way across the earth' (to paraphrase a famous Kansan--the Wizard of Oz), but with the inner dynamics of individuals, families and towns throughout the state. It is this Kansas, this "beneath the surface Kansas" that I am becoming privileged to know more and more, courtesy of one of my former students, Lance Woodbury. I met Lance, his wife Dana and their new baby Campbell when I took the back roads from Denver to Garden City KS for a one-day visit from Tuesday-Wednesday (June 21-22).

Before Getting to Garden City

The trip was long, around five hours, and uneventful. I took I-70 East to Limon, and then dropped down on 287 and 40 through Eads. Instead of following Lance's advice to go down to Highway 50 and then shoot East into KS, I decided to take the less well-traveled 96, which would take me through remote Eastern CO and Western KS. I only stopped for gas in Tribune, KS, the home of other former students, and immediately felt in my inmost being the sense of being back in Kansas. And, it wasn't a good feeling. Let me explain. When I stopped at the pump and filled up the car in Tribune, a lonely town of about 1,000 on KS 96 about 20 miles East of the Colorado border, I went inside to pay for the gas and encountered two people or sets of people: a young woman at the cash register, who must have been about 20, and two men sitting at one of the plastic-formed booths, dressed in their bib overalls and eating a 'Quick Mart-style' meat dish for a mid-morning snack. They were doing this because, as the headline of the Garden City newspaper screamed the next day, the wheat harvest was finally underway.

I didn't really "encounter" these people, if by encounter you mean a conversation of any significance, but I did sense some things "in the air" that reminded me of a vast cultural difference between me and many Kansans that I was only dimly aware of while teaching at Sterling College (1990-96). First, the men. I passed by their table, and we shot glances at each other. I was dressed in neatly pressed off-white shorts, with a quality azure Polo shirt, with the little polo-player logo in orange above my heart. Though we said nothing to each other, the glances said everything. "You are not from here. You don't really understand. You are passing through. Get on with it." That is what the glances said to me. And those were the glances I remember receiving in KS all the time while I taught at this little Presbyterian college in a small town for six years. People would be courteous, and even accept me into their homes at times, but there was the assumption (actually correct as it turned out), that I wasn't a "long-term" Kansan, and that therefore I best "move on."

Then there was the brief exchange at the cash register. The young woman looked briefly at me, told me how much I owed, lowered her gaze, took my money, gave me my change without raising her eyes and then mumbled something about having a (I think she said "good") day. This brought back almost a stabbing pain within, because I recalled the memory, from the outset of my time at Sterling, of people in general and women in particular, never meeting my gaze when I was talking to them. I was nurtured in the system where you meet people's eyes, shake their hands firmly if the occasion warrants, and learn to exchange small and "big" talk with people as a prelude to determining if you want to work with them further. One of the things that frustrated me immensely in Kansas was that I felt I could never even get a person, especially female students, even to look at me, much less interact with ideas I was suggesting.

And this bothered me further in my 1990-96 days because I became aware that the instances of sexual abuse of Kansas girls, abuse that was hidden and never reported because of a combination of shame and a "Christian" culture that tries to present an upstanding picture to the world, were legion. So, as the girl in the Tribune gas station lowered her eyes, gave me money and mumbled something, thoughts flooded over me: things haven't changed, and girls do not know that this kind of behavior might make them even more vulnerable to predacious men.

On to Garden City

But I was late for my lunch with Lance, and I had to move on quickly. I lost an hour from Mountain to Central time after the first tier of Western Kansas counties (Greeley county here), and so I found myself averaging about 85 miles per hour as I sped through the small towns and into Garden City. Lance had given me meticulously accurate directions, but I missed the cutoff because he gave me directions as if I was coming from the West, and I descended on Garden City from the North. No matter. I drove through the downtown of Garden City, to see one of the largest Methodist Churches I could imagine for a town of this size (about 26,000) and asked directions from a young guy in a souped-up car that was cruising Kansas Avenue in 100 degree heat. Finally, about 2:15 p.m., I pulled into the Garden City office of Kennedy & Coe, where I met Lance for lunch.

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