Prairie Dust*

            It’s no secret to anyone who knows me that I’m an ocean girl. Indeed, it’s not a secret, very long, to anybody. Each passing year finds me more enamored with the coastlines of my childhood. Never do I feel happier, more contented, or more myself than with my feet buried in the sand, and the sun on my shoulders, and the crashing, rolling, foaming surf at my toes, and the seagulls calling in my ears. There, like nowhere else, I am complete.

            Summer and winter vacations, as a child, were spent in southern Virginia with my grandparents. Though it was only a couple months out of each year that I spent there, half of my childhood memories stem from those visits and, in that way, I feel like I was partly raised there. The life I led and the things I learned on my grandparents’ five beautiful acres were different from anything else in my life, then or now, and so they shaped me in ways that nothing else could. My aunt and uncle were the first people to take me hiking in the mountains and the Blue Ridge Mountains were my first mountain love. It wasn’t until late college and, later, my move up to Sacramento, that I fell deeply in love with the steep, craggy, majesty of our California mountains. I feel like all the habitats of my life have nurtured in me an ardent love of mountain wilderness.

            Here in Kansas, we are famous for many things, including our flatness and our honorable position at the center of the United States. The list of awesome things about the great state of Kansas is extensive, including our prairies, our rivers, our bird migrations, our sunflower fields, our jazz music, and our tried and true Midwestern values. Still, we are two thousand miles from the nearest ocean. And the state’s altitude statistics are, to someone like me, both endearing and alarming: 

• The highest point in Kansas is Mount Sunflower, a site whose Wikipedia page leaves one inevitably dubious about the honesty of its title. For one thing, it’s practically in Colorado: “less than half a mile from the Colorado border and close to the lowest point in Colorado.” Wikipedia also tells us that “Mount Sunflower, while the highest point in the state in terms of elevation, is indistinguishable from the surrounding terrain.”
• The nearest mountain range to Kansas City is the Ozark Mountains, which “represent the only large area of rugged topography between the Appalachians and the Rockies.” The highest peaks in the Ozarks are just over 2,500 feet.
• In comparison, the highest peak in the Blue Ridge Monutains is Mount Mitchell, at 6,684 feet, and the highest peak in the Sierra Nevadas is Mount Whitney, at 14,494 feet.  

            It’s hard not to respect Kansas for its stolid flatness. It has provided a landscape for flora and fauna that nowhere else could sustain. It has provided America and many places in the world with the wheat on which we are so reliant. Kansas, for all its landlocked flatness has no shortage of breathtakingly beautiful views and a Kansas sky is as stunning as any I’ve seen.

            Still, you can see how a girl like me, who bases her sense of direction solely on the location of the nearest coastline, might find herself a little disoriented in a state like this. My wild affinity for coastlines and mountain ranges on both sides of the country had no sense of direction when my feet first hit the fly over states, a place I had only read about before.

            But Kansas City certainly took us under its wing. To begin with, there are bits and pieces of this town that are every bit as hipster as our Sacramento home. Our little neighborhood on the outskirts of the city welcomed us with the true Midwestern warmth that you hear about in stories, as did the people in our new jobs. We loved the fountains. We loved the humidity (so long forgotten now in the middle of gloomy winter). We loved the fireflies and the smell in the air and the lush greenness of the trees. We discovered that, despite the lack of confidence that Mount Sunflower instills, northeastern Kansas lays claim to some delightfully rolling hills.

            We came to Kansas City in the middle of baseball season and the Royals – as they have been – were looking fine. There’s a little restaurant down the street from our house and it only took us about two trips there to feel the electricity coming out of the bar area where a half dozen tv screens played every Royals game. We donned Royals baseball hats and made ourselves at home. At first, maybe, that’s all we were trying to do: make ourselves at home in a foreign land. Anytime I came across someone who knew I was new to the area, I got asked the same question: “So, what do you think about them Royals?” At first I’d smile and nod politely, thinking only to myself, well, nothing, really. But the fever caught me quickly. The neighborhoods around town had banners waving on every possible street pole. Royal blue was everywhere. So, one night, because I wanted a martini, I started watching. And suddenly the 95 mile per hour balls and the strike zone didn’t seem so boring anymore…especially when Cain was stealing bases. Boy, oh boy, if Heinz Ward made me a lifelong football fan, Cain has made me believe in baseball. Cain is always up to something and my favorite part of watching the Royals is wondering what he’s going to try next. I started being able to tell a ball from a strike. And when it was going to be an amazing run even before the ball hit the ground. I started knowing when to cheer. And I started feeling proud of our players. I started not wanting to miss a game. And delighting in the fact that anything could happen after the seventh inning stretch. I started appreciating the possibility of a 15 inning game and the shoulder strength of a pitcher. Something – or maybe everything – about watching the Royals made me finally get the game of baseball.

            But the real thing is that somehow the World Series hysteria did make me feel at home here. Maybe I have my Pittsburgh sports roots to thank. I know how to rally behind a sports team. And it’s something I have in common with the Midwesterners who are my new neighbors. It’s probably the reason I got myself stuck in a two hour traffic jam trying to catch a glimpse of history at the victory rally. As blue and white confetti fell from the sky, I made my way through stampedes of blue-clad Royals fans the day of the parade – because work, yes, the entire school day, had been cancelled for the celebration. And here’s what I learned when I finally got home:

            Of an anticipated 250,000 people, 800,000 showed up to the parade, which is twice the number of people who actually live in Kansas City. What’s more, there were many people – who can count how many? – who couldn’t make it in to the city – though they tried – because there just wasn’t enough public transportation available. Of all those 800,000 people, the police made only three arrests. (Not to hate on my old friend San Francisco, but I have heard statistics that say that of the one million people who went to their World Series Victory Parade last year, there were 400 arrests.) The Kansas City Chief of Police described the crowds at the rally as “happy and civil.” Here, it seems to me, is indication that groupthink is merely a bunch of individuals, thinking, and not innately a beast of inexplicable and unavoidable destruction and chaos. If the individuals who make up a mob have “happy and civil” characters, so too, it seems, will the mob. If we are the sum of our parts, then Kansas Citians the Tuesday after the World Series come out about as classy as you can get.

            I have been a citizen of Kansas City for a mere five months and already, I want to call it my own. Already am proud to be a part of it. I have heard it called a big city (don’t laugh New Yorkers; it’s bigger than Topeka) with a small town feel, which by all local accounts, is kind of a Midwest thing. I like how proud people around here are of how “happy and civil” we are. One of my coworkers moved to Kansas City from Southern California expressly because he wanted to raise his children in this kind of environment. Many of my students – from various countries – have said that their parents did the same thing.  They say that God is in the details. And I believe that (perhaps synonymously) goodness is too. The best and truest people that I know are undemonstrative in their goodness, positively exacting change not in any grandiose way – as evil often presents itself – but by building many small, good things on top of each other until they are noticeable and strong. Goodness in a casserole for a sick neighbor. Goodness in a compost pile. Goodness in a child raised in love and strength of character. Goodness in a family farm. In a warm fire on a cold night. In a warm meal for a hungry child or a homeless stranger. In a town rallying behind a baseball team. Pride. Patriotism. Self-worth. Integrity. These qualities seem unaccidently interwoven. Who wouldn’t want to be a part of that?

            I’ve written before about the joys of feeling companionship in aloneness. Watching the World Series at the restaurant down the street, felt, to me, like another side of that same die: feeling companionship in a room full of complete strangers. Feeling safe. Which could sort of describe what it’s like to land in the Midwest for the first time.

            Right now, looking out at the snow, beautifully but icily dusting my neighborhood, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the thing I want most is to be salty, sun-kissed in the icy sea waters of home. And I’m sure, if I could plop myself down on a mountaintop somewhere and look out over the prairies of this middle state, I’d see everything from a much better perspective. Seas and mountains speak my language, there’s no doubt. But I saw a bald eagle for the first time at Kaw Point the other day. And I’m learning, slowly, but surely, about the native plants and where exactly it is that I can tramp around in the Kansas wilderness. And I have my eye out for a 60,000 acre horse property in Louisburg or Eudora. And I love baseball now.

            Kansas City has been genuinely welcoming these past months, as though it cares about making a good impression, and has the substance to back it up. Not because of its baseball team, per se, but because of its soul, and its steadfastness, and its competence, and its people, and their values. Because it’s not in a rush and not self-conscious about being too kind or too proud. Because it loves itself and it loves others. Because it doesn’t make strangers of strangers.

            I am away from home and the places my heart knows best, but in this city, I have found warmth and companionship, nonetheless. This last day of the year finds me enthused about the Kansas year ahead of me. There are secrets here to be learned. Secrets that, though foreign to me right now, must be as delightful as the secrets the Pacific Ocean whispers when you sit bundled on her shore on a spring evening. Secrets Brewster Higley must have known when he wrote, “Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam / … / I love these wild flowers in this bright land of our; / I love, too, the curlew’s wild scream.” I am beginning to get it. Happy New Year, Kansas. Happy New Year home and the many homes I’ve seemed to acquire along the way. Here’s to a new year rich with the secrets of the Heartland and a new home away from home.

-R.E.A.

*“Somehow, the prairie dust gets in your blood, and it flows through your veins until it becomes a part of you. The vast stretches of empty fields, the flat horizons of treeless plains. The simplicity of the people—good, earnest people. The way they talk and the way they live. The lack of occurrence, lack of attention, lack of everything. All that—it’s etched into your soul and it colors the way you see everything and it becomes a part of you. Eventually, Ms. Harper, when you leave, everything you experience outside of Kansas will be measured against all you know here. And none of it will make any sense.”  -P.S. Baber Cassie Draws the Universe