Folk Art, Cattle & Kites
Today’s Flyover People column:
FOLK ART, CATTLE AND KITES
Head west from Greenburg and you’ll find Mullinville.
One of the must-see things in Mullinville is the folk art of M.T. Liggett.
On our weekend whirl through Western Kansas last month, Dave and I and Jim and Susie Aber walked along the fence line to study Liggett’s work.
If you like your political commentary painted on metal and stuck in the ground, then this is the place for you.
I can’t tell you how many pieces M.T. Liggett has created, but his outdoor gallery must stretch for a quarter mile along U.S. 400 on the west edge of Mullinville. Just inside the barbed wire fence there are a couple rows of colorful signs.
And around the corner to the north, there’s another block or two of them leading up to his workshop, the Kanza Art Studio.
Using metal and paint, Liggett expresses himself about people and institutions – including President Bush, Dick Cheney, the Clintons, and the Kansas State Board of Education.
Some pieces are kinetic art and spin in the breeze. His work is sturdy; metal pieces are welded onto poles which are stuck in a bucket of concrete buried in the pasture.
From Mullinville, our next stop was the Clark County State Fishing Lake. I was surprised to find some steep hills out here – even a hill warning sign.
We stood in a rust-colored grassy pasture which was spiked with yucca. The hill overlooked blue water and we waited for the sun to drop. And finally the sky did yield some sunset photos.
The four of us ate dinner at the Blue Hereford Restaurant in Ford. After spending the night in Dodge City, we all headed back east toward Spearville.
But at the edge of Dodge, we had to stop at the scenic overlook. Now in the Colorado mountains, scenic overlooks come about every mile. In Kansas, well, not so often.
So when our state does have a turnout on the road, we present genuine Kansas scenery.
And nothing says Western Kansas like a good ol’ feedlot. A sign at the overlook offered a few statistics: the combined capacity of these three feedlots is 60,000 head of cattle and Kansas feedyards market five million head annually.
Then we drove down the road to the wind farm at Spearville.
For 12 years, Jim and Susie Aber have used kites for aerial photography. Here they planned to send up their kite and photograph the wind turbines.
The Abers found a safe place to launch their kite where it wouldn’t get tangled in the turbines or power lines or land on a roadway. They set up in a lovely cemetery appropriately called “Silent Land,” established in 1880.
With their red, yellow, green and blue kite flying in the clear sky, Jim let out the line, pulled it back in, let it out, much like a fisherman playing a fish.
“Generally, higher up, the wind is better,” Jim said, “It’s more consistent.”
The winds were light but strong enough to carry the kite and a small camera into the air. From the ground, the Abers used a remote control to tilt the camera, turn it, and snap the shutter.
They have a thousand feet of 300-pound line and they let out much of it, so that’s a lot of reeling on their sturdy wooden spool.
“You must have arms like Arnold Schwarzenegger,” Dave told Susie as she was winding up the line.
“Well, people have told me they wouldn’t want to arm wrestle me,” she laughed.
From about 350 feet in air, they took photographs of the gray-white windmills which cast long winter shadows on the Kansas plains.
Their aerial photos seem to emphasize how flat the land is here and also show the textural differences between the plowed fields, wheat fields, pastures, and the buffalo grass in the Silent Land cemetery. The Abers’ photographs can be viewed at http://www.geospectra.net/kite/ks_wind/ks_wind.htm.
Copyright 2008 Cheryl Unruh
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