Vanishing Points (radio version)

Here’s the text for my radio commentary this morning, heard on Kansas Public Radio. You can listen here.

VANISHING POINTS

The other day as I drove toward Olpe, it occurred to me that here in Eastern Kansas, we’re a little short on vanishing points.

Highways and dirt roads disappear behind a slight rise or a hill, occasionally a curve, before they have any chance of vanishing in the distance.

When I was 8, Ruth Deckert,* my Sunday school teacher, taught art lessons to my 10-year-old brother and me at her farmhouse kitchen table. She said:

“When two parallel lines, one on either side of you, meet at the horizon, that is called a vanishing point.”

My question was: If I sent my obnoxious brother down that road, would he, too, vanish?

After that art lesson, I noticed as I looked down the mile roads in Barton County, that the fence posts on either side of the road did aim toward a point, far away, one dot in the center of a picture.

This concept works on flat land and Western Kansas is an ideal place to look toward the horizon and watch roads disappear, left and right.

Although the High Plains and all of the state is on a gradual slope, rising in altitude to meet the base of the Rocky Mountains, much of the land in southwest Kansas is checkerboard flat. It’s as if the ceaseless wind blew away the rises and falls of the earth and the summer sun ironed out the remaining wrinkles.

Western Kansas is all about distance: distance between towns, between farms, between people. Some counties near the Colorado border average only a few people per square mile.

Out there, solitude is a survival skill. Rural residents know that it may be days between conversations.

And birds fly for miles between branches. They’ll land on a scrappy tree under which a handful of cattle huddle in the shade.

On this endless plane, small towns are marked by grain elevators which crop up like white pins stuck in the rectangular map.

Elevators give the traveler something to focus on, a target, a town.

Sometimes on the lonesome Highway 156 between Larned and Garden City, you might gallop along for half an hour without seeing another car. With the luxury of no hills and no curves, it’s kind of disappointing that there are no vehicles to pass.

On this level land, it feels as if you are standing in a snow globe. The blue sky is an overhead dome and the line of horizon forms a complete circle – with you at the center. Columbus was right – the earth is round.

In this vacant space, peripheral vision is ensured. Without turning our heads, we can see beside ourselves, behind us. Everything is in plain sight.

If you look down any mile road, you’ll see that it aims toward a tiny point in the distance. The roadway appears to vanish. All around you, fields stretch to the horizon, where even the planet fades away, curving into itself.

And that brother of mine, no longer obnoxious, did disappear on these Kansas roads. He drove north, then west, and made his home in Alaska.

It’s odd, out on the flat land where there is nowhere to hide, that this is the place where people and things vanish right before our eyes.

Copyright 2008 Cheryl Unruh

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* Ruth Deckert died last week, July 20th, at her farm in Barton County.