Old Stomping Grounds

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

OLD STOMPING GROUNDS

In Great Bend, my brother’s cell phone rang. His wife at their home in Alaska had apparently asked what he was doing because Leon replied, “I’m frying an egg on the parking lot pavement. What are you doing?”

Leon didn’t mind the triple-digit heat. He doesn’t get back to his native state often, so he spent nine August days absorbing Kansas in all of its blazing glory.

One of his goals for this trip was to visit the five counties in Kansas where his feet had never walked. He wanted to clean up his Kansas map, he said. He had flown into Denver and rented a car. On the way to Great Bend, he hit Rawlins County, No. 101 on his list. His plan was to pick up the four remaining counties in southwest Kansas on the return trip.

Meanwhile, the egg on the pavement in the Dillon’s parking lot wasn’t cooking. We stood around with cameras but the egg white remained clear. “That’s one egg and eight minutes we’ll never get back,” Leon said.

My mother (who had driven up from Arkansas) and I spent several nights in a Great Bend motel visiting with Leon. He had come to Kansas for a class reunion and to see family. And, as a historian of our hometown (www.pawneerock.org), he wanted to do some research and photography.

Leon drove us around to places that, at one time, had been our natural habitat. Along the way, we each shared our individual memories. We stopped at Dundee’s diversion dam and later crossed the Arkansas River. We visited Macksville (where Leon and I attended high school), Radium, St. John, and Great Bend. And we checked out Larned where my mother had spent her pre-teen and teenage years.

We circled around the swimming pool in Larned where we had each spent youthful summer afternoons. I remember the old bathhouse so clearly – I’d reach up to place a dime on the counter, hear the radio blaring, and smell chlorine hanging in the air.

At Fifth and Main, I mentioned the old Dillon’s store which had been replaced in the ‘70s. One day I begged my mother for money to ride the mechanical horse outside the old store. As I clung to the horse, a man walked up with a friendly word and plunked a coin into the slot. Forty-some years later, I remember that moment; perhaps kindnesses are never forgotten.

The Larned Daily Tiller and Toiler building still has its red tile roof. That’s where my brother and I each worked as reporter/photographers when we were in our late teens. My mother pointed out the building’s cubbyhole where she and a friend had rolled newspapers for delivery when she was in junior high. “I got $1.25 a week,” she said. “If I didn’t get any complaints all week, I got a pass to the Saturday afternoon movie. I never got any complaints.”

We drove past houses where Mom had lived in Larned. Noting the healthy lawn on one, she said, “I planted the buffalo grass in that yard.” Leon grinned and replied, “Well that’s something you brought up that turned out OK.”

Many things in Larned had changed over the decades. We commented on buildings and businesses that had been taken by time. Leon said, “It’s like there’s a second Larned we can’t see anymore.”

We walked around Pawnee Rock State Park, climbed the spiral staircase and looked over the Arkansas River Valley from the top of the pavilion. Leon drove us through the familiar countryside and we cruised through the Pawnee Rock Cemetery and talked about the people we once knew.

It was fun to watch Leon take in all of Kansas. In the country, he’d scan the horizon for landmarks, recognizing an old granary or finding a tree that he had photographed a dozen times. He got excited to see turkeys in a field and a badger crossing the road, to see thunderheads build in the afternoon and the sky fill with purple and orange clouds each evening.

Leon loves living in the land of mountains and glaciers and bears, but like any good Kansan gone astray, he misses the place where he learned to fish and to ride a bike, and where he learned to turn toward the west to watch for approaching storms and psychedelic sunsets.

Copyright 2010 ~ Cheryl Unruh