As We Wander

 

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

The other day while headed toward Manhattan on K-177, I saw a great scene to illustrate this column, but it was not a safe place to pull over.  So, instead, I swiped this photo from Dave’s collection of great Kansas photos.

 

AS WE WANDER

One of the joys of Kansas is that the scenery is simple and uncluttered – and that also makes it easy to focus on one thing at a time.

But because our minds like to chew on something, the brain employs the eyes to scan the horizon and find something to contemplate. This happens all the time as we wander around in our cars.

Human minds like to solve riddles, fill in the blanks; we want to know the rest of the story.

Maybe we’ll see a patch of yellow irises where they seem out of place, blooming along a rusty barbed-wire fence. So then we look for a driveway nearby or some evidence that the land was once a farmstead, because irises don’t just pop up out of nowhere.

Down the road our eyes may settle on a falling-down outbuilding and wonder how long it will lean before the nails just let go. Then we may think about the lumber becoming one with the earth, and roly polys curling under the rotting wood, half-buried in the cool, damp dirt.

An abandoned barn holds onto its nobility like a weathered gray castle, even thought the paint has been worn off by wind and rain and the windows and doors have become black holes of mystery.

And, if you’re like me, you think about those folks who may have worked or played in this barn a few generations back. Did the kids have games of hide-and-seek in the hayloft? Did the boys spend hot summer days bucking hay bales?

When I was a kid riding in the car, I stared out the window and whatever we drove past, I tried to figure out how that thing worked. I was curious about how a pivot irrigation system walked its way around the fields, and what the oil well “horses” did with the oil they were supposedly pumping, or why Aermotor in Chicago couldn’t make a metal windmill that didn’t shriek in the breeze.

And, as a youngster sitting in the backseat of the car, one day I noticed that some of telephone poles along the highway were taller than others. There would be a long stretch of regular-height poles, then taller ones, then regular-sized poles again.

I didn’t ask my mom for the answer, I just studied the rhythm of the poles and finally realized that the taller ones were placed on either side of the mile roads, to allow for high-clearance vehicles to pass underneath.

It’s fun as a kid, or even as an adult, when you figure something out like that, when you connect those dots and come up with an “aha.”

Although I have only a casual acquaintance with cattle, the manner in which they place themselves in a field has always fascinated me. Cattle are cocktail-party animals. They’re social, they hang out together.

With cattle, I always check to see if they’re facing the same direction. That habit I blame on Mark Twain. Ever since my grade school days, I’ve been carrying in my mind a scene from “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

In the story, Huck puts on a dress and a bonnet and goes to town to learn whether or not the community fell for his staged murder. Pretending to be a girl, Huck stops at a house and visits with a woman. Curious about his odd behavior, the woman questions him.

One thing she asked was, “If fifteen cows is browsing on a hill, how many of them eats with their heads pointed in the same direction?” Huck replies, “The whole fifteen, mum.”

“Well, I reckon you have lived in the country. I thought maybe you was trying to hocus me again.”

Heaven only knows why that one particular scene in the story stuck with me, but it’s been riding along in my brain like a fact-checker for years. And I keep trying to prove it. Sure, in real life, most cattle in a field are facing the same direction while eating, but there’s always one or two rebel cows aimed a different way.

So that’s how I’ve spent my adult life, trying to mentally will cattle to all face the same direction. I want to make Huck Finn right.

This state may have a quiet landscape, but there are certainly enough things out to there to occupy one’s mind along the Kansas roadways. We can always find something to wonder about as we wander about.

Copyright 2011 ~ Cheryl Unruh