Last summer I did what millions of people have done while on their way to somewhere beautiful. I drove through Kansas.
With a marathon ten hours of chewing up blacktop, I had time to observe the small variations in the Great Plains landscape. When named “Great”, that word had a different meaning than our modern version. Back then it meant vast, enormous, and unforgivably large. As opposed to the overused modern “great” which describes how we feel no matter how crappy we actually feel.
There was a corn field, wheat field, sunflower field; on repeat for hundreds of miles. It is the rural equivalent of the Los Angeles suburbs. Chili’s, Jack In The Box, Applebee’s, repeat. We had driven north from Tulsa for too many hours. When we finally hit I-70 and turned west towards Colorful Colorado, I fully expected to see some sort of grand truck stop with healthy snacks and friendly service. All I got was a nondescript intersection in a sea of grass with the defeated feeling of many more hours trying to remember to suck in my gut.
In a moment of clarity, I had started playing every Pearl Jam album in reverse chronological order when we left Oklahoma. The newer stuff was “great”, but as the miles dragged on and the scenery more monotonous, the music improved and took me back in time to my first trip to Kansas where my then best friend and I had worn out Ten, Vs, and the newest album at the time, Vitalogy.
The summer before my freshman year of high school I traveled with him and his strange old chain-smoking parents on a summer road trip to this land of endless agriculture. We had played golf once and boated on a lake somewhere nondescript while staying with their family friends along the way. His dad was a janitor at the hospital where I was born, and his mom was a smoker and drinker of very cheap wine. My friend was the youngest of his siblings by fifteen years. The word “accident” comes to mind, but that’s a harsh label even for a dumb ass like this kid was back then.
The trip was spent talking about girls, playing baseball with ghost runners and heightened imaginations, and trading baseball cards we bought along the way. One night we stopped at a middle-aged farmer’s house to crash for the night while his parents to got shitfaced. He was a normal looking divorced guy living alone on a sprawling farm in the middle of nowhere. The two of us played ball in his enormous yard and came inside now and then for water breaks to combat the intense Kansas humidity. Later in the afternoon, he directed us to the basement with his cigarette/beer hand while telling stories with the parents. “Go check it out!” he smiled. He was proud of something down there. What it was, we were about to be shocked and awed by.
On the far wall of the basement, there were boxes filled with every issue of Penthouse magazine ever printed. We didn’t think about how god awful creepy this was whatsoever. We just sat there pouring over pages of porn like only fifteen year old boys can do. After about thirty minutes, we realized it was kind of the same thing over and over, then for some reason the situation seemed very unnatural. I got to thinking this guy must be on some sort of FBI’s wanted list, or worse. Why else would he live literally in the middle of nowhere, grow acres of corn, and sit on that much hard core pornography? We made it up the stairs and headed out to the yard for more batting practice. On our way out he said something like, “Well, what do you think?” “Cool,” we said nodding like we’d just committed a heinous crime. We were ready to leave.
In twenty-five years the terrain hadn’t changed save for the thousands of wind turbines stacked up in perfect rows like giant spinning palm trees. Now and again there would be a farm pond that looked extremely fishy, and I imagined an eight-pound bass blowing up on a dear hair popper. Out here small ponds and billboards are the only change in the scenery. As Eddie belted out “Present Tense” we passed one of these out of place advertisements with a picture of a familiar bearded dude saying, “I can do anything through Jesus who strengthens me.” Not a quarter mile up the highway sat a dilapidated gas station without gas pumps and a newish hand-painted sign that simply read, “ADULT”. I thought, least Kansas has balance.
Mile upon mile the highway stretched serpentine as we neared the Colorado border. The album “Ten” rang in my earbuds reminding me of the rebellious nineties and songs about escape. Over the next hundred miles I thought about my own escape as the Rocky Mountains peeked over the plains through the bug guts on the windshield. If I had stayed on the never ending plains to perpetuate my parents’ lifestyle would I have been good at it? Maybe. Would I have ended up a divorcee with a basement full of pornography? Probably.
The Confluences 