Diary- Kansas

Kansas. I don’t really know what to say about Kansas. I’ve tried writing everything that happened down chronologically, but it doesn’t sound nearly as important as it felt. How do you describe how important it was that a girl working at Sears happenes to say “Smile, it’s not so bad.” As you walked by. How do you describe what it feels like to meet people who, though they promises you they’re white trash, treat you as well as you could want to be treated? How do you describe a town that’s been around since 1886 whose heart is beating more and more slowly? And how do you describe thinking you’re going insane after 100 miles on the boiling road? I don’t know if I can, but I’ll try.

Things in Kansas happen slowly and quietly. It’s a state that’s shuffling its feet along a dusty road, or getting up early just to sit down in the cast of an east facing window at sunrise. People at 4 way intersections stop and wait, looking around at each other waiting for someone else to go. They wave at anyone to pass in a dignified, and orderly way. The cows follow you with their eyes as you ride across the horizon. They seem wise as they stand in the sun, with miles of food in every direction, and plenty pleasant company. The people here remind me of cows somehow, living so simply and content, and following me with their eyes and a wave as I ride my busy way on through town.

I’m a celebrity in one town, there’s a picture hanging above a mantle piece in a café chefed by an old man with big sunglasses. Yep, hanging right next to the picture of that Drew Carry look-alike that stopped in a few years back.

“See that’s me with him. People ask me sometimes ‘is that really Drew Carry?; and I say ‘Oh yeah that’s Drew, I’ve known him for thirty years’”

At one of the state parks I stayed at a couple days back, I put up my tent and sent to chat with my neighbors. They live outside of Manhattan Kansas, one works construction, he’s a fellow with a badass attitude, a spot in a trailer court, lots of tatooes, a hardcore moustache, and the loudest voice in the bar. “This guy’s killing me with that moped thing. Across the country on a moped? Let me ask you though, you ever ridden up to a girl and said, ‘hey babe, I’ve got room for one more. Wanna get on my Moped?’” Then there’s his friends, they’re married, and have been for three years. They’re very young. I think they’ve been together since highschool. They’re totally in love, it’s nice to watch. She works at a windows and doors company, she’s very intelligent, and though not high ranking, is certainly one of the reasons it would be a good place to work. “You play by most of their rules and then bend a few,” I heard her say. “One time her boss had me page one of the sons, the company is run by a father and his sons, anyway the father asked me to page his son, ‘tell him to get his ass down here, I’m hungry’ so I got on the intercom and I said ‘would Mr. Soandso get his ass down here to the door, his father’s hungry and ready to go.’”

When they found out I was planning on eating a sack of Tuna for dinner, they hit me up with a plate of steak, corn on the cob, potato salad, chips and a couple of beers.

They joked about being white trash, hicks and rednecks, but it seemed more like they were just good people with different eating preferences and poorer table manners. ‘Trash’? when it comes down to it, they’re just as ’trashy’ as any Harvard graduate thank you very much.

I went a little crazy in East central Kansas. Most of this trip so far I’ve spent in my head, thinking and thinking above the polite din of the moped’s engine, but in Kansas, that got taken to its uncomfortable extreme. With no one to talk to and nothing to see for miles and miles and miles, the life in my head took on greater centrality and started to loose its footing. I rode in silence for hour after hour until out of the blue my front wheel started making an extremely loud and annoying sound. This sound got distributed evenly through my helmet in such an odd manner that I thought the sound was not coming from something outside, but was completely in my head. It was a sound like the intolerable screeching of sicadas, or like a 6 ft wind up santaclause grinding its way from my temples and out through my ears. Just then I started seeing incredibly huge, and disgusting grasshoppers I’ve ever seen. Grasshoppers are little neet little poppers that flip about as you wander through tall grass. Right? No. They’re huge disgusting insects that leap at your throat and while you’re mopeding across Kansas. The kings and queens of the grasshoppers are nearly 6 inches long and when they hit you, they squirm like a writhing crackling tentacle, and then disappear before you actually see it, leaving you to wonder if it ever happened. ‘where are all the birds to eat these ridiculous grasshoppers? Birds, the last bastion between the civilized world and the festering hordes of grasshopper hellspawn… Oh good god, they must have been eaten by the grasshoppers!’ Ten minutes later they all disappeared. “Did that really happen? Was my mind so restless that it was creating these creatures just to have something to think about? Was this trip a big mistake? Am I going to get back to school a raving lunatic?” I felt like my mind was wriggling restlessly free from its confines, the logic, reason, memory, and thought had blended into a sloppy soup that I was trying to eat with a slotted spoon.

I stopped in a town that was about to be scratched off the map, the windows of almost every building were either broken or clung to for sale signs by twisted pieces of wire. I sat on a discarded air condishioner in the shade of a neglected porch just off the road, and waited until the storm subsided, drank a bunch of water and a granola bar and went on in the hundred degree heat.

By the time I got to Western Kansas, “Dry as toast, flat as a board, western Kansas” I was really looking for someone to talk to in a bad way. I do plenty of talking when I’m on a long day’s ride. Sometimes I just talk to nobody, sometimes I make up characters with different accents and have them tell stories. Sometimes I impersonate the people I’ve met along the way, and sometimes I just chatter at the things around me, the cows, and grass, and sky and road. But at a point you know that they don’t talk back.

Eventuallly though, I found someone. I was riding and riding in the blazing Kansas sun, and up ahead I saw a dark object bouncing slowly on the horizon. I continued to watch and wonder as I rode, “I’m gaining ground, so it must be going slow. It’s not a cow that got loose though, not round enough. It’s not nearly big enough to be a tractor. Too big to be someone standing there. Oh my god it’s a bicyclest!” I rode up along side

“Hey there,” I said.

“Hey, how’s it going?” he replied. He was an attractive guy in his late twenties I think, with longish hair in a pony tale, riding a mountain bike dragging a one wheeled trailer, wearing Oakley sunglasses, full biking shorts and shirt covered in logos.

“Great, where you coming from?”I asked.

“Lawrence Kansas.”

“you going across the country?

“Up to Oregon. There’s this trail called the Trans America trail its all these little highways like this one.”

“Sounds great, where you staying?”

“You can camp in the city parks in all these little towns in Kansas. Where you from?”

“New York, I’m on my way to California.”

“Is that a moped?”

“Yeah.”

“Sweet. I was trying to convince my sister to come along on a scooter or something like that. Hey wanna stop and take a picture or something?”

“Sure,” I said.

We pulled over and parked our respective vehicles on the side of the road.

We sat on the side of the highway and just talked. It was so great to talk to someone who had real interest in the details of the trip, and what its like later. Here I was, the experienced veteran of the road. I’d been riding for nearly a month, and here he was a little greenhorn at 3 days. We agreed to meet at the next big town, and get a bite to eat.

We pitched our tents in the Ness City city park and chatted about ‘touring,’ poverty, religion, stories from our trips, and the differences between bike and moped until it got dark and we both nearly fell asleep before we got into our tents.

I found out the next morning that it was about 300 miles to Colorado Springs. Two days! That’s just two days riding! I was so excited that I rode nearly two hundred and thirty miles that day and then made myself stop.

Which reminds me…

At one point when I was just getting into Kansas, and I started seeing fewer and fewer people, and more and more scrubby bushes and grass, I stopped to fill up on gas, and give bike a quick check over to make sure there wasn’t anything about to snap or break, or drag on the ground. I heaved the ped onto its stand and hunkered down on the right side and started poking. Everything looked alright, the air intake was loose, and I stuck it back on, then the bike started to lean and teeter, and slowly fell on top of me, all 500 pounds of it. I had been in a standing sit, with my feet flat on the ground and my elbows between my knees so instead of being flat out crushed, I was just trapped. I sat there for a second, looked back down the abandoned road and grimaced. It could be twenty minutes before someone came by to help me out, I took a deep breath and started pushing. I pushed with ever ounce of strength in my body, and slowly the bike started to lift. I grimaced and strained against the weight, and the ackward position but heaved and heaved until finally I got the bike upright. I looked down, and realized what had happened. It was so hot that the asphalt had melted, and the ped had sunk through on one side so the whole thing had toppled. I sat there, watching the asphalt thrity miles down the road reflect the sky, in lucid waves of blue heat and grinned.

As I sat there, gathering myself, an rusty old sedan pulled up. And idled next to me. I walked over, and hunkered down by the open passanger side window.

“Hello there,” a fellow said from inside. He had a big Santa Clause beard, and a big old belly. He was a total biker. “You alright there?” he asked.

“Yeah I’m doing alright now, thanks. Managed to get myself trapped under the bike for a minute there, but I managed to get out,” I said.

“Where you going on that thing?”

“California.”

“Where you coming from?”

“New York.”

“Hey, I reckon you’re bout half way there then.”

“Yeah just about half way.”

“I went cross the country bout eight years ago. Reckon it was bout the best time of my life. I started in New Jersey, and rode clear across to California, then all the way up to Alaska. Took me two years, best two years of my life. Let me tell you when I got over to California, to Sacramento, and I came over a hill and saw the pacific, let me tell you it was one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. I went back up to Alaska last year, just bout ruined the rest of my life.”

“That’s terrible, what happened.”

“Well I got up to Alaska, and I stop at one spot, pull out my rod, and on the third cast, hooked a 62 pound trout. I fought him for bout an hour. By the time I finally landed him, there was a whole crowd. Fella says to me, I’ve never seen a trout landed with twenty pound line and all the while he’s foo fooing my equipment, and I says, well you seen it now. I was riding through a park up route 101 and a park ranger comes up to me and says I have to pay 8 bucks to ride through. Well I didn’t want to pay it, so he looks at Harley, and says, ‘well how much guts you got’ and I say ‘plenty’ and he says, well then you ride on through but you take care of any bears you see by yourself. So I gets back on old Harley, and keep riding through there, well sure enough a minute later I see big ol’ mama bear and two cubs standing there right in the middle of the road. I thought he was kidding about that bear thing, but sure enough. Blazed old harley through there fast as I could.”

He stopped talking and looked in his rear view mirror, and saw another car at least two miles down the road. He rolled down his window and started waving them past. “Comon fella, go around you can do it.” He said as he waved the guy on for the next five minutes. He waved as the car passed, rolled up his window and continued his stories.

“Last time I went up to Alaska, I got a fishing license, and on there it says ’20 fish’ well they mean twenty fish a season, but I thought it meant a day. So I go up and one day I catch twenty fish, and then the next day I catch another twenty fish, then the third day I go up again, and a park ranger comes up and says ‘didn’t I see you fishing down at that other park the other day’ and I say ‘maybe so, I’ve been here for a couple.’ So he says ‘ how many fish you caught’ ‘ bout 14 today’ I say, ‘well the limit’s twenty, for the whole season’ and I say ‘oh! Ohp, I’m one over’” he says and cracks up laughing. “and the ranger says, ‘I reckon you’re two over’ you can catch two more, then I don’t want to see you fish another fish.”

We laugh together for a good while and he sits for a few minutes to wave another car on past. He wishes me luck, and rides on down the road.

Welcome to Kansas.