Kansas... Again.

“The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.”

- Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

We were in Kansas... again. Or maybe, again-again. Let’s see: over and back, then another over and back. How many “agains” is that? Too many!

We just completed our fourth frantic dash across the Sunflower State (motto: “You can see forever and it will take you that long to drive from border to border... maybe longer”). And it was a trip that will live forever in our memories and probably in our nightmares.

We zipped speedily into the K-State on a recent Saturday, leaving at O-Dark-Thirty (give or take ten minutes) and arrived in a town in Missouri at about Half-Past Dusk. A solid 14 hours of mostly driving at seven miles over the posted speed limit (calculated after googling “How fast do you have to speed to get a ticket in Kansas?”), with intermittent stops for fuel, bathroom breaks, and moments to ponder the vast and expansive cornfield that is Kansas.

What am I saying? There’s much more to Kansas than corn! They also have 2 bizillion water towers and approximately 7 bizillion grain silos. And a fleet of John Deere tractors large enough to successfully invade Canada.

After “dropping off the package” (wink-wink), we managed to get probably 6 hours of sleep before rising and putting the pedal to the metal in the other direction. We smiled as we headed West (young man) and began to entertain visions of getting home to a place where overalls are not the uniform of choice.

We stopped smiling at around the two hour mark. That’s because the clouds that had been hiding the sky and the newly risen sun began to share their bountiful moisture. This was, at least according to WeatherBug, not happening and not forecast to happen. This continued to not happen until we got to Kansas City, at which time we could no longer see because of the unauthorized rain.

By the time we reached Topeka, the imaginary clouds and imaginary water falling from them required ultra-high windshield wipers as they had magically transmogrified into one heck of an imaginary downpour. The highway flooded. Cars pulled to the side of the road. Tornadic fingers reached down from the heavens...

When WeatherBug finally caught on - delayed radar revealed a monsoon front stretching along I-70 - we were assured that we would soon drive out of it. So we kept going, creeping along, trying not to get into a wreck or drive off the road or get sucked up by a twister.

Thankfully, we drove out of it. Unthankfully, we drove into it again about an hour later. As we were approaching The Middle of Nowhere, Kansas (home to one gas station and approximately 13 residents), the hail arrived.

I would love to tell you that WeatherBug warned us of this hazard. But I would be lying. It didn’t even provide a vague hint. Which is why we barrelled right in and were met with walls of quarter-sized and occasionally ping-pong-sized chunks of ice. Our only refuge from the storm was an underpass. As the hail tried to dent and break the windows on our vehicle, we watched a disaster in the making: people all stopping under the overpass, some of them IN THE MIDDLE OF THE HIGHWAY! The real fun began when an 18-wheeler came along, horn sounding.

We survived. So did the car.

But here’s the problem: despite all of these interesting, exciting, unexpected events, we 1. still had a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad amount of Kansas in front of us to traverse, and 2. we were forced to miss the Oz Museum - as in The Wizard of Oz.

Yeah, I know. It was a huge disappointment to us too. We had seen multiple billboards for the museum on our three other fast-forward blitzes through the state and decided that it was high time we visited. However, when we reached the turnoff to Wamego (yes, Virginia, there is a Wamego), we were busy trying not to die and whizzed right past. Thus, no museum for us.

In lieu of seeing wax figures and artifacts and maybe some original props from the classic movie, we resorted to Wizard of Oz trivia. As it turns out, I am even worse at that than I was at literature trivia, sports trivia, or geography trivia. My only correct answer was to the header: How well do you remember the Wizard of Oz? Answer: Not very well. Not having seen the film in decades and never having read (all of) the book, I failed to guess accurately on such easy questions as: Who was originally slated to play the Tin Man? What’s the name of the mean lady who tries to take Toto away? and Which song was nearly cut from the movie soundtrack? 

So overall, the Kansas-Oz connection was a flop. But what wasn’t a flop was Jesus. He appeared to us in a half dozen farming fields, as well as on random signs and on the sides of barns. Jesus in the corn, as we began to refer to him, (we later learned locals call the billboard above Wheat Jesus) was a timely reminder that we were snared in something otherworldly. Only Jesus was able to travel with any speed in the horrifying stretch from Salina to Colby.

We also saw this sign more than once: “Where will you spend eternity? Heaven or Hell?” And our consistent answer was: We are current in hell (aka Kansas) and we’re pretty sure we’re going to be here for all eternity. Amen.