Fur Trail: Plains

I woke up this morning on the Kansas prairie and kicked off the day with a beer and a cigar. I love the Great Plains. They’re dustily honest. The land is open and you can see for miles, uninhibited by the forests of the east, the mountains of the west, or the red rock mesas of the southwest. The people don’t self-mythologize the way westerners imitate cowboys, southerners imitate rednecks, or New Yorkers act like they run the universe. In the Great Plains, it’s all there for you to see: farming country spread far and wide, grain towers the most conspicuous buildings around, and people who don’t dress up for nobody.

Duke and me by a creek a few miles west of Cottonwood Falls, Kansas.

I had breakfast in the Highway House Café, which turned out to be my favorite type of breakfast place. The laminate tables had been scrubbed so many times that the subsurface showed through and the booth seats were almost uncomfortable because so many customers had crunched them down over the years. It was where the old men got together in the morning to drink coffee and talk about their health problems. Six or seven old guys came in while I was there, and each time a new one walked through the door, the others greeted him.

“Hi, Jack.”

“Hey, John.”

“How’re you doing?”

“Well, I’m alive. But my wife is going to need that wheelchair . . .”

One guy named Henry walked in, jerked a thumb at the parking lot, and asked who was hauling that camper around. I said it was me, and he sat down across from me to ask about it. He wanted one like it for hunting. Henry was about sixty, and he leaned forward when he talked. His belly touched the table and he clasped the thick, sturdy hands of a working man in front of him. He told me about the café while I ate pancakes. “That’s Doris, the waitress. She’s a sweetheart, but she’s tough. Real tough. She’s had a whole bunch of surgeries on her hips, knees. Still waits tables. Been here forever. She used to sit me on her knee I was a kid.”

I’m in Nebraska now, parked at the intersection of a couple dirt roads sitting on top of my camper as I write. The sun was setting when I climbed up here, but now dusk has fallen and I can see the lights of at least five separate towns in the distance. These farming towns are withering, but they’re wonderful while they’re still here. Unpretentious. Just farming towns being what they are.

Sunset from the top of the camper.

I’ve been sitting on top of this camper for awhile now, practicing to be a writer and wishing I still had that cigar. I’ve watched a crop duster fly low over the field next to me and an older couple drive by in a dusty Chevrolet. I waved to the couple, and they stared at me awhile then waved back. These out-of-state people are strange, they probably thought. Trying to be something they’re not.