With all due respect, Mr. William Carlos Williams, it’s not the red wheelbarrow on which so much depends. It’s
the cinder
block car wash
glazed with rainbow
foam
beside the Handlebar
Grill
in Great Bend, Kansas. I’ve seen it in the setting sun as I watched Red River Valley clay, carried up from Texas, make runnels off my rented pickup.
You don’t go having mystical experiences in Kansas. At least that’s what I’d heard. What was it Dorothy said when she opened the Technicolor door? “I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” By which she meant you have to leave the plain old Great Plains to discover miraculous things.
But when I pulled into the Big Bend Traveler’s Inn and stepped into the office, it was a Great Dane that rose from behind the counter, placing his paws on the register as if to say, “What can I do for you, sir?” The human manager who peeked in later and gave me a once-over was definitely familiar with the ways of misfit wanderers. And was I just imagining the midweek clientele, while watching the Women’s College Softball championship on the Handlebar’s TVs, enveloping even strangers with something like the warmth of a postcoital cuddle?
Another poet comes to mind. Scott Cairns in ‘Taking Off Our Clothes’:
Let’s pretend for now that there is no such thing
as metaphor. You know—waking up will just
be waking up; darkness will no longer have to be
anything but dark; this could all
be happening in Kansas.
Yeah, right. As if you could ever turn this June night at the Jiffy Wash back into sepia.
I was adrift on America’s great inland sea, which the plains once were. I had made my normal stops in Texas to see my daughter in Dallas and check in on the folks in Archer City, Larry McMurtry’s canvas for his longing heart novels of small town mid-America. I once spent a lifetime in Archer during a month-long writing retreat at The Spur, its old Western hotel. Just goes to show you can never really tell where your soul’s going to show up.
So I primed the pump for this trip by returning to that base and heading north. The annual Willa Cather conference in Red Cloud, Nebraska was the notional destination, but isn’t it always the case that the journey’s the point of the thing? Why not make a stopover at Doan’s Store on the old Western Trail and imagine an endless ghost herd of cattle crossing the Red River? Why not detour through Greensburg, Kansas to see how a place endures after the tornado really does take everything away as it did on a black day in 2007 when the world’s first EF5 twister rolled through? Why not Great Bend on a Wednesday night in June?
When she wrote Dakota: A Spiritual Geography to great acclaim in the 1990s, Kathleen Norris said, “As it turns out, the Plains have been essential not only for my own growth as a writer, they have formed me spiritually. I would even say they have made me a human being.” (11) I get it. To see the infinite treasure inside each one of us, sometimes you have to go confront the wizard, even when he lives in the last place you’d ever think to look. You may not know you have the brains, the heart, or the nerve until you come face to face with the open hand of the land. Open—not empty. Norris quotes the fourth-century bishop Hilary who wrote, “Everything that seems empty is full of the angels of God.”
The next day when I pulled over to see the flagpole that marks the geographic center of the United States, I marveled that I was alone at this roadside wonder. At the center of everything is the same pseudo-nothing that everyone assumes of ‘flyover country.’ ‘Settlement’ was always going to be a tenuous thing in a place like this, built unsteadily on the foundations of the removal of native peoples, homesteading, price supports, and a quickly-depleting underground aquifer. But I’m here to tell you something essential remains. William, Willa, Kathleen, Larry, and Scott will testify with me—it all depends on the cinderblock car wash on Tenth Street just before it trails off into the blessed, blasted wilderness.
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