I grew up here. I suppose we almost all love our homes, and Kansas was mine. I have read several diaries in the last couple of days, talking about the crazy folks who gave rise to Roeder and the Phelpses. They are not representative of Kansas. There are great people here. And there are great things. Let me tell you about just a couple of them.
The Santa Fe trail ran down my street, according to the local maps. It ran mostly through what is now the western part of Lawrence along what is now US Highway 40 (6th Street). There are places in this part of Kansas where you can still see the wheel ruts from the wagons that passed here 150 years ago.
There is nothing, absolutely no sound, more beautiful than the call of the Western Meadowlark, our state bird, whose
birdsong you can listen to here (for some reason I am not having luck with youtube embeds this evening). It is a song of wild and beautiful places. And Kansas has those. It has the Tall Grass Prairie National Preserve in the Flint Hills. Here you can see what the prairies once were. There is little of the unbroken land left, but the wildness has come back to the Flint Hills, and the ecological diversity is incredible. This is subtle, not the brassy (and spectacular) western canyons and waterfalls. This is land that needs to be walked, and listened to, not climbed or conquered.
All over Kansas we have sunflowers (our state flower), wild by the side of the road. And in the west you still have the fields of wheat that are the most beautiful thing to see blowing in the wind. Kansas still grows more wheat than any other state in the nation. Are you potentially a Kansan? Or a Jayhawker (a Kansan born and bred)? If you can't see the beauty in this short clip (there is something that is not working for me this evening, but the link is here, or if all you can see is the rather flat horizon line, I can't imagine that this place would be right for you.
It is right for me. The mountains near my brother's home in Denver, while pretty, are claustrophobic to me. With a low horizon, you have the sky. And the sky here is constantly changing. We do have tornadoes, and storms -- you can see a front coming for miles and miles. You grow sensitive to the changes in clouds and light and air pressure and wind and humidity. There was a tornado that came through the place I now live in Missouri and (while I wasn't there) several of my friends were together. The Michigander and Canadians were making noises about going to the really small cellar, and they commented to me -- "The Kansans were standing out on the porch, talking about the clouds!" I know exactly why. And when they scoffed at going into the basement, I would have listened to them. You know. And you pay attention to the weather and the radio. But you know. Very very few people died in the F-5 tornado that came through Greensburg several years ago (I know someone whose sister died, so believe me, I am not downplaying that horrific storm). They knew it was worth hiding from. You know.
The history is great here. There is no strong evidence (at least as of yet) for pre-Clovis peoples, but people were here from at least 11,000 11,000 BCE. The first contact with Europeans was in the 16th century, when Coronado's expeditionary force traveled up to the central part of the state. Fragments of chain mail showed up in the 1880s and subsequently, and they are clustered in Kansas, a bit east of Salina. There are native groups here (I like the term "First Nations" better, but it isn't appropriate, seeing as we are not in Canada!) but most of them are 17th and 18th or even 19th century immigrants -- the Kansa and Osage, the Cheyenne and Comanche and Sioux. The state is named after the Kansas River, from the word KaNze, which means "south wind." And of course the wind blows all the time here. There is the only preserved Reconstruction-era black western town (Nicodemus) in the state, and pueblo ruins at Fort Scott. You can still visit the cemetery in Lawrence where the people killed in Quantrill's Raid were buried. It is Pioneer Cemetery, on the western side of the University of Kansas. Long-time professors from the University are buried there. I have been known to go on occasion to talk to my godfather, who was the chair of the English Department at KU for some time.
Kansas is home to the second oldest radio reading service for the visually impaired, known as Audio Reader, where I worked through my last year of high school and intermittently for several years thereafter. It is an amazing service, and one that would be really great for people to know more about outside of the visually impaired community. I came home to Lawrence, KS, for my sabbatical year (took Arabic at the University of Kansas, and traveled and did a lot of work on revising a still-to-be-published dissertation), and volunteered on Tuesday afternoons for Audio Reader, reading local news from newspapers across the northern part of the state -- Hays and Salina and Abilene and Concordia. When you do that you read the obituaries, and the local news, and the local columnists (remember William Allen White, a prairie progressive and famous newspaperman, came from Kansas and his house is still there in Emporia for you to visit (a former student was the Site Administrator there last I heard).
One particular series of letters to the editor haunted me through the late fall and winter. Someone had heard a cat crying from the top of an abandoned grain elevator. It had gone up, but couldn't find its way down, and was crying out for help. This man tried to find it, to see it, and even tried to climb up very rickety stairs and couldn't get to it. The stairs couldn't hold a man's weight, and the writer thought the problem was they couldn't hold a cat's weight anymore either, and that is how the cat got stuck up there. There was nothing he could do. He tried leaving food out for it, getting the local police and fire interested in the story, and nothing apparently happened (this was told in increasingly more desparate letters to the editor over a couple of weeks). He asked for the old elevators to be torn down (as he said, what if it was a child who was up there). Finally he wrote a letter about finding a broken body of a cat at the bottom of the elevator, emaciated creature that it was. This was a heartbreaking series of letters. The man was eloquent and even eight years later, this story haunts me.
Then there were other writers who wrote about small town issues, and there were the people in western Kansas who hosted people whose planes were forced out of the sky on 9/11, and the discussions from small towns all over the state about the guests that had unexpectedly been grounded anywhere there was an airport big enough with a runway long enough to take a plane. That hospitality, and the stories of nature, and the general niceness of people in the state stay with you.
Dwight Eisenhower came from here, as did Ed Asner, Arlen Specter and Bob Dole (both from Russell, sigh), Hattie McDaniel, and Walter P. Chrysler. And me... My parents remembered seeing Wilt Chamberlain in Lawrence when he played for the University of Kansas, and I saw Mandy Patinkin as Tevye and as Sancho Panza in the two most spectacular stage productions I have ever seen -- both at the University of Kansas.
I am sure everyone loves their home state. But I can tell you, unequivocally, that you from other states don't have the faintest idea of what you are talking about. Kansas is the best. That is why we celebrate January 29th as Kansas Day, and have a sheet cake (with the upper right corner cut off in the proper tribute to the state's shape) and conduct Kansas Day trivia challenges. What, you don't????? What kind of a Kansan ARE you? We even do it in Missouri!!! Those of us who miss Kansas every day, anyway.