After St. Joseph we leave the Interstate and start heading west on Kansas State Route 50 – it follows the old Pony Express mail route and cuts across the northern part of the state. We nearly run out of gas near Highland as we are awestruck by the passing rain clouds and the lowering sun. I buy a newspaper in the gas station. It’s a weekly printed community newspaper that offers no theories on who or why Anthrax.

 

I like these small town papers and buy them whenever I have the chance.

They’re nearly always devoid of any news from the outside world – but in reading them you can get a real sense of The Heartbeat of America.

They’re always filled with local police reports and community goings-on.

 

Also, truth be told, they make me feel a little superior and citified.

 

In the Highland Gazette there is a report that "Uncle Sam's Story" will be presented at the local community college by the Highland Players Student Theater Group. The play is an original script by Dan Glynn - an English instructor at the college and a former columnist at the Hiawatha Daily World.

 

We feel superior and citified.

 

We arrive at the Dreamliner Motel in Mankato, KS at nightfall. The neon is beautiful. It is everything pink, orange and aqua I could have asked for.

 

At the Dreamliner Motel-- the motel manager is actually snaggletoothed. I can hardly believe our luck. Some weeks earlier I had called this motel manager on the telephone to reserve a room – which we’d been warned in this part of the country is essential as there are only three motels within a 150 mile radius and the hunting season was getting underway.

 

Evidenced by the mighty and mighty nervous looking 8 point buck we saw standing on a sun burnished ridge as we raced toward the motel.

 

As I placed my reservation the hotel clerk asked me if we wanted a double or a single. He wanted to know if we were a couple.

 

I told him we were a couple of men.

 

He assured me that we would want two beds. Rhetorically he asked me, “You don’t want to sleep in the same bed, now, do you?” I couldn’t help but answer, “Depends on the size of the bed.”

 

At that time Edward and I were sharing a double and would not have minded, really, sharing anything larger.

 

I didn’t press the issue.

 

In the room, three very interesting handwritten and misspelled signs.

 

One warns us not to clean game in our room less we be evicted with “no refound” and another alerts us to the presence of “soiled but clean” towels we should use to clean our guns or to remove our makeup.

 

We feel superior and citified.

 

We sleep soundly – in separate queen size beds - and leave at dawn. Our day starts with a side trip south to see the World's Largest Ball of Twine.

 

Cawker City, it's home, is peeling at the edges. The sun is just barely up and the silence is a little Harvest Home.

 

After viewing the twine we stop for gas and coffee at the lone gas station in town. We are stared at by the locals. Openly.

 

It makes us feel uneasy. It makes us feel like birds of paradise at a house sparrow convention. We feel citified and less smug. I think about the story of the country mouse and the city mouse and wonder how the cat will manifest itself.

 

As we leave Cawker City, the sun is rising over the mist covered ridge to the east and Kansas is covered in frost and pheasants. A coyote hesitates at the road's edge and then dashes across the highway and up the opposite bank.

 

In the northwest corner of the state it's all become about the sky -- and where the ground reaches up to meet it. As we reach the top of a rise outside Atwood, there stands before us, in the middle of a plowed field, a derelict drive-in movie screen.

 

The projection booth/snack bar still stands. I can't not go there and crawl under barbed wire and across the field.

 

In the booth, the projectors are still there - they are two Mighty 'Ninety' projectors made in Toledo, Ohio.

 

I'm thinking about rattlesnakes as I make my way over broken glass and smashed crates to snap close-ups of these beautiful machines.

 

In Colorado, once we’ve endured the horrors of driving past Denver, there's snow in the mountains and when we stop to re-fuel I try to avoid looking at the headlines of the Denver papers.

 

Not surprisingly, they’re full of Anthrax.

 

We feel like foreigners whenever we stop and I wonder if it's because of world events or if it's because we look like city slickers – you know, fags - or if it's because we aren't wearing feed caps.

 

Edward says, "It's all white people here. I haven't seen a black person since we left Chicago."

 

I say, "And we're going to Utah."