Wray, Colorado is a small town hiding from the prairie wind in a shallow canyon, just a few miles from the three-way corner of Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado. EJ Carpenter, who runs the 4th and Main Grille where we played Thursday night, told us about a miraculous event that took place this winter: he went to his mailbox and found it blanketed a foot high with snow. The snow fell straight down. It NEVER falls straight down. A man came to the CD table after the show, bought three CDs, and threw down three hundred dollars. Thanks for coming, he said. The school principal came to the show after his own students production. Ranchers came in spite of calving season. In the morning, we went to visit a local quilt maker. He proudly pulled quilt after quilt from the closet. I dont sell my quilts. I keep them here so I can show them off! A snowy patchwork star entirely encompassed one, painstakingly glued with hundreds of tiny rhinestones, the borders hand-colored with pencil. Another was a black-and-white stitched replica of a Frank Lloyd Wright window design. Yet another, a Halloween quilt, hand embroidered with a border of crows, ghostly black trees, and cartoon caricatures of local businesses (the car dealership became Used Brooms). Friday night in Salina, Kansas we played on a horse farm. REO Speedwagon played downtown; David Sedaris had been in town the previous night in the same theater. I know this because a member of the theaters board had skipped out on REO Speedwagon to come to our show. Several of our audience had unsuccessfully run for state senate and house seats, knowing they were too far left in a right-leaning state. After the show, I bonded with an audience member who was quietly described to me as probably the most conservative person here tonight. I showed him the picture of Jett Webb and his 500-pound wild hog in the eastern woods of North Carolina. He quickly and correctly identified the caliber of the gun Jett held in the picture on my tiny iPhone screen. Then he showed me a picture of himself holding a red stag by the antlers in Scotland. He offered to take me hunting anytime. May The River Run Dry was his favorite JByrd song. Our host broke out maps and Kansas travel info over breakfast, a handy reference session in what must be the state with the most- and the most unusual- roadside attractions in all of the United States. We decided on Lucas, Kansas where we visited The Garden of Eden, a mystifying cement folk-art menagerie dedicated to populist and biblical ideology, surrounding a faux-log cabin wherein the logs were hand-cut from solid limestone, dovetailed together at the ends, and chinked with cement. The house and art were built by a Civil War veteran, hauling the limestone from three miles away with mules, and included a solid 21-foot stone that is the single longest piece of quarried limestone in the world. After a burger at a local bar, where we discovered that the town of 300 people had public wifi, we were told that we simply must visit Bowl Park, Lucass public restroom, before we drove out of town. Inside, the restroom was every inch mosaicked with teacup handles, glass beads, action figures, matchbox cars, ceramic tiles, and colored bottle-bottoms. I could have spent an hour in the mens room like a museum-goer with my hat in hand. Later, I learned that the tiny towns movie house presents first-run cinema and is staffed entirely by local volunteers. An undulating black cloud of sparrows a mile and a half long slowly flowed from one cornfield to the next as we drove over the lions mane hills of the western landscape and low snaking rivers of cottonwood. We entered Nebraska at the geographical center of the 48 contiguous states. The rich smell of manure promised the spring that would soon rise from the stubble and seed-heads. Natures first green is gold. The sky invited us in to its infinite blue deep. In Hastings, a town of about 25,000, we played a listening room that was acoustically damn near perfect. We turned off the mics for the encore and sang softly to over two hundred people while the Burlington Northern Santa Fe moaned a block away with miles of mixed freight. The building renovation cost $1.8 million, digging out and fortifying the foundation of the old downtown piano store and replacing everything inside but the stamped tin ceiling. They sell out every show. The surrounding blocks are bustling with local business. I found a used-book store across the street from the new-book store. This morning, sandhill cranes gathered by the thousand in the expansive rows of corn stubble north of town, gathering as they have since before there was corn, before the Platte River ran, before the buffalo roamed, before humanity walked out of Africa, back when camels and elephants roamed Nebraska. Can you imagine what they think of airplanes and concrete? Only five minutes ago, they witnessed the arrival of tipis and that long winter known to us as the Ice Age. The tide still shifts slowly across this recently raised seafloor. The people I met on the Great Plains this weekend are generous, caring, tolerant, thoughtful, hard-working people. They know bullshit when they smell it. They love a good story. They want to help. They regard change with equal amounts of curiosity and suspicion. They are stubborn and yet willing. They are quietly proud and outwardly humble. They still pray. Im flying home out of Omaha, back to where the horizon hides behind the great eastern forest. Im seated beside a Buddhist monk. The vastness and diversity of America is hard to believe sometimes. How easy and safe it is to travel. How young it is and yet how far along. Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska: Yall put the heart in the Heartland. Thanks for your hospitality. Im looking forward to next time.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Mar 2014 22:48:25 +0000
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