Tell people you’re headed for Utah or Japan or Cape Cod and they’ll usually smile and nod in understanding.  Tell them Kansas and you’ll often get a “Why?” or “for what?” or they’ll assume it’s to visit family.  Or they’ll mention Dorothy.  They always mention Dorothy.

Our friends here in the eastern elite city of Boston pretty much all followed this script, as most of them know we’ve no relatives in the Sunflower State, or at least none of which we’re aware.   Our ancestors arrived by boat from Europe and as far as we know did not move west by Conestoga to become sodbusters on the prairie or cross the plains via the Oregon or Santa Fe Trails.  

I have memories of spending a few days in Emporia, Kansas, when my Uncle Bob’s brand new Olds Delta 88 had fuel pump problems on our way to Chicago in 1959.  I recall, perhaps erroneously, lots of corn and possibly sunflowers but definitely tremendous heat, and the odds are we spent a lot of time around the motel pool, but it’s also possible that never happened.  Uncle Bob, who was a traveling salesman assigned the “western territory” by his company, always had new cars and drove around 100K miles a year.  His Olds was the first car we’d ever seen that had A/C, a great idea if there ever was one with its four giant nozzles across the bottom of the dash. 

When it comes to travel destinations, before one gets to specifics the better question is “why anyplace?”  Switzerland and Kenya and California and any destination that doesn’t provoke an immediate “Why?” will have some kind of reputation or even iconic qualities that make it appealing, familiar even to those who’ve never been there.  Glorious mountains or fabulous beaches, wild animals or spectacular birds in their native habitat, great cities oozing with art and culture and great food.  But what do we know about Kansas? 

That it’s there in the middle of the country, for one thing.  That it’s full of farmers and blanketed with amber waves of grain and cornfields and soybeans as far as the eye can see, which can be a long ways even from atop the shallowest hill, as the whole place is pretty damn flat.  As the American mythos relates it, this is the “heartland,” where the “real” Americans live, those honest simple white Christian rural folks who toil by the sweat of their daily labors, with church on Sunday and Bible study on Wednesday nights and maybe even Bingo on another night. 

Of course, to many who live on the American coasts or in the south, this is your basic Midwestern “brand,” and in this context notions about Kansas also apply, for the most part, to Iowa and Nebraska and the Dakotas, as well.  That is how ignorance works, usually abetted by a good deal of disinterest.  From this perspective, they are the “flyover” states, a description that speaks volumes.  Therein also lies one of the best answers as to why one might visit Kansas.  The brand is so familiar, almost suspiciously so, that any possible reality is fraught with mystery.

For tourists like ourselves who are big fans of the natural world, there was also a special angle:  we’ve visited deserts and forests, been to the tropics near the equator and tundra above the Arctic Circle, spent numerous days in coastal areas and savored much of the special flora and fauna to be found in those places, which was the major rationale for those trips.  But the habitat with which we are least familiar is that of the prairies and grasslands, which should be no surprise because, for one thing, that has become the rarest of all habitats, most of it transformed and converted to large scale agricultural purposes or human sprawl a long time ago.  Those amber waves of grain and the endless rangelands of the west tell the story, and this trip was about one of its most interesting chapters where things turned out a bit differently.

There have long been passionate efforts to save the rainforests and the redwoods, the undeveloped shorelines and marshes and bays, all the glorious mountain and desert landscapes.  Consider all the National and State Parks and Forests and Recreational Areas and conservation lands.  Heard much about concerns for saving the prairies?  It turns out there are at least a few places where that kind of passion exists, and one of them is in eastern Kansas.  It is known as the Flint Hills and that is where we and our group wandered for a week in mid-September.  

If you are a Eudora Welty fan, or grew up with the Little House on the Prairie books or watched the TV shows, or paid attention in history class when they covered the Homestead Act that told the story of the farmers who “broke the prairie sod” and settled the great central plains, you know a few things about what went on in places like the Flint Hills in times gone by. Chances are you can picture native tribes  –  in this case the Kaw, Osage, Wichita, and Pawnee  –  sharing that once vast land with millions of bison, practicing a way of life long established before the White Man showed up and took it all over.  Another purpose of this trip, in a way different from all our previous “nature” trips, was to pick up on what evidence is left of that history in the place where it happened.  History here is more about the land itself than in many places, and this trip showed us a whole lot of what that means. 

If you are a fan of plants or geology and travel to pursue your passion, chances are any group travel involves a botanical or geological society.  Our experience with commercial tourism that focuses on nature and the landscape is that trips are mostly about birds, with flora thrown in if the leader or one of the participants has an interest and knows a few things, with geology being an outlier interest.  After that it’s about birds and perhaps insects, and after that it’s all about birds.  In Honduras our guide, who’d just written the first field guide specific to the birds of that country, admitted to us that his initial academic studies and his passion was mainly butterflies, “but” he told us “birds are where the money is” or something to that effect.  He had an incredible talent for snatching a butterfly right off the plant and gently holding it up for us to inspect.

But this time around geology was a major feature. Unlike most of Kansas, as well as the rest of the midwestern plains of central N America, this narrow stretch of prairie earth lies atop a kind of rocky stew, comprised of layers of flint (aka “chert”  –  nice word, that) and limestone and sandstone.  Eastern Kansas happens to be the place where these all accumulated as the great Permian Sea that lay between the Appalachians and the Rockies receded about 85 million years ago.  In modern times, this led to some interesting developments:  1) the land was too rocky for the sodbusters’ plows, so 2) the special grasses that comprised the “tall grass” prairie were never disturbed, unlike the land to the east and west, so 3) the economy that developed was based on cattle, which like their predecessors the American bison grew fattest the fastest on a tall grass prairie diet.

The four essential grasses of the tall grass prairie are Big and Little Bluestem, Switchgrass, and Indian Grass.  This will be a question on the test worth half of your grade, so take note.  Those who can recite and correctly spell the scientific names get lots of extra credit, for obvious reasons. A note about the sodbusters:  the tough prairie grasses were initially too tough to cultivate with old school methods, but the game changer was mass production of the first steel plows by a fellow named Deere (ever heard of him?) around 1850, and the rest is history.  That plow met its match in the Flint Hills, however.

Of course, there’s still a whole lot of mixed and short grass prairie to the west and especially north, the type of grass depending on levels of annual rainfall, for one thing.  Another peculiar aspect of the Flint Hills is that the roots of the grasses go especially deep, a dozen feet or more, part of this facilitated by the porosity of the limestone layers beneath, which also add a dose of calcium to any ungulate’s diet that consumes them.  Of course, cattle can also do a number on an ecosystem, so perhaps the most unusual aspect of the Flint Hills are the efforts made to preserve the tall grass prairie that is left, about 4% of what once covered 100 million acres.

So our trip began like so many, with some airline travel, which is supposed to be totally mundane, a tale not worth the telling.   Anybody who flies nowadays can tell you any trip can all too often turn into something quite different, a tale that is entertaining and instructive and revealing, full of suspense and heartbreak and one that is ultimately cautionary.  Dorothy’s journey began, you might recall, with a somewhat stressful and unexpected ride on a tornado, which is about as Kansas as it gets.  While the safety record of American Airlines is no doubt incomparably better than any violent weather phenomenon, the experience is often not without stress and the unexpected.  Here are the highlights of ours:

1. Several months prior, Joan schedules a Boston to Wichita flight by way of Chicago, as there are no nonstops.  Though we were to discover Wichita was a hotbed of early American aviation and remains home to much aviation industry, it may have been a major airline hub until about 1945 but no longer.  Having experience with modern flight connections, we felt okay with having a two hour stay at O’Hare, ample or at least adequate time to change planes.
2. A few days prior to our departure, we get an email informing us our connecting flight from Chicago had been moved back an hour, reducing our connection time to one hour in the unholy labyrinth of Chicago’s major airport, a tight timeline which lowers the odds for getting on that ride to Wichita.  Being the anxious downbeat air traveler that I am, I become certain we are doomed to fail.
3. The day before our departure, we get an email offering us a complete shift in itinerary, for reasons only a major carrier might understand, which would send us to Dallas where we’d have a comfortable three hour layover, time for a decent dinner and maybe even coffee with dessert.  It takes a one-minute discussion between us to go for this.
4. Enduring only the usual stress levels, we get to Boston’s Logan airport at 1230, with a comfortable two hours to spare.  Hey!  We got this made in the shade!
5. After checking in and going through security, we are wandering the noisy surreal corridors of our gate area when Joan gets a text telling us our flight will be delayed an hour, or something like that.  The exact interval of the delay is now a bit lost to memory and confusion.
6. That’s because in short order she gets informed of another delay, followed by yet another and ultimately what one might call a cascading series of delays, which at some point ensures our inability to make that Wichita flight out of Dallas, at which point we consult with one of the friendly customer assistance people.  No, they’ve no intention of canceling this flight even though there have been “maintenance problems” and at some point they comfort us with the fact that our airplane has, indeed, left Dallas and when it gets to Boston, we will ride it back to where it came from, where American Airlines will make sure we have a nice bed to sleep in at some yet-to-be-named hotel near the Dallas airport before we are put on the 8am to Wichita.  
7. True to their word, our flight to Dallas leaves the ground eight hours after our arrival at Logan and we do indeed get into Dallas around 1130pm and have a nice ride to our hotel and a decent four hours of sleep before we leave for the airport to make our 8am flight.  We get to Wichita about an hour later, pretty much back on our original schedule.  Whoopie ding!

The Wichita airport is small and wonderfully low key with terrific displays on the “history of flight” in that fair city, which started in 1911 and hit its heyday in the ‘20s and ‘30s.  This sort of makes sense when one considers that the area was wide open, with steady winds and a landing place pretty much anywhere one might choose or be compelled to choose when one’s primitive machine had problems.  Those were romantic and colorful and simple times, often referred to as the Golden Age of Aviation, and there are pictures of Charles Lindberg and Amelia Earhart passing through town.  Lucky Lindy actually negotiated to have his Spirit of St Louis built by a Wichita constructor, but it didn’t quite happen, and somebody in Wichita was probably kicking themselves when news arrived of Chuck’s landing in Paris.

So as it turns out, AA’s efficiency at managing our change of plans (all airlines have a lot of practice with this sort of thing nowadays) got us back to plan A and an opportunity to savor the downtown, and who knows?  Maybe we’d get a chance to see the lineman from that glorious song?  Or maybe he was still on the line, such is his brand.  We asked the young woman at our hotel what she’d recommend if one had a few hours to spend in Ta-Town (that’s a real nickname!)  She looked thoughtful for quite a few moments and suggested the Museum of World Treasures, where she’d gone many times on field trips in school.  She was a bit vague about the nature of the treasures, “dinosaurs and mummies and all kinds of historical stuff,” but no matter.  With a name like that it was a must see.

Downtown Wichita was very very quiet but also visually quite striking, lots of recently sandblasted brick, or so it looked.  The bars and music venues suggested “college town” which of course it is, home of the Wichita State Shockers and the school they represent on the gridiron or basketball court or wherever.  The Museum was low-key and charming.  It was there we got introduced in the grandest fashion to that ancient Permian sea and all it left behind throughout the middle of the continent, including the requisite T Rex but any number of skeletons and other fossils, many of them aquatic.

“Eclectic” is one of those overused words nowadays but the Museum of World Treasures fits the word to a T.  I mean, when you’ve got dinosaurs and fossils and art and artifacts from ancient Rome and Greece and Egypt (mummies! and a shrunken head), a room full of crystals and geodes and other beautiful rocks, and more cultural objects from Africa and Asia and Pre-Colombian Latin America, not to motion a 29 ton piece of the Berlin Wall, what is it if not eclectic?  And that’s just on the first floor!  How does such a wondrous conglomeration come about?  The story here seems to be it was one person’s collection in the beginning, but word got around that the MWT might accommodate any collection found worthy, so now it seems there are something like 30 different sources for what is found there.  Talk about a community effort!

On the second floor one gets the Hall of Presidents (with an original signature of each and every one of them), a room with items from the American Revolution, plus a display commemorating every American war, from the Civil through Vietnam.  One might be tempted to also visit the Eisenhower Library over in his hometown of Abilene, but need one really bother?  Though of course Abilene also has the Greyhound Hall of Fame, and then there’s that World’s Largest Ball of Twine over in Cawker City, so if one has lots of time… Which we did not.  In fact we did not make it to the second or third floors, leaving open the possibility of another trip to Wichita someday. We did find time to eat one of the best meals of the whole trip at the HomeGrown restaurant, which specializes in serving locally produced food.  

The largest city in Kansas has a lot to offer, though I’d avoid homecoming week if I were you, unless you’re a bigger Shockers fan than I thought you were.  Go Shockers! Or is it Grow Shockers?  KS is the #1 wheat producing state in the US, by the way, though you won’t find much of it in the Flint Hills, for reasons already mentioned.

---