Too Long in the Wind

December 2006

Shoveling away the last of 2006

[December 31]   Last night I was just about finished -- for the second time in the day -- shoveling 5 inches of powder off the driveway when big lights popped up over the hill. An enormous front-end loader marched its scoop right down the center of the street. Behind it and to the right came a sand truck with a blade on the front, rolling snow into yards at 20 mph.

I waved broadly to the loader's driver and the truck's driver. The last time I did that, to a grader driver, he lifted his blade so that it wouldn't block my driveway with scraped snow. This time, my wave got me a brand-new berm a foot high and four feet wide.

You never know what you'll get unless you try, right?

It could be worse. I could be shoveling a driveway in Denver. There must be piles of shoveled snow there that rival the Rockies in size.

Now, if all that Colorado snow had fallen around Pawnee Rock, it still might not have amounted to much. The wind would have put it all in the ditches.

Hello, Teresa: Speaking of Denver, I heard Friday from Teresa Shields Manuel, who attended Pawnee Rock schools before her family moved to Colorado.

Perhaps you remember Teresa; her parents, Wanda and Gail; or her brothers: Rick, Danny, and Randy Skelton and Bill Shields. They lived in Pawnee Rock's northwesternmost house.

Teresa's e-mail address is now on the Friends of Pawnee Rock page.

Where the party is: What are you doing for New Year's Eve? House party? Movie? Dining out?

Things are probably different now from the way they were when I grew up; at least, I hope so. Back then, New Year's Eve seemed like an elegant party that was held somewhere else.

We tried to whip up celebrations. Most of us gathered around televisions at 11 p.m. to watch the big ball fall in New York City, a place as alien in those days as France. No one I knew had confetti or champagne or those little horns and pointy paper hats, like the ones we saw on "I Love Lucy."

It was nevertheless a night for drinking, back in those days of 18-year-olds with 3.2 beer, and it's a wonder some of us didn't end up as gossip fodder in the newspapers. And then there were the church-sponsored parties, hosted by parents who especially wanted to keep their coming-of-age kids from becoming coming-of-age parents. While we younger-minded kids slogged through Monopoly, the "fun" kids were upstairs testing sloe gin.

It was my New Year's tradition to look in the Hutch News for the editorial cartoon showing the withered Old Year handing the world's troubles to the diaper-clad New Year. I tried making resolutions, laboriously listing them on lined loose-leaf notebook paper. It took me a couple of years to understand that I shouldn't share my list with anyone else, because they might remind me at awkward moments that I had, for example, resolved not to pick on my sister.

Resolutions or not, however, I liked the idea of starting a fresh and clean year of life. That part hasn't changed, although most weeks I'll be happy if I can just keep the driveway fresh and clean.

Happy New Year, everyone!

A photo I like: No. 17

[December 30]   I was a high schooler with a camera, and I was going to be a photojournalist. When one of the Apollo missions -- 14 or 15, I think -- had a moonwalk, I was there to capture it. At least, I was in the basement photographing our Zenith TV screen at 1/30th of a second.

It's not much of a trophy, some barely distinguishable blobs crossed by dozens of TV scanning lines. Yet I remember this clearly: As I bent down before the screen, I understood that it wasn't the moon mission that was attracting me but the joy of experimenting. I was enjoying the method more than the product, the journey more than the destination.

A safe place for our history

Some trophies earned between 1953 and 1957.

[December 29]   As a junior high kid, sometimes I'd wander up the high school hall and look at the trophies high above the rows of lockers.

Some were shiny, and quite a few wore the tarnish of history -- trophies won before I was born. Bronze boys shooting layups, holding batons, and crouching in football stances. The torches of victory held high. The South 50-6 League, the South 50-7 League, schools that even by 1970 had gone out of existence.

The trophies that bore dates go back to the town's first high school, which stood across the street. They go back to my dad's time in school, and to the generation before his.

Marsha McFann Bouker, who was in one of the last classes to graduate from Pawnee Rock High School, brought up the idea that our school memorabilia should stay together if -- when -- our school is sold.

When that eventually happens, our sports trophies -- and our school pictures hanging on the wall, and our yearbooks, and our records -- will need a home. We're not thinking of a person's home, but a public place where our trophies and pictures will stay together. We need a place where we can keep alive the one torch we've all gathered around.

In search of electricity

[December 28]   When I was a kid in Pawnee Rock, it was always an adventure when the power went out. We gathered around a battery-powered radio or sat in the car to find out from KVGB or KANS whether the lights were out in Larned or Great Bend, too -- although if our lights were out theirs likely were too.

The problem was "near Kinsley," the radio voice frequently reported.

The power went out last night where we live now, shutting things down from about 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. as a miniblizzard roared through. On the way home from work in the well-lighted city, I picked up Chinese food and we had dinner by candlelight, lamplight, and flashlight.

To entertain the boys, who were a little nervous, and to satisfy our curiosity, we went out for a drive. Two nights before, we had gone out to see the Christmas lights; this time, we just wanted to see any lights.

Power was on in the big city and in much of our town -- but our neighborhood and those around us were dark. I suppose it was reassuring that we could find running electricity near our house, in case we needed to buy gas or groceries, but the feeling of unity I remembered from countywide blackouts was missing.

In Pawnee Rock, when the lights were out, everyone's were out. We were all in it together.

On the other hand, this time we sat in the dark but we had sweet and sour chicken. For the boys, that was still an adventure.

Bringing history forward

[December 27]   Larry and Cora Smith must be people who walk around saying "What if . . ." or "Somebody ought to . . ."

They did what ought to be done. These Pawnee Rock natives, now in Wichita, created a 20-minute DVD of historical Pawnee Rock photos, artifacts, and postcards -- including images Larry has sent to PawneeRock.org -- and set it to grand music. He and Cora speak men's and women's messages found on the postcards.

Ken Burns did something like this for public broadcasting. But this is better -- it's about us.

It's a celebration of our heritage, and it's wistful. Pawnee Rock is a complex place, and a project such as Larry and Cora's creates a new way to look at how our hometown grew up. Those early decades boomed and busted, and through it all families posed for photos and sent postcards that showed their homes and churches and that advertised their drugstores and nurseries.

As I understand it from Larry, this DVD is something of an experiment. For all his modesty, though, I think it's great. Larry and Cora looked at the pile of history and found a pattern, a story, a chorus of voices from old Pawnee Rock. I hope they keep at it.

We wish you a Merry Birthday

[December 26]   Mrs. Latas once told me to never again rearrange the letters of "NOEL" in the grade-school hallway. Thus was my sad little cry for recognition unheeded.

I suppose that all kids whose birthdays fall near holidays have the same problem, but I think it's worse for those of us whose big days are only a step away from Christmas and who grew up getting from frugal relatives one half-hearted gift "for Christmas and your birthday. I know you won't mind."

Maybe we're just the whiny ones, disappointed that the hoopla around the most important day of our year is lost in the Christmas shuffle. But heaven help those whose birthday falls on the day when the nation's economy is focused on returning unwanted gifts and desperately buying half-price Christmas leftovers.

But that's life -- even if "life" is never getting to take birthday cupcakes to school (everybody's gone for Christmas vacation) or to work "because it's too close to Christmas."

I've had one birthday party, one full-blown party to which friends were invited. It was during my first-grade year, and I think Todd Bright, Ida Deckert, Rhonda Countryman, Rick Batchman, Dale Unruh, and maybe the Givens boys came to our house for cake and ice cream. That's not the only reason they're my friends forever, but it's good enough. (That said, I must add that my immediate family always throws a great small party, with balloons and too many candles, and despite considerable concern for their own chocolate cravings makes me a lemon cake. I love the thoughtful cards and gifts that come in the mail. I wish you were here.)

Now, for all you other fine folks whose birthday falls amid these "happy holidays," let me answer your cry for recognition:

"You're a great person. You hardly seem a year older, but you're obviously even wiser than before. Being around you makes my day. Let's not go shopping."

The sounding joy

[December 25]   We went to one of the masses at the new Catholic Church in town last night. It is a wide-open church, with lots of windows and soaring arches -- the kind of place that seems suitable for a big event such as Christmas. The choir was accompanied by bell ringers, violins, a French horn, a trumpet, and a piano, and there was a harpist just outside the sanctuary. As we left, the organ launched into majestic chords.

It was my first Catholic service since I attended a funeral a dozen years ago. I couldn't help thinking about how different this church is from the humble Mennonite Church of Pawnee Rock. For all the grandeur, though, one thing was the same: People were happy to be there and left feeling good.

Holiday by the shovelful: We're having a white Christmas. I shoveled a half-foot of white off the driveway yesterday morning.

Hixon's: The photo of Hixon's store (on the home page today, in the gallery afterward) brings back a lot of memories -- and not just for the store. Look at that tree. Remember when downtown shade trees were cool?

Santa Claus explained

[December 24]   Here it is, Christmas Eve, and you're still buying presents? Well, drive carefully and remember to pick out something nice for me.

But in case you're done and the packages are already under the tree, here are some amusements to help you pass the time until the football games are over and Santa heads your way.

• The Physics of Santa Claus

• Arctic Mystery

• The Claus That Refreshes, or Why Santa Looks the Way He Does

• Can't get that Christmas carol out of your head but you can't think of the words? Don't be embarrassed! Here are the lyrics for contemporary songs and traditional carols.

• Listen to a recording of Clement C. Moore's "A Visit from St. Nicholas" -- better known as "'Twas the Night Before Christmas."

• Santa loves trans-fat-free cookies. But what do the reindeer snack on?

• The North American Air Defense Command -- NORAD -- tracks Santa for you so you'll know when to stop eating those cookies yourself and leave the rest by the fireplace.

• And, if you haven't been quite as good as you thought you had been and you end up with a stocking stuffed with coal, take heart. You can sell that coal and buy something cool with the profits. The weekly spot price for Central Appalachia coal is running about $47 a ton.

Luke 2:1 And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. . . .

Some of us might refresh our memory of the Gospel of Luke.

A day like today: As a kid, I didn't want to go to church more days than necessary, so having two services -- church in the morning, Christmas Eve service in the evening -- on the same day was perfect.

The evening service in our church involved a biblical play, the youth choir, a small gift of candy, and "Silent Night" in German (Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht. Alles schläft; einsam wacht) for the older folks who grew up singing it that way.

Afterward, we'd drive Grandma back to her place under a cold starry sky. At home, we might open a present or two, and I'd go to sleep listening for the tap-tap of reindeer feet.

One year I thought Santa was really my friend. I wanted a BB gun, and there for several days before Christmas was a long, flat box leaning against the wall next to the tree. Thank you, Santa! When the family gathered to open the presents, that box was kept until last, when it was delivered into the hands of my sister.

It was a pogo stick.

That incident haunts me like the Ghost of Christmas Presents. The moral? Be careful what you wish for, because you may not get it.

But you, faithful readers, I hope you do get what you have wished for.

Merry Christmas, one and all.

A photo I like: No. 16

[December 23]   The long shadows of evening are a favorite subject of mine. Here, the sun -- two or three minutes from setting -- casts a sidelong glance at Pawnee Rock State Park in January 1995.

I don't usually have two photos here and I rarely have one that's not from the Pawnee Rock area, but my birthday is coming and I thought I'd make an exception. The following photo was made by one of my parents at a Macksville High School junior varsity basketball game in 1972 or 1973. I'm wearing No. 42 and red Converse All-Stars. With me are Clayton McAllister (32), who was from Radium, and fellow Pawnee Rockers DeWayne Davidson (22) and Andrew Stimatze. This, of course, was after PRHS was closed and a bunch of us enrolled at Macksville. Besides cycling, basketball is my favorite sport.

The family dinner

Lena Unruh never was one to sit still when there was company. Clockwise from Lena: Anita Unruh, Merle Unruh, Laramie Unruh, (unseen: Laramie Unruh Jr. or Brenda Fox), Elgie Unruh, Herman Fox, Cheryl Unruh, Mary Fox, and Juletha Fox. This photo was made in 1973 or 1974.

[December 22]   On the big holidays -- Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas -- our Pawnee Rock and Great Bend families gathered at Grandma Unruh's farmhouse for dinner.

In our family, dinner came in the middle of the day. The main course was almost always a chicken from the farm, sometimes with ham. There were mashed potatoes and candied yams, a casserole, rolls, often beets, and the big glass relish tray with celery and carrot sticks, olives, and sweet gherkins.

Dessert was pie: cherry or mincemeat or lemon meringue with the fluffy topping that cried to be eaten first. After the table was cleared, the plate of peanuts, walnuts, Brazil nuts, filberts, and pecans was put on the table to occupy the uncles while the aunts washed the dishes in Tide. (Grandma was thrifty.)

Farmhouses built around 1900 didn't have insulation. In the winter, Grandma generally closed off the parlor so she wouldn't have to heat it with the propane furnace in the dining room, but the parlor was open at Christmas for the tree and the gift giving.

We kids burned off energy outside, heading to the barn when the afternoon was brisk and windy. If it was Christmas, we flitted around until it was time to open the presents piled under the heavily tinsled tree. After all these years, though, with the exception of a big jet plane it isn't the presents I remember most.

Grandma's dinners were a place for finding out things. The men talked expansively, probably moreso than they did at home. If a kid had a question -- Uncle Laramie, did you shoot anybody in Korea? -- this was the time and place to ask, because we sensed that if it was a good question everybody else would stop talking and wait for the answer.

I'd like to write that the dinners were always as sweet as the bowls of ribbon candy that Grandma laid out, but they weren't. Our family was like any other family; people are geared in different ways and sometimes siblings disagree. But getting most of the family together two or three times a year for this ceremony was the way our family remained a unit; we were responsible to one another.

Maybe we were like the bowl of ribbon candy: hard and colorful, sometimes broken, with a tendency to stick together.

Of course, we also could have been like the plate of nuts.

When I look at this photo of Grandma hovering over the table, however, I feel nothing but warmth. This is my family.

Changes in latitude, changes in attitude

[December 21]   After I wrote yesterday about sledding in Pawnee Rock, it occurred to me how much different the snowy world looks after you trade your sled for a car.

It's just not as much fun.

But why is that? Why don't adults have fun in the snow?

Sometimes snowstorms are bad, but mostly they're just inconvenient on the few days that snow falls each year. A good reminder came yesterday, when I-70 was closed west of WaKeeney.

Snow makes it more difficult to drive. Put a couple of teenagers, some grandparents, some parents with young kids, a yahoo with a cellphone, some cattle trucks, and Joe Blow with his bald tires on the snowy highway with me, and I get nervous. I know I can drive safely, but I fear that someone else will make a mistake that will turn my day unpleasant.

You feel the same way about me, don't you?

Confession: I've put my car in the snowy ditch a few times. I know the shame.

Adults have seen enough winters to know the hazards. Snow makes the roads slick. Snow melts into water that refreezes into ice. When we walk on ice, we fall down. Big wet storms can knock down powerlines, and then our pipes freeze because the furnace won't run and the kids get antsy because the TV won't work.

And somebody has to shovel the sidewalk.

I suppose the smart people pack up after a while and move to Arizona.

After I graduated from KU and was full of smarts, I moved to Austin, Texas, and worked at the paper there for four years. I moved back up I-35 to Wichita in time for a winter of record cold and snow. It was fun for that one winter. I stayed two more winters and moved back to Texas.

My only fear about moving to Alaska in 1990 wasn't the mosquitoes or earthquakes or bears or how far up and around the globe it was from Kansas. The bogeyman was snow -- how do people get around when it snows so much? But then I realized that people have been living in Alaska for 10,000 years and must have the situation under control.

Now, it's no big deal. I brushed 8 inches of flakes off my windshield last night before driving home from work and parked on a shoveled driveway next to a tunnel the boys had dug in the snowberm. The night before, I took the boys skiing around the neighborhood. Here on the 61st parallel, we won't see the grass until April.

It's winter. It snows in the winter. I have adjusted my attitude to fit reality.

And it doesn't hurt to have good tires, too.

Dashing through the snow

Two days after a heavy snow in January 2005, a little snow remains on the north slope of Pawnee Rock State Park.

[December 20]   Is there a kid who didn't drive a sled down the northern slope of Pawnee Rock? A daredevil who didn't push his luck down the park road? Dashing through the snow, laughing all the way until the sled smacked a cedar head-on?

Pawnee Rock kids were lucky. A lot of towns on the plains got snow, but they didn't have any hills. Go sledding in Macksville or Great Bend? Not a chance. To be fair, a lot of people didn't use gravity. They were towed around town behind a pickup. I suspect they survived for the same reason that dogs could survive the summer despite sleeping in the roads; there was rarely enough traffic to be dangerous.

We didn't have fancy sleds in our family, although we did have a pair and neither one came to us directly from a store. One was classic sled, the kind you flatten yourself onto and steer. The other one was an odd affair with big loopy runners -- the VW Beetle of sleds -- that I think was rescued from the dump.

Our town's sledding wasn't the classic fun we read about in schoolbooks written by New Englanders or saw in Disney movies. Snow in central Kansas isn't really made for sledding. It's often heavy and wet and turns to slush at the drop of a cotton glove.

It wasn't until I was a grownup that I began to understand why people made such a big deal of going to Colorado to ski. The snow's different there: It's fluffy and deep and it doesn't melt within a day. You know -- it's the way snow was meant to be, according to those books you read as a kid.

But when you're in Kansas, you do as Kansans do. You play hard, splashing through the snow as fast as you can before it melts into the buffalo grass.

12 useful things I learned in kindergarten

[December 19]   Back in 1989, Robert Fulghum published a short essay that made him famous: "All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." Some of his universal rules were:

• Share everything.
• Play fair.
• Don't hit people.
• Put things back where you found them.

The list went on in this vein for a while, and it was a pretty good compilation. He was right about how practical those lessons turned out to be.

Join me now in the kindergarten room in the Pawnee Rock school building. I took this photo last August, standing near the big windows and next to the east wall. I am looking toward where our teacher, Aletha Loving, kept her desk in front of the chalkboard.

What did I learn in kindergarten? To remember a lot of new names. To make my letters properly. To take my coat off quickly and hang it up. To raise my hand before answering. To walk down the hall without talking or pushing.

But there's more:

• The pencil sharpener handle goes up in front and back over the top. When you take off the case, shavings go everywhere. Don't stick a crayon in there.
• Also, don't stick a safety pin in a wall socket. (Marla Johnson taught us this.)
• Everyone gets to sit on a letter, but some people have their favorites.
• Chalk can screech on the blackboard.
• At nap time, don't lie down on your rug so that your face is next to someone else's feet. It's not that the feet stink, but that you might get kicked.
• Show and tell is fun.
• Big kids in other classes are dangerous.
• You like it when Mrs. Loving pays attention to you, and you try to make her happy. You can't ever fool her.
• It's not as easy as you'd think to get a milk carton to open correctly so you can drink out of it.
• When cardboard building blocks fall on you, it doesn't hurt. But if they fall on someone else, you're in trouble.
• The line to the bathroom moves slower and slower.
• When your last name starts with "U," you're going to be near the end of the line all your life.

This was my kindergarten class: Richard Batchman, Jerry Boyer, Todd Bright, Melissa Broadston, Jill Clawson, Rhonda Countryman, Ida Deckert, Kenneth Henderson, Charles Jelinek, Marla Johnson, Susan McFann, Debra Petty, Brenda Schmidt, Kristen Underwood, Leon Unruh, and Randy Wittig.

The luck of the Christmas draw

[December 18]   At the newspaper where I work, we in the newsroom had our annual potluck dinner and gift exchange last week. This year's treats included moose stew, venison sausage, and a baked boar's head.

And then came the part we were all stressing over: the giving of small presents to coworkers whose name we had pulled out of a cup.

It's hard to find something appropriate in a week's time. You want to buy a present that matches the recipient's interests -- but do you get a book on history or an edition of early comic strips? A DVD, perhaps, or a CD. Do you get something that's job related, or something that won't remind your coworker of his job?

As difficult as this is, however, nothing at yuletide is harder than picking out presents in grade school.

Our Pawnee Rock class, as yours probably did, drew names for a gift exchange in the classroom party just before we all went home for Christmas vacation. It was easy to pick for the boys -- we bought whatever boy-thing was being advertised on TV: wooden tops, or a GI Joe, or an airplane.

Girls were impossible to pick for. Maybe it was easier for guys with older sisters, who could give advice about clothing or makeup or music or books.

And there was the ultimate bad Christmas: when you drew the kid you hated -- or when your enemy drew you.

But sometimes there's a Christmas miracle.

In sixth grade, I drew the girl I had a crush on. After diligent searching at Penney's in Great Bend, I picked out a white billfold. Mom suggested that I put my picture in one of the plastic sleeves, which I did even though that seemed pushy.

My classmate opened her present and said "Thanks" instead of "Yuk!" when she came across my photo. I don't know whether she ever used the billfold, but that, boys and girls, was a great Christmas.

As for this year's gift exchange in the newsroom, I was stumped for a long time. Figuring I might as well give something I'd like to get myself, I chose the collection of cartoon strips.

I had drawn the cartoonist. He loved the book.

Flat, maybe, but a high flat

Does this look flat to you?

[December 17]   It occurred to me yesterday as I studied the photo of the dead cow how an outsider might look at that land and think, "Goodness, what an unimaginably flat place."

We know that's not true. There are several places in the township with elevation differences of a good 30 feet within a quarter mile. And the Rock, of course, looms 50 feet over downtown Pawnee Rock.

When I lived in Wichita and drove home the 112 miles home through the Arkansas River lowlands to Pawnee Rock, I would joke that the only hill along the route was the K-96 railroad overpass near Mount Hope. Actually, it wasn't much of a joke.

Sure, Kansas is as flat as a table -- but the table is tilted. The elevation of Wichita's Mid-Continent Airport is a mere 1,333 feet, and the top of Pawnee Rock State Park and the ridge that runs past the cemetery stand at a proud 2,000 feet. Take that, Mr. State's Biggest City!

A photo I like: No. 15

[December 16]   Sometimes you walk, sometimes you run, but in the end gravity always wins. This cow died in the pasture between the Pawnee Rock cemetery and the salt plant. The rancher had towed it to the edge of the field, where it was waiting for the truck from the rendering plant.

I made this photo one late-summer evening in 1987. The scene was peaceful: meadowlarks sang, the wind was a caress, and the evening light was gentle as the heifer slipped into the night.

What's in the wind?

[December 15]   The wind around Pawnee Rock can be stiff, summer or winter. It can sap your strength and make you crazy. It dries your sweat and dries out your yard.

Yet for all the bad things we say about the wind, Kansas is of course "the land of the south wind." The wind is Kansas, and anyone born in the state is born of the wind too.

The wind pollinates the grasses in the field and the trees in our yards. For more than a hundred years, the wind has driven the mill gears that pumped the water that kept our farms alive.

The wind is fresh, and you can breathe as deeply as you have a mind to.

Now, as you know, there's a plan to erect three more coal-burning power plants on the western Kansas plains along the Arkansas River not far from the feedlots of Finney County. Ninety percent of the power would leave the state, I've read, but the plants would use Kansas water and Kansas air and in return give Kansas mercury, sulfur dioxide, and soot.

The wind that blows from the southwest would spread that mixture toward Pawnee Rock and towns like it, and when your children run outdoors and take a deep breath you'd always wonder whether poisons were infiltrating their lungs -- so that more air conditioners can be run in the Denver metropolis.

The additional mercury and other toxins, widely dispersed, would be blown onto Kansas yards and gardens and stock ponds, and then they're yours forever. The carbon dioxide? Well, that would be Sunflower Electric Power Corp.'s gift to global warming.

The wind is going to blow. The choice seems to be whether it will blow against smokestacks or against the blades of wind turbines.

The wind will always blow. What do you want it to blow to your house?

On the radio: Pawnee Rock native Cheryl Unruh is scheduled to read one of her columns this morning on Kansas Public Radio a couple of times between 5 and 9 a.m. You can listen online. Want more of Cheryl? Here you go.

Back on the bus

[December 14]   As you all know, my dad drove a bus for the Pawnee Rock schools. He did it for 18 years, until about 1980. Other drivers I remember were Earl Allen Schmidt, Woody Wilhite and John Howerton.

My sister and I often rode along in the morning or afternoon. It was a cheap form of babysitting for our folks, and I think we really liked riding around in the country south and west of Pawnee Rock.

Being a town kid and a grade-schooler, I was fascinated by the rural boys and girls, whose conversations often covered machinery and animals. And because they lived away from Pawnee Rock itself, they often discussed other towns: Radium, Larned, Albert. Those weren't big towns, but they were different and therefore exciting.

Dad also drove team and spectator buses to football and basketball games and to track meets and music competitions. For a fee of 75 cents, high school spectators got a trip to Rozel, Bazine or -- a real bargain -- Healy.

A few vignettes stand out:

• Ron Darcey brushing Cora Deckert's hair after school while listing the leaders of the Soviet Union.

• Looking ahead for the white cloth that would or wouldn't tied to the fence in front of Cora's house to announce whether she was or wasn't riding that morning. Dad liked knowing ahead of time whether to stop. Sometimes families would call very early to tell Dad to drive on by.

• Doug Flick ostentatiously reading the political novel "Animal Farm."

• The Kroeker kids bounding onto the bus in the morning.

• Turning around at Pickle Creek, in the sand hills south of the river, after dropping off the Kasselmans.

• On the way home from a football game, Greg Davidson telling the world's longest chased-by-a-gorilla joke. (I'll save you the trouble: The punchline is "You're it!")

• Watching to see which boys and girls would pair up. School policy was to never dim the lights in the back of the bus.

• Sweeping out the bus when we got back to the shed.

Driven by the beat of Kansas

[December 13]   The year must have been around 1968. We were driving our red Impala back to Pawnee Rock from Sunday dinner at the Blue Goose in Larned. I was in my customary seat behind Dad, leaning against the window and lost in my thoughts as the radio, set on KANS, played a Beatles tune.

Suddenly I noticed that the long white lines in the middle of the road were passing in time with the rollicking beat of the music. I looked over Dad's shoulder at the speedometer, and we were going 60 miles per hour. Now, this was exciting! By the time we were home, I was ready to write to the Beatles and let them know of that magical stretch of U.S. 56.

Well, I didn't embarrass myself in a letter to the Fab Four. Eventually I figured out that it was a coincidence that everything matched up. But from that day, I've been attuned to patterns in nature.

We have all listened to the rhythm of bird calls and of the wind rattling the leaves and have seen the pretty pictures drawn by frost. But I'm thinking not of nature's own patterns, but instead of patterns imposed by people and their things.

Think of a field of furrows, straight to the end, when they turn toward the center of the field and return.

Of a stepped row of combines moving across a wheat field, their reels drawing wheat into the double rows of triangular teeth sliding back and forth and the spreader at the back whipping the straw out -- whack, whack, whack -- with a dusty plume.

Of a freight train rolling along the tracks, clacking over the joints. Of a car rolling over a cattle guard. Of a car beating its wheels against a sandy washboard by the river.

Of power poles stretching into the horizon, each pair looking a little closer together than the pair before it. Of the drooping arcs of wire between the poles.

Of the endless music of irrigation pumps. Of the clanking of pigs nosing into their feeders at night. Of the whip-whip-whip of windmills and wind generators.

Of tire treads on a dirt road. Of a dirt road every mile.

Maybe our lives follow patterns too, and it's easy to see why. It's our nature.

Santa Claus is comin' to town

[December 12]   It has dawned on son Sam that he hasn't prepared his Christmas list yet. He's a little worried because he didn't hand a list to the Santa at the grade school bazaar.

I don't think he really believes in Santa Claus, but Santa has been good to him for the previous 10 Christmases and he doesn't want to jump off the gravy train now.

We all know how he feels, I would think.

I'm not afraid to admit that I once was a true believer. You'd have to be when you lived in our house.

We didn't have a chimney. Well, we had galvanized tubes rising from the furnace and water heater, but we didn't have the classic brick chimney or fireplace. How I envied the people in Pawnee Rock who lived in big houses!

Still, I stayed awake and listened on too many Christmas Eves for the sound of reindeer on the roof. I watched the furnace to see whether Santa and his bag of gifts would squeeze out past the filter. Maybe he came in the front door, like Dad. Who knows how the miracle worked; the presents still appeared under our tinsel-and-paper-chain-decorated tree.

Complicating matters was Santa's arrival on the Saturday before Christmas, waving from the back of a Pawnee Rock firetruck as the siren screamed. Santa handed out bags of candy, oranges, and nuts that Dad and I and Cheryl had prepared in Dad's shop; these were gifts from the Lions Club. For a while, I was really puzzled by why Santa went to so much trouble, being driven down from the Rock (so the story went) just for our town. It was nice of him to stick around and hand out raffle turkeys, too.

I don't mind that our boys believe -- or are willing to let me believe that they believe -- in Santa. It lets us double the number of presents they get: one from Dad, one from Santa, one from Mom, one from Santa. The happy beliefs that children have are few enough.

The truth is obvious, of course: There is no Santa with rooftop reindeer. Yet, when I see my sons' bright eyes, it seems clear that there is more than one truth.

Verna Wickstrom: Verna Wickstrom, who lived in Pawnee Rock for many years and was married to Ralph, has died. Her son, Mike Mauney, is of Pawnee Rock. The funeral and burial will be Wednesday afternoon in Larned. Obituary

Open the door

[December 11]   There's always a door.

This one is to the pumphouse on my Unruh grandparents' farm northwest of Pawnee Rock. By the time I arrived, the frame building was just a storage shed between the yard and the vegetable garden.

You know kids: We'll snoop around in anything in hopes of finding something interesting. Magazines, firearms, knives, tools. In this building, there wasn't any fishing tackle, but there were tools and leg-hold traps (which I used on rabbits and rats). There were many old cans and bottles; in hindsight, a biohazard suit probably would have been a good thing to wear.

This room was a small museum of the way the farm used to be. Some of it made sense, and some of it . . . well, you must have had to be there when it was used to understand what it was for. It was a room full of strange items, some hanging from the walls, but it was also comforting to know that my grandparents and uncles and aunt had used everything in there. Their hands had touched it all.

Dad told me once that he had been exploring in there too, back in the 1930s. He had wondered what would happen when you put a .22 rimfire shell in a vise and tapped it with a hammer. I always looked for the hole in the wall, but apparently it was plugged.

This door is gone now, rubbed off the earth after the farm was sold. But there are other doors on other farms, or next to other gardens.

Sometimes a door is a metaphor. Sometimes a door is just a door. Open one and see what you find.

The taste of snow

[December 10]   Good snows are infrequent in central Kansas. When the snow does come, it's usually with a big wind that pushes it into ditches and drifts. And the temperature is often so warm that the snow turns to mush within hours.

But once in a while, the snow falls to the ground and stays put. Kids pour into yards and re-learn how to roll a double handful of snow into a snowball too big to lift, and snowforts and snowmen are born.

Yesterday, the town where I now live got four or five inches of snow. The temperature was around 30 degrees, so the snow was wet and easy to pack. Our family did what comes naturally: We built snowmen. Eight snowmen -- actually, five snowmen and three snowdogs.

Sixty years ago, the tradition was to use coal for the buttons (you got it down at the warehouse by the tracks) and a lot more of grandpa's pipes for the head. More men wore hats, and snowmen more closely resembled Frosty.

Forty years ago, we barely dressed our snowmen. I don't think we even had a scarf in the house.

But there's more to snow than snowmen and getting so stuck that you have to beg a farmer to pull you out of the ditch.

There's snow ice cream.

You've probably made it: a bowl of clean snow, a little milk, and maple or vanilla extract. You mix it with a spoon and eat it right away.

It is said the people of the far north have dozens of words for snow. They don't, however, generally make ice cream out of snow. Instead, they've traditionally whipped rendered fat and added berries. Nowadays, it's handier to beat a bowl of Crisco into a winter delight.

Me, I'll take ice cream the way nature intended: right off the ground.

Sell this: Flyoverpeople.net's Saturday blog entry describes a disturbing new method of fundraising by kids.

A photo I like: No. 14

[December 9]   You can't have too much color in August. This stop sign jumped out at me late one afternoon at the Mennonite Cemetery two and a half miles north of Pawnee Rock. Seen from a car, the signs are just part of the scenery. When you get up close, however, it's easy to be impressed by their size.

Chili weather

[December 8]   My favorite Boy Scout fundraiser came in the New Jerusalem Church basement. What made it special was carrots.

Our troop was raising money for either camping gear or a trip to Camp Kansa, the retreat near Arlington. If I remember right, we voted for the chili feed because it just sounded like fun. The Rev. Galen Unruh let use his church's kitchen and tables.

Tickets to the chili dinner weren't too expensive, $3 or so. We set up long rows of tables and folding chairs, and the chili was created in stainless steel pots by several dads, all of them joking around. We laid out plates of crackers and carrot sticks on the papered tables.

I suppose I had led a sheltered life, but the idea of eating a vegetable with chili struck me as a treat. Imagine -- someone in town had been eating this way all along!

The place was full. We carried pitchers of water and coffee and refilled the cracker plates. We smiled and said thank you and tried not to get anything on our Scout shirts.

That was my introduction, back in junior high, to raising money through filling people's bellies. I know now that the food probably was secondary to the diners' desire to get out of the house for a cheap dinner and chat up the neighbors. And that was OK.

Since then I've been to plenty of other fundraisers: spaghetti, hamburgers, hotdogs, fish, chicken, pizza, even donuts. I'm by no means an expert, but I do feel qualified to offer some observations:

• Chili is boiled until it can't possibly be unsafe.

• Chili fills your belly. The beans give you something to laugh about all night.

• Chili contains ingredients that cost real money. Spaghetti doesn't, and we all know it. Spaghetti is what we eat when we don't have money to buy what we would rather eat. Even when I go to fundraisers for a cause I like, I want to believe that it's costing the cooks something too.

• Chili has better side dishes and condiments: saltines and carrots, cheese and onions. Spaghetti, already a plate full of starch, has bread for a side dish.

• On the other hand, spaghetti is good if you have kids. Kids like spaghetti. It splashes.

It's going to be cold and snowy this weekend. I think I'll make some chili. Bring $5 and you can have a bowl and a stack of carrots.

Rocketing back in time

[December 7]   In 1966 or so, the Pawnee Rock schools needed a new bus. My dad, who would be driving it, was dispatched that summer to pick it up in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

And what's a bus driver without passengers? Mom, Cheryl, and I went along. We all drove in our blue Dodge Coronet on the way out there; Mom got a few days of peace on the way home and Cheryl and I got the run of the bus. We were, I think, about to go into second and fourth grade.

There were highlights: seeing four state capitols, including the tornado-damaged one in Topeka; touring Hannibal, Missouri, and Mark Twain Cave; getting lost in the woods at the Abraham Lincoln New Salem park in Illinois; and driving through the parking lot of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The stellar point of the trip, however, came in Dayton, Ohio.

In that town was Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and the Air Force Museum, a fantastic repository of rocketry and space exploration -- a national version of the Cosmosphere in Hutchinson. What fourth-grade boy wouldn't love that?

The folks gave me a couple of bucks to buy a college-level paperback guide to building rockets, which I devoured over the next week. It was far beyond my abilities, but it had diagrams of rocket motors, descriptions of solid fuels, designs of firing ranges, and explanations of thrust. That was just the help I needed to plot trajectories from our house to the houses of other kids (heads up, Randy Wittig!). In fact, if actually building a rocket hadn't proved to be impossible for a barefoot boy with no money and no metalworking skills, I might have been known as the Kansas Missile King.

This was before you could buy cardboard rocket kits at hobby shops. You can imagine how thrilled I was a few years later when Dad was digging through the city dump and found a beaten-up metal rocket with two sheet-metal fins still welded to its slender fuselage. I filled it with flammables and tried to launch it from the front yard.

So when the space shuttle gets launched today, you know I'll be watching on TV, just as I used to for every Gemini and Apollo launch. This time, the pilot is a guy who grew up nearby in Alaska and flew Cessnas as a teenager.

Were it not for a couple of career decisions along the way, I can see myself working on the shuttle program. And the credit for that would go to a few days of reading and dreaming in the back of a brand-new Pawnee Rock school bus.

More nicknames: Cheryl adds these to yesterday's collection:

• Mark "Cotton" Smith
• Ray "Rayball" Tutak

Names you know

[December 6]   A correspondent sent us a list of Pawnee Rock schoolmates' nicknames. Do these ring any bells?

• Verlin "Orley" Morgan
• David "Cricket" Smith
• Steve "Manuel" Crosby
• Larry "Jake" Crosby
• Glenn "Marion" Mull
• Ed "Beans" Crosby
• Doug "Bugs" Unruh
• Kevin "Gill" Unruh
• Warren "Benny" Deckert
• Bill "Bo" Levingston
• Gwen "Hubba" French
• Kent "Buck" Tutak

This collection comes from the golden age of nicknames. These folks graduated in the 1960s and early 1970s.

Our correspondent, who asked to be anonymous, also remembers cars:

• Mike Swanson's black '64 Sport Fury
• Doug Weathers' blue '64 Chevelle
• Mike Dunlap's green '58 Olds
• Verl Brown's gray '51 Chevy Fastback
• Dave Morgan's orange '68 Roadrunner
• John Keener's blue '55 Chevy

Let's see you top those lists, trivia fans.

Little town on the prairie

[December 5]   My wife and sons are on a "Little House on the Prairie" bender these days. My wife bought the entire 10 seasons on DVD, and they've been watching episode after episode for ... well, I've lost track of how many weeks.

The 1970s and 1980s TV show was an idealized knockoff of Laura Ingalls Wilder's series of books about growing up on homesteads in Kansas, Minnesota, and the Dakotas. Some of our readers may have been to the re-created cabin near Independence, where the family lived when they were Jayhawks.

The first years of Pawnee Rock must have been a lot like "Little House," with blizzards and disease and uncertain crops and kids running around in bib overalls.

Our sons are watching and learning about the pioneers, even if it is just the watered-down TV version. I tell them about the Unruhs and Schultzes, who arrived in a boxcar in roadless Barton County at the time the Ingallses were plowing up the prairies, and about my mom's side, which landed in northwestern Kansas, and they gain respect for their heritage.

Maybe they'll think of their own great-great-grandparents as heroic figures, pressing the plow into the soil and swinging a hammer to create a home on the windswept prairie.

Because the idea of history has been made interesting, the boys will more quickly grasp the difficulties that the settlers faced, succumbed to, and overcame. The boys might even extend their respect to your and my generations.

In a few years, I know, the boys will read "Too Long in the Wind" and begin to understand that we of the pioneer generation, twice or thrice removed, were just regular heroes, walking to school through three-foot snowdrifts, coaxing tomatoes out of baked soil between dust storms and tornadoes, and making do without color television. In the meantime, I'll bask in the reflected glory of Pa Ingalls.

Snake and shake

[December 4]   The snakeskin lay next to a weathered fencepost, so well camouflaged that I walked past it twice before the pattern caught my eye.

When I picked it up, the skin was flexible. I don't think it had been gathering dust in the August heat for very long.

Snakes are reasonably plentiful in central Kansas, feeding on rats, mice, and ground-nesting birds. We see racers and bull snakes from our cars, usually after an unfortunate incident involving a badly timed attempt to cross the road.

I've always been surprised -- and a little disappointed -- that there aren't more rattlesnakes around Pawnee Rock. That said, there are plenty of rocky places where I won't stick my hand without putting a stick there first.

Most of the snakes I've seen were at the cemetery, where the bull snakes feast on ground squirrels. In fact, when Dad was the sexton, he collected bull snake skins, the longer the better, and he stretched them out on a display board at his shop downtown. A lot of them were 6 feet long.

As many people who have walked through fields, especially down by Ash Creek, might know, bull snakes can be just as scary as rattlers. They don't rattle and they don't bite humans, but they do make a raspy hiss. Loudly. The uninitiated are never quite sure whether that's what a rattle sounds like, and they give the snake a wide berth then creep closer in fascination. They often throw cow patties at it, too, hoping to chase it off.

There's no shortage of fear we can whip up when faced with a snake -- or even with the notion that one may be lurking at our feet. We've been trained for it since the first time we heard of Eden: "The serpent," says Genesis 3:1, "was more subtle than any other creature the Lord God had made."

That may be true. In general, snakes move silently under our world. We hardly ever think about them until we roll over one or until we find one coiled up like a hose next to the house. But in most cases, I think, the fear comes simply from surprise and maybe annoyance that the wild kingdom has intruded on our lives. We don't see the world as a snake does, so we don't know what it wants to do. Sadly, our training for "unexpected animal" is often to kill it.

Yet snakes, by the thousands, are out there in the grass and rocks. They're minding their own business, dining at the rodent buffet, making our nightmares a little more vivid, and shedding their skins where we can find them. I say that's worth something.

Birth of a salesman

[December 3]   Adam Deckert was a saint and a trusting man.

He bought my Concord grapes, the ones with the super-tart skins surrounding the sun-warmed slick insides. He lent me his leather shoes to be polished. He may have even bought tickets to the Boy Scout-a-Rama.

I took advantage of Adam quite a bit when I was Mr. Entrepreneur. The Deckerts were our family friends, and those are the people who suffer the most when a kid sees the need to earn a little pocket money. You're probably reminded of that when cash-hungry schools and ball teams send their kids out to hawk wrapping paper, candy, and raffle tickets.

I bet each one of us Pawnee Rock kids had some early attempt at marketing and sales. I hope everyone else had a little better idea of how to go about it than I did. Our family did things, rather than sell them. As life turned out, it would have been good to have learned a better mixture of skills.

My early newspaper, the Pawnee Rock Informer, didn't have advertising in its three years of existence because I was too shy to ask anyone to advertise and because, more importantly, I had no idea what advertising meant to a business, to the customers, and to my own bottom line.

Find a need and fill it. Now I know.

It's neat to watch our younger son, Nik, learn about marketing. He's an entrepreneur and always looks for a way to add to his bank account. Saturday at a grade school bazaar, he sold dog biscuits and bones that he, a friend, and their moms made in the kitchen. He sold out in about two hours and took home nearly $100.

He's finding and filling a need, and he's learning to tout the benefits of his product.

Of course, he has advantages that you and I didn't have as kids. He has a graphic designer mom, for example, and he lives in a town bigger than Great Bend. His market is simply bigger and richer than our hometown is.

But one thing's the same. When he sells something, I see in his smile the same feeling I got when a Pawnee Rock neighbor bought grapes she really wanted.

A photo I like: No. 13

[December 2]   I was walking near the opera house and back around the old telephone building last August when I found this pile of bricks along the alley. Our Boy Scout troop used to meet in this building in the 1960s and early 1970s, and it has been upgraded by Patty Lee, who owns the adjacent antique store.

Places and people on display

[December 1]   Well, here it is the last month of the year, and maybe December has come in gently. In eastern Kansas, of course, it came in like a snow angel with a headache.

Sometimes I just like to look around the Web. Here are some entertaining places to visit.

Railroad site: If you're an Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad fan, you'll like this site recommended by Larry Smith: www.atsfry.com. This particular link goes directly to a photo of the Pawnee Rock depot.

What this world came from: Here are some historical museums within a 45-minute drive of Pawnee Rock.

• Barton County Historical Society Museum and Village in Great Bend

• Rush County Historical Museum in LaCrosse

• Santa Fe Trail Center west of Larned

What this world is coming to: You've heard about MySpace.com, the site where people share their interests. Some Pawnee Rock people have become members and might have something to say. Check it out:

1. Go to MySpace.com.

2. In the search field at the top, click on the "MySpace" tab.

3. Type in "pawnee rock" (or "great bend" or "larned" or wherever you're curious about).

Some of the language is tasteless, but if you deal with Pawnee Rock teens and young adults, you're probably used to that. You might have spoken a few of these words yourself when you were finding your way.

Sell it

Advertise here to an audience that's already interested in Pawnee Rock:

Or tell someone happy birthday.