Too Long in the Wind

March 2006

Red-brick democracy

[March 29]   I grew up in the house next door to the old City Hall and fire station. This red-brick building was where I learned how our town worked.

Although the council members were grown-ups I knew from school, church, 4-H or Boy Scouts, they took on a different aura when they sat down at the table. These were men and women who were brave enough and principled enough to stand for election, and other people had voted for them and their ideas. The voting took place in this room, too.

When I was old enough in the early 1970s, I attended the city council meetings and listened to discussions of, for example, how to spend federal block-grant money. Sewer projects were mentioned, but it seems the vote eventually came down on the side of curbs and gutters for our sand-and-dirt streets. This directly affected me, because in my grade-school years I had spent many rainy days building sand dams across the ditch in front of our house. Curbs didn't make any difference to the town's dogs, who still slept in the middle of the street.

As a bastion of democracy, City Hall was more than just where the council met. It also housed the couple of thousand books in the town library. Imagine what a gift it was to have the library next to my home.

City Hall was all these things:

• The building and government, which we all had in common.
• Fire station. Two fire trucks and a loud siren that was turned on only for fires and tornado-drill testing.
• Library. The book van from Great Bend brought a new selection every week to puff up our shelves.
• Court and jail. You came in to pay for speeding or running a red light. Although I never saw anyone in the slat cage in the back room, I heard once that a killer had been held there for a few hours.
• Utility bills payment station, where Mr. Carpenter sat behind a table, took our money and stamped "paid" on our postcard bills.
• Dog pound. Cages held howling dogs behind the fire station. This wasn't the city's finest achievement.
• Maintenance yard behind the building. The grader was parked under the elms.
• Boy Scout meeting hall. We sat in the council's chairs and learned how to be good Americans.

Sticking it to your friends

[March 27]   It is one of summer's finest gifts -- sticker grass.

The business end of a stem of this grass has a dozen or so pea-size seed pods covered with barbs. They stick to socks, to long-haired pets and especially to skin. The plants grow next to churches and the school, anywhere we Pawnee Rock kids could congregate without adult supervision.

You remember the stickers. If you were a boy, you did what comes naturally and threw a stalk at your friends or those you hoped would become your girlfriends. Girls, possibly sensitized by pain, had a more intelligent view of the stickers. Boy or girl, however, you threw them only at people you could trust to retaliate in a fair way -- not at your face, not in front of your parents.

Sticker grass becomes noticeable in early summer, beating by several weeks the cockleburr, which isn't really painful until fall and isn't much fun to throw anyway, and the devil's claw, which is more of a winter annoyance and then only if you are walking through a pasture. And the common thorn plant, bane of bike tires in August, is an ugly little creeper with no redeeming value.

When my mom and I took my Alaska-dwelling sons to the Barton County Historical Museum last July, they saw many new things: antique trucks and tractors, my dad's wooden model of a farm, a train station. I stumbled across some sticker plants and invited 7-year-old Nik to toss one at my leg.

Well, wouldn't you want to expose your kid to childhood pleasures?

He hesitated. But it turns out he's a natural boy.

Edge of town, edge of the world

[March 25]   Remember when the world was so big that you could take a 30-minute walk and see something you had never seen before?

One day when the 1970-ish year was young, DeWayne Popp (now Davidson) and I tested our hiking skills. We loaded up our backpacks with dill pickles and sandwiches, hung green canteens around our shoulders and set off northwest. Our destination wasn't set; we just wanted to go someplace.

We passed the small feedyard on the edge of town and headed west. Now this dirt road is called SW 165 Road, but back then it was "the road past the Shields house."

A quarter-mile out of town and well past the Shieldses' two-story house and the last shelterbelt, we decided that the spring wind was a little too sharp and that it was time to break for lunch. We lay back in the north ditch, faces to the sun as the wind moved above our heads.

Of course we had been this way before. We had biked out here, like all kids, and I had walked this lightly traveled route in the summer to my grandparents' farm. So this was not new territory. But sitting there in the soft ditch dirt let us absorb a different perspective on Pawnee Rock. We sat there and saw just how nice it felt to be away from everybody and have not a single thing to do.

To this day I've never had a better dill pickle.

Backup basketball

[March 23]   The Jayhawks men's basketball team lost embarrassingly early in the NCAA tournament, and the KU women are out of the NIT. The big news for the K-State men's team is that it has hired a coach with a speckled past. And Barton County's not in the juco tournament. K-State's women's team plays tonight in the NIT.

On the main stage, we still have our emergency backup team -- the Shockers.

Wichita State never seemed to have much cachet in our neck of the plains, although the school has had good baseball over the years and an occasional good basketball team. And Pawnee Rock residents do see the Shockers, good and bad, on Wichita TV news shows.

In fairness, I should point out that my wife and my mom, Anita, both graduated from WSU and that I took some history classes there when I worked in Wichita.

Go, Shocks!

The politics of wind

[March 21]   A historian once wrote that Poland's centuries of being dominated were caused by its geography: a plain on which the armies of what's now Germany and Russia swept back and forth.

To me, that describes Kansas as well. Not the part about the Germans and Russians, of whom there are plenty, but the battlefield.

The plains, especially the high plains to the west and the Arkansas River valley, are where meteorological air forces play their power games.

The southwest wind and the north wind have their seasons. The southwest wind leaves scorched earth, the north wind freezer burn. And between those two seasons, the land recovers quickly. The bright colors come to the front. Flowers and crops arise in the spring, and red and yellow trees decorate our county in the autumn.

As in geopolitics, when neither the southwest wind nor the north wind is in control, we have a power vacuum that sometimes is filled by opportunistic forces: thunderstorms and tornadoes. And what's more exciting than a green sky?

Elgie Unruh is turning 80

[March 19]   Many of you know my dad, Elgie Unruh. He was born north of town and moved to Pawnee Rock, where he built the house that still stands on Sante Fe Avenue. For health reasons and convenience, he and his wife, Betty, moved to Great Bend late last year. The photo shows him with grandson Nik last year in the house in Pawnee Rock.

He started out his work life making truck beds, a job that evolved into Elgie's Craft Shop, which was in the brick building catty-corner from the post office. He ran the bus route west and south of town. He carried mail for years. He took care of the cemeteries, digging many graves. (Read about that in this book; flip through the pages until you reach the Digging Graves chapter.) He took care of his mother, Lena. He taught carpentry in 4-H and was a member of the Lion's Club. He and his first wife, Anita, raised Cheryl and me.

Dad's turning 80 the last week of March. It would be nice if you'd congratulate him on his achievement when you see him in Pawnee Rock, at church or when he's drinking coffee in Great Bend.

Pawnee Rock: The movie

[March 18]   We all have unresolved issues from our childhoods. One of mine involves old television shows.

A couple of what-show-was-that questions have been resolved, thanks to the miracle of late-night reruns on cable channels.

But here's the one I haven't yet solved, and maybe someone can help me.

In the 1960s, one of the TV stations visible in Pawnee Rock ran a series called "Experimental Television," in which quirky movies were broadcast. One of the movies involved the main male character talking about "lying on my back along Ash Creek near Pawnee Rock, Kansas, and my girlfriend bringing me a beer."

This caught my attention because it mentioned Pawnee Rock, of course, and because it mentioned three scandalous possibilities: girlfriend, beer, Ash Creek (and we all knew what could happen at Ash Creek).

What was the name of this show, and when did it air? Any ideas?