Too Long in the Wind

August 2006

Walking through the dust

[August 31]   Earlier this month Durward Smith let me walk around on our old family farm, which Dad had sold him for Grandma back around 1990. The Smiths have lived west across the road forever.

I kicked around the yard, reliving a lot of memories and emotions. The last time I was here, the two-story farmhouse was still standing. The yard looks a lot smaller without it, and now there are cattle all over.

I did go into every building that was still standing: the brooder house, the chicken house, the root cellars, and the barn. My cousins and I played quite a bit in the barn, as kids visiting grandparents will do. Grandma couldn't be everywhere, and there were secretive places in the barn where kids could play cards and -- heaven help us -- tear apart firecrackers and burn the gunpowder.

Thirty years after I climbed it as a kid, the ladder to the hayloft is still held in place by a single piece of baling wire. In the loft this August, I was careful to walk on the joists; I didn't trust the floorboards even long ago. Dust filled the air like a million stars, stirred in the heat by pigeons panicking from one end of the barn to the other.

Across the floor in the middle is a shed where tools and bags of grain once were kept. A barrel hoop is nailed to the side; Dad told me years ago that he and his siblings had played basketball there.

My cousins and I spent many hours on the barn's lower level, where the combine and Impala and cattle were kept, and we rarely messed around upstairs -- it was a do-it-on-a-dare zone. The loft was full of pigeon poop, there was a cat's skeleton off to one side, and I doubt that the hay had been changed since the 1950s. Maybe it still hasn't.

The loft was Dad's place to play, and maybe his dad's before him. It wasn't my place, but I got to stand there -- 30 years ago and again this year -- and imagine what it was like for young Dad.

But that was Dad's life. My sister and cousins and I have our own history in the barn. As the dust settles, understanding the difference makes a trip to the farm more rewarding.

One day at the fair

[August 30]   Most adults don't see the state fair as quite the adventure that kids do. I imagine it has been that way for generations, and I'm reminded of that every time I see my boys light up at the prospect of bumper cars and demolition derbies.

When we were growing up around Pawnee Rock in the 1970s, being set loose -- trusted with good judgment and twenty dollars -- on the Kansas state fairgrounds was as good as it got.

Sometimes the high school band would perform, and then we'd have the rest of the day to ourselves. Other times, our parents would take us for the day. During my senior year, I drove my sister there and we each took a date.

For several years, I entered the 4-H and wheat-industry photo contests and won a few ribbons. It was nice to see other kids from Pawnee Rock and Larned do well with their cooking and home ec exhibits. When we were young, 4-H was the reason for the fair. A little later, 4-H was replaced by tractor races and, well, the Tunnel of Love.

As much as I revere the rides and exhibits, however, the real treat is the people.

Farmers earnestly tend their critters, and salesmen hawk their cars, tractors, schlocky T-shirts, and fancy knives. On the midway, young parents are towed by wide-eyed kids. Women wear things they really shouldn't, and the men show off their finest tattoos.

And the food -- cholesterol on a stick, grease on a plate, sugar in a cup: we're talking about food that has real flavor.

Fairs haven't changed much in the important ways. There's still the mixture of city and rural, concerts by stars our parents thought highly of, and rides on which a guy can either throw up or throw his arm around his girl.

Families still spend way too much, farmers still earnestly tend their critters, and kids still try to win goofy hats. And it's all worth it.

The fair connects the kids from the center of the state to the rest of Kansas. If we let it, the fair allows us all to see Kansas as kids again.

The postmasters of Pawnee Rock

[August 29]   I practically grew up in the Pawnee Rock post office. Mom worked behind the counter, selling stamps and helping postmaster Roger Unruh sort the mail. Before Dad got the permanent job of carrying the rural mail, he was the fill-in guy behind Virgil Smith.

Occasionally -- and this was long before the super-serious-security days in which we live -- Cheryl and I would get to help sort the mail into the mailboxes and the outgoing bags. (If you got the wrong mail in those days, I apologize.)

During a visit to the post office this month, I wondered aloud who all the postmasters had been. And lo, Merita Rice pulled out a framed list.

Here they are. Note that the post office has been open for 134 years and 1 day.

• George M. Jackson -- August 28, 1872
• Annie T. Irvine -- April 24, 1873
• Dennis R. Logan -- April 6, 1875
• Simon P. Leitner -- December 22, 1876
• William M. Jenks -- March 14, 1879
• Alfred W. Metcalf -- August 25, 1880
• Joseph N. Barrett -- May 14, 1883
• Job M. Miller -- August 25, 1885
• Joel Miller -- March 31, 1886
• Charles W. Vosburg -- July 3, 1889
• Andrew Daniels -- May 20, 1893
• George A. Francis -- June 23, 1897
• Sam H. King -- November 28, 1914
• Nancy M. McKetchnie -- May 2, 1916
• Edmond Houdyshell -- August 19, 1921
• Charles Dean Ross -- March 4, 1936
• Margaret K. Converse -- January 20, 1940
• Virgil L. Smith -- August 6, 1957
• Roger R. Unruh -- May 22, 1958
• Mary Joan Smith -- October 6, 1979
• Doug Smith -- February 23, 1991
• Kathy A. Pechanec -- May 4, 2002

Occasionally, there have been interim postmasters, or officers in charge. Roger Unruh served the longest term, 21 years.

The location of the post office has moved several times. It was often in the block where the depot now is, in buildings that aren't there anymore. It was also in the building west of the current post office, which used to be one of the town's two banks.

It looked like fun

[August 28]   Eight-year-old Nik and I went mountain-climbing Sunday, picking our way up a mountain to about 3,300 feet. On the way up and down, we gathered blueberries in the sun.

It's not remarkable, I suppose, that Nik scampered to the top long before I got there (I'll blame my backpack full of water, jackets, and snacks) or that Nik practically ran down the slope on the way back. Thighs that start out made of steel turn with age to lead.

One of the fun things about this little exercise was watching the parasailers -- those folks who pack a wing-shaped parachute up the mountain, open it to the breeze and walk off into the air. One fellow on the high ridgeline let us bother him with questions as he laid out his lines and waited for the right updraft.

He said he had been making these flights for four years. I asked him whether he had a background in parachuting; he replied that had had no experience and had started parasailing because "it looked like fun."

Then he gathered the lines in his hands, spoke a little prayer, stepped backward, and rose like an eagle.

Mountain daredevils have appealed to me since the mid-1970s, when I found a couple of fellows practicing their rappelling skills one evening on Pawnee Rock.

They wrapped a rope around a locust tree at the top of the cliff and dropped one end down the east face of the Rock. The guy at the top wrapped the rope through a set of rings strapped around his waist, and the guy at the bottom held on to the other end for support.

Then the guy with the rope around his waist walked backward over the cliff, leaning out as far as he could go until he walked his way down. They each did it several times, then asked me whether I'd like to try.

Of course I didn't want to -- it looked crazy. So I did it anyway. Badly.

Who trusts walking backward over the edge and then sticking out from the cliff? Cliffs are meant for hugging. Ropes are meant for holding on to, not sliding past your waist.

These days, rock climbers are everywhere, spider-walking up and down cliffs with their rosin-covered hands and funny shoes. Ropes come in a zillion colors, and whole catalogs are dedicated to belts and rings. But in the 1970s in central Kansas, everything about these guys from Great Bend was an introduction to a new world.

It was a backward-walking, death-defying world, but sometimes a teenager needs to find one of those worlds and step into it just because it looks like fun.

Friends with photos

[August 26]   Alita Felts sent in some nice photos Friday of the recent flooding in Pawnee Rock. Marsha Bouker of Hays earlier sent a photo of her family. Janice and Earl Schmidt contributed photos of the 1971 ceremony at the state park and of the City Drug Store, and of course Don Ross has entertained us for months with his photos of old Pawnee Rock. Konny Trinka made it possible for me to digitize lots of school photos for the site. Cheryl Unruh has sent historical photos, Laramie Unruh sent a nice photo of himself and Glenda Franklin, and I've posted many photos collected over the years by Elgie Unruh. Thanks to you all!

I think I speak for all the readers when I say that we appreciate your contributions to Pawnee Rock's online archive.

If any reader has some Pawnee Rock photos and can send them digitally (up to 600 pixels wide), we'd love to see them. If you have questions or photos, give me a shout.

The cemetery fence

[August 25]   The whitetail deer looked at me from the field beyond the cemetery's north fence. The deer was calm, but it was also taut.

We stood there for a couple of minutes, a hundred feet apart. It was a humid day, a few hours after a big rain, and the air was heavy.

Between us, and to the left, was the tree where Dad first pointed out a brown thrush and a flicker. Dad and I, and Mom and Cheryl, spent a lot of time in this corner of the cemetery because the white clapboard mower shed was here. The heavy boards that Dad bolted together to outline the graves as he dug them were kept in the shed, and so were the clippers we used to keep the grass around the headstones neat.

There always were a few flower vases on the private side of the shed, the green brittle kind with a spike on the bottom for putting next to a stone. The flowers and wet styrofoam would be gone, gathered a week after a funeral or Memorial Day and carried in the pickup to join the big pile of leftover dirt and branches in the back of the cemetery, over on the east side. But the vases were left here for anyone who needed them.

In the winter, tumbleweeds would pile up against the back fence, pressing their scratchy fingers through the chain link. When people came here in the winter, they too would turn their backs to the north. The wind was always pushing, finding a way into us and past.

Sometimes I miss the cemetery a great deal, in the way I miss the home where I grew up. For many folks, it's a place of private sadness; for me, it's where my family was a family.

The deer and I looked into each other's eyes, and I must have moved my head. The deer turned with a start and in seconds became a memory, like the birds and the wind and the tumbleweeds and the years.

Elevated dreams

[August 24]   Randy Staggs, the manager of the Farmers Grain installation in Pawnee Rock, says the steel elevator on the south side of U.S. 56 may be replaced in the next year or so.

Now, this is a sad thing -- another Pawnee Rock landmark being removed. But Pawnee Rock has a long history of raising and razing elevators. The bins just east of the elevator in question stand on the site of an old Gano elevator and shed. The photo atop PawneeRock.org's Gallery pages shows five elevators, none of which still stands. They come and they go.

Let's look at this creatively. Maybe Farmers Grain and Pawnee Rock can both be helped.

Pawnee Rock has plenty of room, plenty of beef and grain, plenty of people driving through between Larned and Great Bend, and a state park that has been drawing visitors since 1908.

On the other hand, Pawnee Rock needs jobs, a place to buy a meal, and a fresh point of interest.

What if the steel elevator bins were dismantled and then erected just down the highway -- as a restaurant? Put a floor inside the elevator most of the way up, keep the drive-through dumping area as a portico, cut picture windows into the steel sides, and install a people elevator inside the elevator.

Imagine the view of Pawnee Rock. Of sunrises and sunsets. Of highway traffic and clouds. Of the Santa Fe Trail. Of harvest. People will pay good money to eat good food where there's a view unlike anything else between Wichita and Denver.

Certainly, some work and expense would be involved. But it would be a place that would:

• Hire Pawnee Rock residents and pay property taxes.
• Sell Pawnee Rock beef, pork, and farm produce.
• Draw money from people who now drive through without stopping.
• Describe Pawnee Rock as a town that has new ideas -- a place that is worth buying a house in and starting a business.

This is just a wacky idea. Will it work?

Known far and wide

[August 23]   Pawnee Rock shows up in the most unexpected places.

Last week I stopped in Kanorado -- a Sherman County farm town a mile from the Colorado line -- to mail a few postcards. I got to chatting with Connie Sheldon, the longtime postmaster, about how folks in Kanorado had been nice to my family during a Biking Across Kansas trip in 2000.

One thing led to another and that led to my saying I had grown up in Pawnee Rock. I figured Connie would give it a shrug in the way that people who live to the west always do when they hear about something from "eastern" Kansas. But Connie knew all about Pawnee Rock. Connie said she had trained Kathy Pechanec at Olmitz before Kathy moved south and became Pawnee Rock's postmaster.

Connie spoke proudly and fondly of her former student.

Pawnee Rock made the regional news again Monday because U.S. 56 was flooded in downtown. Five or six inches of rain had fallen in a few days, and even in thirsty Barton County the land could absorb only so much water.

The story Tuesday in the Great Bend Tribune quoted Dean Lakin about how close the water came to breaking into his Jayhawk Mechanical Services office and P. Lee's Antiques and Memories. Dean owns the building that once held the old Consolidated scale office and later the Midget Malt Shop, and Patty owns the former Knights of Pythias hall/opera house along the highway.

The foot or more of standing water was pushed toward the buildings by traffic until the traffic was detoured.

Seeing what's possible

[August 22]   The earliest lesson I remember in adapting to a changing situation came in grade school in Pawnee Rock.

When I was 10 or so, our teacher was impressed that during the production of a play by the older students ("My Darling, My Hamburger," perhaps), one of the actresses realized that a blindfold was missing. Without skipping a beat, the teacher said, the actress pulled off her scarf and used it for the blindfold.

That's doubly impressive -- to think of how to fix the problem and to do it with dozens of people watching.

That episode has always my gold standard for adapting on the fly.

I'm the kind of guy who wishes he could adapt faster. The business book "Who Moved My Cheese?" might have been written for me.

This past weekend, 10-year-old Sam showed me that flexibility can be developed spontaneously.

We were on a long-awaited ferry trip, his compensation for not getting to visit Pawnee Rock with me earlier in the month. Halfway across Prince William Sound, we had to turn back when our boat was accosted by 12-foot waves off the starboard bow.

Sam, bless his heart, took everything in stride. Because it was his weekend, I was open to anything he suggested. He thought we should spend the night in Seward, a seaside town that is reachable by road. The next day, we stopped in a near-ghost town called Hope, where the summer's salmon run was just ending. He caught eight or 10 pink salmon and was the world's happiest boy. A year ago, he wouldn't have accepted anything but his original plans, but he has opened himself up to possiblities.

Things rarely turn out the way we plan for them to. That's life. Sometimes I feel blinded by fate or my own lack of wits, but that just might be a scarf I have wrapped around my own head.

Perhaps the real trick to adapting is knowing that the blindfold can be taken off.

Red, ripe, and ready to eat

[August 19]   I bought the watermelon at the farmers' market at the Great Bend library. I bought the knife at Dillons. I cooled the melon in my room's refrigerator at the Best Western in Great Bend.

And then I sliced open the melon -- it was the size of a basketball and it split easily at knifepoint -- and ate the whole thing.

I know I should be ashamed, but I'm not going to apologize. Nor will I say I'm sorry for buying fresh tomatoes and eating them in the parking lot.

When you live as far away from fresh fruit as I do, you eat when you get the chance. All our grocery stores' "fresh" fruits and vegetables seem to be ripened with gas, except for carrots, potatoes, and cabbages, which really are grown here in the northland. But our grocery stores' tomatoes are baseballs sold at $3.49 a pound, the strawberries have bright white rings around the stem, and the carrots from California taste like soap.

So I was pleased to take a handout of roma tomatoes from Terry, a friend of sister Cheryl and brother-in-law Dave in Emporia who had a prayer service in her home and then served a green salad decorated with fried chicken pieces.

I was thrilled to caress the peaches ripening on a streetside tree in Pawnee Rock, although I checked first to see whether anybody was watching. I enjoyed rolling slowly down the back roads, watching for sand-hill plums. When Dad's wife, Betty, served a bowl of local cantaloupe, I was there with a happy spoon.

So what if Kansas is as flat as a tabletop. As long as there are fresh vegetables and fruits, it's a table I'm ready to sit down to again.

It sticks with you

A sticky hedge apple, or osage orange, in a shelterbelt near Pawnee Rock.

[August 18]   The grand scheme of things shows us that a messy hand is a mere inconvenience. These days, when I'm picking up around the yard, I'll sometimes find that the kids' toys are coated with sap that dripped out of the trees. I'm a little more annoyed when I step in a gift from a neighborhood dog.

During a couple of days recently in Pawnee Rock, I had the pleasure of walking through pastures and sandy riverbeds littered with cow pies. For the most part, the pies were dry and didn't stick to my shoes. I'm sure we all remember days when it seemed that everything we stepped in stuck to us.

That's probably one reason that running shoes didn't catch on right away with farmers. Imagine having to scrape, day after day, between the treads before you could come back into the yard.

The rest of us had sticky problems of our own. Melted candy in the car, for example. Milkweed. Cedar and pine sap. And hedge apples.

What kid can resist picking up a hedge apple -- an osage orange -- and throwing it again and again against a post? After the apple hits something once, it bleeds sticky white sap. And in a shelterbelt, there's no easy way to clean up the stickiness except for rubbing dust in the goop.

Even when we're grown up, we keep on picking up those hedge apples. In the end, it's not the sap that sticks to us as much as the memory of a childhood pleasure.

The roads to madness

A mudhole on a sandy road south of Pawnee Rock looks worse than it is.

[August 17]   If you want to get stuck, drive north of Pawnee Rock.

The clayish dirt in the limestone "high country" is slippery when wet, and it sticks to your vehicle. Hit a soft spot wrong, and long before you stop swiveling you'll wish you had been smarter. That was my case a week ago when I drove through some puddled storm runoff southwest of Albert. My Jeep was still flinging mud off the tires a dozen miles later.

Driving on sandy river-bottom land, however, is a piece of cake. A careful driver can roll straight through a puddle six inches deep and 50 feet long. It's like life -- you can drive through anything as long as you have faith in your path.

Mail carriers can skip muddy roads if they don't look safe -- and carriers who drive a hundred miles a day become good judges of dirt-road integrity. Farmers, school bus drivers and the occasional Sunday driver take their chances, and after the roads dry out we can savor the dried ruts until the grader scrapes them flat.

You don't want to build your house on sand, perhaps, but you can trust a sandy road.

A moment in the sunset

[August 16]   After saying goodbye to Dad and Betty in Great Bend, I mailed some packages in Pawnee Rock, stopped in Larned, and headed west on the long drive toward Denver.

A few hours later I was in the middle of wide-open country as sunset approached. As I drove up U.S. 83 toward Oakley, I came to the sign pointing to Monument Rocks, four miles east and two south.

As a guy from another "rock" town, I had to stop by while I was in the neighborhood. I had gone decades thinking abstractly that one day I'd make it here, and now I was going to see the fabled rocks.

My rented Jeep lifted a plume of chalky dust as I drove next to a corn field and pasture and then into open range in a valley near the Smoky Hill River. Jackrabbits -- the critters that put the "tic" in "erratic" -- scooted away from the road. Cattle were quick to moo and slow to step off the road near the big rocks, and I got to the spot just a few minutes before sunset.

I stepped out into dry air, the wind strong enough to move the tops of the low-growing grasses. To the southeast, a cumulonimbus lit up the sky like a fireball.

The fins and towers of brittle limestone stood isolated on the plains, 80 million years of erosion having taken their toll on the land around them. Swallows built their mud nests under overhangs where the rocks' sedimentary layers had eroded unevenly, and fast-drying cow pies were everywhere.

For this, I had stayed a little late at Dad and Betty's in Great Bend, run my errands, and waited in line at the Larned post office. For this, I had dawdled in two construction zones near Rozel. For this, I had driven 65 mph on virtually clear two-lane highways. Life had arranged for me to arrive at exactly the right moment.

I knew the half-hour at Monument Rocks was the true end of my trip to Kansas. There was a lot of driving still to be done before leaving the Sunflower State and I had an airplane to catch, but every mile afterward was illuminated by my singular moment under the darkening sky.

Remember when . . . you remembered me?

[August 15]     I don't drink coffee, but a lot of Pawnee Rock seems to.

I met Dad at Burger King in Great Bend, where there's a regular Pawnee Rock convention on Wednesday mornings for current Pawnee Rockers and ex-patriates. There was Adam Deckert, and Dwayne and Janice Deckert, Janice and Earl Allen Schmidt, and Tag and LaWanda Hendricks. It was a free-flowing group, well mixed with Great Benders.

At the invitation of Vivian Bright and Toni Stimatze, who I ran into on their evening stroll, I dropped in at the Pawnee Rock depot last Saturday morning for a pastry and juice (others drank the coffee). The men, some of whom I hadn't seen for two decades, sat at the table closest to the door. I stepped up and shook hands around the table. When I left for the serving line, I heard some of the older fellows ask in a loud whisper, "Did you know it was him?"

The next time I walk into a room, I'm just going to ask loudly, "Does anybody here know Leon Unruh?" I'll hang around anyone who says "yes."

Charles Gano turned his Pawnee Rock grain and supply company into a statewide outfit.

John Lindas, a farmer, started a store and a lumberyard and became one of western Kansas' influential businessmen.

In the 1920s, someone in town created a pace-setting combine (Tom Lohr had it on his lot).

Walter Hickel took his sales experience from Claflin to Alaska and became a construction and hotel millionaire, governor, Nixon's secretary of the Interior, and governor again.

Jack Kilby of Great Bend helped invent the gizmos that made our computers possible, and he received a Nobel Prize.

What was in the Barton County water these folks drank? What gave them their creative spark, their ceaseless drive?

As adults, we turn our insights into fun and profit. Are those insights related to some hands-on experience we had as kids? I think they are. That's why living in Pawnee Rock -- in small towns in general -- is a good thing. We got -- and kids today get -- to try their hand at a lot of things.

As sister Cheryl and I waded through old Pawnee Rock stuff this past weekend, I babbled on about photos, newspaper clippings, and my old toys rescued from the attic before our childhood house was auctioned off last October.

"This will be great on PawneeRock.org," I kept saying. In fact, I am mailing home four boxes of newspapers, books, and pictures today. You, Mr. and Mrs. Pawnee Rock, will see a lot of it.

But Cheryl, who is wiser than I, warned me against living in the past.

Yes, that's the burr under the saddle. We all know that sooner or later we're not going to be able to keep up with the future. There can also come the moment -- say, at a Saturday morning coffee -- when we realize that the golden past is over and that our future is in the present.

But that doesn't mean we can't have fun thinking about the path we took to get here.

Water you looking at?

[August 14]   I left the home of my sister and brother-in-law in Emporia about 7:30 Sunday evening, westbound for Barton County. It's a three-hour drive, with McPherson being halfway.

The lightning started in the south, but it soon appeared in the west too. These were not friendly inside-the-cloud bolts, but the long, jagged, hard kind that can inspire trepidation in anyone who owns a tree, barn, or TV antenna or who has rented a car even if he has paid for the damage waiver.

Now, at 12:30 a.m. Monday, it's raining hard in Great Bend. There must be a million drops for each acre of crackling grass and overheated asphalt. It's hitting the air conditioner hard, but not hard enough to drown out the thunder, and soaking the vacant lot next door to my motel room. I can see reflections of the street lights in puddles all the way to my window.

The air smells good.

When I am in Alaska, I check the weather radar for zip code 67567. I love to watch the evening storms sweep across the prairie. But that's all imagination and memory. This -- what's happening outside right now -- that's real. Real rain. A million drops per acre, and almost everyone else is asleep and missing it.

Summer pictures

[August 11]   Nature has been good this week. The air has been purifying, the farmers' market tomatoes full of flavor, the storms cleansing, and the hedge apples as sticky as ever.

Wednesday night, a few hours after the temperature hit 107, a row of thunderheads rose south of town. I saw them from the cemetery, where I was walking on crunchy brown grass, and raced to the Rock for one shot before my camera battery died.

Thursday, as I was walking behind the school building with a cooling breeze, a sprinkle turned into a cloudburst. I ducked into the shop to wait it out. Does anything feel better than a heat wave broken, even for only a few minutes, by a shower?

I found the hedge apples in the shelterbelt immediately southeast of town. Throwing one is just as satisfying as it was when I was a high schooler.

I toured the school building Thursday afternoon, wondering what I'd do with the building if I could buy it.

I went into all the rooms I could, stepping among the books on the floor in the library, standing behind the teacher's desk in the science room, leaning against the gate blocking the way into the music room.

Like every guy, I relived my glory days. I made a short jumper and sank a free throw in the gym, then sat in the bleachers and looked with unease at the peg board that the coaches used to humiliate those of us without strong arms for climbing. Outdoors, I walked around the track, marveled that the long-jump runway was still there, and slipped into the shelterbelt north of the practice field, where once upon a time I and a few others had tasted acorns during football practice, just to see whether they were edible. I can say for certain that they're not tasty.

I was surprised that my favorite part of the self-guided tour was flipping through the senior class pictures mounted on the wall near the office. If your photo is there, let me assure you that you looked dashing or pretty, and definitely strong and intelligent.

The way things used to be

Dutch Smith's blacksmith shop occupied a building that since been torn down. The smithy was next to the building that housed Willard Wilson's welding shop, which was next to the drugstore, which was next to the bank (now the post office).

[August 10]     I drove my dad around Pawnee Rock on Wednesday morning, getting him to tell me as much about the old-timers as he could remember.

I pointed to houses, and Dad confirmed who used to live there. Houdyshell, Foster, Morris, Ross, Bowman, Dirks, Flick, Darcey, French, Schultz, Spreier, Clawson, Drake, Heinz, Bright, and so many more. It surprised me how many times he said "but they don't anymore." Some left town, and a good number of them are now in the cemetery.

And the businesses? D & B Truck Beds (both locations), the Rock Hotel, the two grocery stores, the drugstore, the banks, the post offices, Logan's mercantile, the doctors' offices, the hospital, the blacksmith's shop, the livery, the elevators and mills, the bars, the Knights of Pythias lodge, the American Legion, the insurance office, the dress shop, the newspaper offices, the mechanics' garages, the welding shop, the antique stores, T.P. Nichols' mercantile, the phone buildings, the lumberyard, and the restaurants.

And the quality of life? The bandstands. The two grade schools, the two high schools, the final school, and the downtown school lunchroom. The two Christian Church buildings, the two Methodist Church buildings, the two New Jerusalem Church buildings, and the three Mennonite Church buildings.

With Dad, the answers anymore don't come as easily. He probably wishes I had paid better attention 30 years ago when old Pawnee Rock was fresher in his mind. We rely on historical photos to a greater degree to explain exactly where the banks were and when, what the lumberyard looked like, and who lived in the houses on this or that street.

It would have been a lot easier if we had written down all this information when the houses were still lived in -- in fact, when many of them still existed.

For Dad, who ran his carpentry shop downtown and drove a school bus and mail route for decades, it's a matter of remembering what he saw every day. For me, it's a matter of trying to figure out the location and importance of people and things I never saw -- or saw for what they really were.

On the road to Pawnee Rock

[August 9]     I left my iPod, with dozens of songs, in my suitcase as I drove from Denver. I'd rather listen to the radio -- farm reports, local deejays, local advertisements -- as I pass through the towns.

A credit union advertising itself on a Hays radio station said: "We'll see you when you get there."

The Goodland station asked its listeners to come back after supper for the best part of AM radio: "It's an hour of talk, here on the Evening Show."

They say it plain in northwestern Kansas.

So I'll be plain as well. Here are eight good things about getting back to Pawnee Rock:

Dressing for Kansas

[August 8]   I'm a sucker for bumper stickers. Most of them aren't worth straining your eyes for, but now and then somebody with a sense of humor covers a rust spot with a good one. I read them all anyway.

Yesterday's favorite: "Remember who you wanted to be?"

I say this now and may regret it once I get to the Great Big Toasted State of Kansas: Thanks for leaving the heat on for me.

I'll try not to leave any footprints in the asphalt.

Does anyone still use swamp coolers, the kind with the hose running into it? We had one when I was a kid in Pawnee Rock, and it was a fascinating piece of machinery, even though its main moving part was a single roller fan attached with a rubber belt to an electric motor. Remember that moist, cool breeze? Modern air conditioners are bland in comparison.

The smell of dinner

[August 7]   On the desk in front of me is a tomato leaf, one single piece of greenery that contains the best scent of summer.

We have a couple of tomato plants on the back deck. We got them late, hoping they'd at least bloom and make a little fruit, but all they're interested in doing is shooting upward.

Sometimes I bend down and rub a leaf to release its aroma. It's a surefire ticket back to childhood in Pawnee Rock, when my sister and I shared the duty of picking tomatoes.

They were beefy tomatoes generally, sometimes perfect but often with stretch marks. Those big ones almost always made it into the house. The cherry tomatoes were much more tempting al fresco.

We had a lot of luck because of our garden bedding, which was good dirt made better with cow manure and irrigated with water freshly pumped out of the wet sands three dozen feet below.

There was zucchini, bready by itself but delicious fried lightly with onions. String beans, carrots, cucumbers, lettuce, and radishes. Sweet corn, wrapped in silk; half the fun was peeling off the husk.

Current Kansans have their own gardens of eatin', and the rest of us just have the temptation. That's why, when I'm in Kansas this month, I'm going to buy a bottle of dressing at Dillons and seek out every roadside produce stand.

Kansas -- the Salad State.

The time of three lives

[August 6]   Life on the prairie moves at the speed of seasons. The hay grows, the sky brightens and darkens, we all grow a little older in the timeless embrace of Kansas.

One early autumn, I was a high-schooler working as a fieldhand for Harold and Shiela -- or Mrs. Schmidt, as our music teacher was always known. They lived northeast of town in the Rock House, a smart little home made of sandstone likely quarried from Pawnee Rock itself.

The Schmidts hired me on a few Saturdays to help with odd jobs: chainsawing wood, fitting hay bales to insulate the pumphouse, and so on.

This particular weekend, the three of us were bucking bales in a rolling field Harold had mowed and run the Hesston baler through after the yellow straw dried. Mrs. Schmidt drove the truck, Harold stood on the flat-bed trailer, and I walked alongside. I wrapped my gloved hands around the two wires holding each bale together, tugged the bale up on my knee, and bucked it upward. Harold took the bale and stacked it on the trailer.

We had 40 acres or so to cover, several hundred bales. It was the middle of the afternoon, and the wind and sun were draining us. I was just glad that the bales were hay and not alfalfa, which was twice as heavy. Twenty or so pounds lifted many times was heavy enough.

I bucked a bale, another bale, the 200th bale. Harold took them, leaning out a little more as I tired. And then he leaned too far; when he grabbed the bale he was so off balance that the weight pulled him down hard to the dirt.

He lay in the stubble, as still as could be.

"Mrs. Schmidt! Stop the truck! Come now!" I yelled as I caught up with the cab. She knelt over Harold and with a strained voice called his name.

We prayed and hoped, and Mrs. Schmidt put her hand on his chest. It was desperate fear, and love.

Harold awoke slowly. Mrs. Schmidt helped him sit up, her arm around his shoulders. His face was pale, but I think all of ours were.

Our day in the field was over. We went back to the house and took the bales off the trailer, then I hugged Mrs. Schmidt, shook Harold's hand, and left. The shakes hit me before I had driven a mile.

In the timeless embrace of Kansas, where nothing ever changes, everything had changed in an instant.

A smoking good time

[August 4]   Life is full of temptations, and sometimes you just have to go along.

Smoking your first cigarette probably still is the rite of passage it was in the 1960s. Back in those days, we practiced on candy cigarettes and watched friends and relatives smoke. If you went to Larned a lot, you could even watch girls give away small boxes of cigarettes on the sidewalk by the American State Bank.

My day came in fifth grade. Andrew Stimatze had lifted a pack from his parents and had hidden it under the floorboards of an abandoned church that sat behind his house and just east of the tennis court.

Todd Bright and I, Andrew's classmates, dug the cigs out one drizzly fall day. Todd seemed pretty certain how to light up. He knocked out two cigarettes, and we each struck a match and held it to the unfiltered end.

His worked. He breathed in and blew out a mouthful of smoke.

I can feel the texture of that paper, the heat when the match flashed, the little sense of dread when it came time to inhale.

My cigarette was a dud. I admit that I didn't try very hard. I said the cigarette was wet and wouldn't light.

Todd accepted that. He put his cigarette out. We hid the smokes, agreed that it was fun, and left.

That scratched my itch. I have never since put a cigarette to my lips.

Still, I'm glad I did it. The good news is that I know all I want to know about smoking. The better news is that there are plenty of other vices to be tempted by. Sooner or later, I'll find one that is just right for me.

Our little secrets

[August 3]   The red chaff fell only in the night, sprinkling Pawnee Rock with half-inch-square pieces of foil.

The government said the chaff was part of radar tests. Maybe it was weather radar, or maybe it was military radar. All I'm saying is that the chaff fell at night from planes we never saw.

There were a lot of "weather balloons," too.

Sometimes, in the 1960s, we knew what was going on but had to follow odd rules. For example, the chain-link fence around the Otis helium plant had signs that said "Take no photos," or words to that effect. As if that would stop a Fifth Columnist.

We Pawnee Rockers did what we could for the Cold War. (We also had Mennonites, who did their part for peace.) We didn't have any missiles in our fields, like the folks near Wichita did. We didn't have a bombing range, like the folks southwest of Salina did.

What we did have in Central Kansas was lots of airspace, and the Air Force liked to use it. It's a safe bet that all those sonic booms were not made by Cessnas.

One of my treats as a grown-up was sitting near McConnell Air Force Base in Wichita and watching -- feeling -- the B-1B bombers roar into the sky. I never saw a Lancer in swept-wing flight until a few years ago near Lindsborg, when one slipped sleekly across the landscape. For the moment, I was satisfied that my tax dollars were well spent, at least for entertainment value.

I suppose we all remember our first 747. My first 747 flight was between Vancouver and Toronto. My first 747 sighting was at our grandparents' farm north of Pawnee Rock.

Mom was driving Cheryl and me home on the long driveway when suddenly everything felt unusual. The bottom of the biggest plane I had ever seen appeared in the Dodge's windshield, passing only 200 feet above our roof. It just looked wrong. You know that feeling when you are certain you're about to see something awful, like a plane crash?

Perhaps it was the folks from Boeing in Wichita giving the hicks a thrill. Maybe it was some jet jockey from Salina learning how to fly. But let me tell you, I do appreciate their effort. That was a great day.

Now I like to take my boys out where we can see the F-15s, C-130s, AWACS, and occasional Air Force One take off from Elmendorf Air Force Base. Watching the F-15s leap into the sky -- engines straining, afterburners lit, wheels folding into the fuselage, the aircraft banking north -- makes me feel heroic by association.

A lot of the sorties are training flights. Still, it's a thrill to see planes leave on a secretive mission to who-knows-where. Maybe Korea. Maybe Russia. Maybe China.

Good old secrets. They can make anything more interesting. Now, about that sign on the Otis helium plant's fence -- I'll tell you exactly what it said, if I can just find the photo . . .

Stuff you need to know

[August 2]   With trains just about gone and both the depot and the post office moved over the years, it's likely that certain parts of Pawnee Rock's history will be forgotten. But then there are storytellers like Don Ross.

Back in the days when Pawnee Rock's mail came by train, Don wrote, it had to be moved between the depot and the post office by handcart. That cart was pushed by Hilliard Evers, who lived in a shack on the northeast side of town.

"He pushed a little cart from the post office to the train, picked up the mail and small packages and wheeled them back to the post office. There were a number of trains that came through P.R. in the '30s and '40s and he always met the mail train.

"One night, picture show night, we had a pretty bad storm. Hilliard was on his way home and he accidentally stepped on an electric line that had gone down and was electrocuted."

"I can still see him going down Main Street with his cart. Wish I had a picture of that."

Election: Congrations to election winners Earl Allen Schmidt, Janice Schmidt, and Dean Lakin. They all won their unopposed primary races for (in order) Pawnee Rock Township precinct committeeman, precinct committeewoman, and clerk. Only one vote was cast in the Democratic primary, a write-in for clerk, so it seems fairly certain that these three long-time Pawnee Rockers can coast through November's general election.

Check this out: When someone says Kansas is as pretty as a picture, they must be talking about Dave Leiker's photo blog and his galleries on FlyoverPeople.net. The galleries includes Pawnee Rock and other towns.

Music on my mind: Maybe I've been listening to too many golden oldies on the radio and dwelling on Pawnee Rock too much. For the past couple of days, these songs have been stuck in my brain:

Well, there they are. Now they can be stuck in your head for a while.

Meet a pal: Remember to sign up to be listed on Friends of Pawnee Rock and to make your bid for the old Pawnee Rock school building.

Dry humor: After I wrote last week about Mennonites and beer, sister Cheryl sent along this joke:

Q. What happens when you take a Mennonite fishing?
A. He drinks all your beer.

Q. What happens when you take two Mennonites fishing?
A. No one drinks your beer.

The boys with scars

[August 1]   When they were in Pawnee Rock Grade School, a few years apart, two young boys got burned. One fellow accidentally pulled a pan of hot grease onto himself, and the other might have been hurt by a flaming liquid. How they were injured isn't so important.

Both boys came back to school with horrible scars on their faces. Although I'd rather not think about it, I can guess what suffering they and their families went through.

It's often said that great artists and scientists had a terrible disease or event in their childhood. They are somehow purified, and they gain tremendous sight into themselves and others. Still, can you imagine how much these boys worried about how others would see them?

More than we kids understood, we must have been important to those two boys. How we treated them influenced how much they wanted to come back to school, whether they wanted to play sports, how soon they would feel not different from us.

I wasn't alone in being standoffish to the boy who was closest to my age. I had always been afraid of him because he was a little older than I was and because he had run around with tougher friends. But one day, as he rode his bike down the sidewalk in front of my house as I was playing in the yard, I picked up a handful of sand and acted as if I were going to throw it at him. I wouldn't have done that if I hadn't sensed some new advantage.

I hope he has forgotten that episode. He stopped, anxiety in his eyes. Then he spoke gently and seemed more curious than afraid. Because we talked at that moment, he and I became friends -- not best friends, but friends and good basketball teammates.

You and I both know people with damaged skins, and we see more of them in the newspaper and on television, the ones made famous for a day by a disaster, an emergency, an illness, a tragedy. Can we be the people they need? Can we put ourselves in their place, or do we throw sand?

The more I see of the world, the more I admire the folks with scars.