June 2005 Archives
At some point, the wise man gives up or gives in, and that point is probably in middle age, and the best location is probably in Kansas, Nebraska or Iowa. Thus my recent trip, in fact my first trip, to the Midwest. America's heartland. And, yes, it is all about land and all about heart.
Try making a reservation with Sally Rush's bed and breakfast in Highland, Kansas. She doesn't want your credit card number, because she doesn't take credit cards. She doesn't need to know what time you're coming, as long as it's before dark. And, don't try to tell her not to haul your bags up two flights of stairs, even though she's barely 5 feet tall and pushing 70 years of age. The real issue is what time is breakfast. Dearie. Honey.
It never made sense to me, my wife's genealogical tour of small towns in three states, not until we were there. And everything made sense in Sally Rush's kitchen, eating her eggs, her crisp thick bacon, her waffles shaped like hearts. Her grandson, Mason, was hauling up potatoes from the cellar and lugging in pork chops from his grandfather's truck. The pork chop bags were too heavy, Mason complained. His complaint was matter-of-fact, not suffering and in no way designed to inspire guilt. He just wanted us to know. I wanted to know more about twangy Mason, whom Sally described as her husband's shadow. Grandfather and grandson did farm chores together. According to Mason, the steers were now eating out of his hand. The price of beef was at an all-time high. It was time to sell.
Out in the fields, it was a different story. Time to despair. The regional drought had stunted the spring corn crop. The plants were not going to be knee-high by the Fourth of July. They weren't even going to be ankle-high. They were probably going to be plowed under and the fields replanted in hopes of midsummer rain. If this saddened me, it barely seemed to faze Gene Rush. He remarked on the seasonal failure with a tone crisp and dry as an old cornstalk. Encountering a Midwestern retiree with similar affect in California, I might have been mildly repulsed by the coarse exterior. But in the Rushes' kitchen where nature's coarse ingredients get pounded, kneaded and baked into the finest things, where people traipse in and out with the latest news of the lifecycle, Gene seemed neither coarse nor hard. Only seasoned, and with the long view. Everything is, and always has been, tenuous on the plains. Life is precious.
And in place, in context, the hand-lettered billboards along the empty Kansas highways proclaiming the preciousness of unborn life make a kind of rural sense. The world is big and flat and empty, the weather inclined to stomp in and out like an angry mother. You need all the live calves you can get. No flushing any embryos down hospital toilets, either. These little Kansas towns are empty enough as it is. Highland, Kansas, hangs on by dint of its junior college, the oldest in the state. We need our people. We need our life. So we put up our signs and let the world know what it ought to know anyway. That babies belong to the community. That Bibles belong on the bedside.
True, the Rushes wouldn't know what to make of Bangladesh or the South Bronx, and their ideas about human reproduction probably wouldn't transplant well. Never mind. They've got all the planting and transplanting a human could ever manage in and around Highland. I'm glad I met them, for to know them is to respect them, even love them a bit. We are certainly on opposite sides of the blue-red national divide. But things are moving fast. There's at least one issue potentially uniting us all. It's in the air, hanging over everyone, and the Rushes are closer to it than most of us. You can see it right outside their door. In all those stunted fields that sweep to the horizon. It's the weather, of course.
Europeans were skeptical of global warming, often dismissing it as fanciful and trendy, right up until some point in the 1980s when several dire predictions came true at the same time. The worst involved the winds. The earth-is-heating-up believers had been predicting warmer and more violent weather since the 1970s. And, lo, by the end of the 80s, there it was. Violent wind. Floods. Blazing hot summers. Since then, it's only gotten worse. So, if the people of Kansas want us all to get down on our knees and pray, so what? There's good reason for us to look up at the sky. Maybe in the fullness of time, we'll all be looking up at the same scary thing.
