US Route 50, Kansas
A missed exit at Wichita sent us seventy-seven miles towards the northeast when we should’ve been heading southwest. It meant two additional hours on concrete and behind the wheel. There was some steering-wheel-pounding and a little bit of creative verbalization, but without the error we wouldn’t have picked up where we left off years ago, continued to connect dots on the map. We wouldn’t have seen some of the heart of Kansas.
Back in 2007, we’d taken 50 all the way from Washington, DC to Route 177 and into the Tall Grass Prairie then south down 177 to I-35 on to Oklahoma and our new home. We were driving the heavily loaded, growling and comfort-challenged F350 diesel. Highway 50 reaches across the states some 3,000 miles from Ocean City, MD all the way to Sacramento, CA and unlike the interstates it lingers through small towns and cuts into some of the loneliest stretches of the country, sometimes with only the sights of abandoned gas stations and boarded up diners for company.
It's a smooth two-laner that comes up against stop lights, slows you down to 35 MPH through the towns, and frustrates occasionally with local drivers in battered pick-ups who you know are thinking (as you ride their back bumper), “What’s the hurry?” You have to lift your foot off of the gas pedal and adopt the same attitude. There really is no hurry.
This time of year the wide, flat fields of Kansas offer acres of corn – or the stubble of harvested corn, cows grazing among the dried and bent stalks – sorghum, cotton, something green and viney that might be soybeans and of course, sunflowers. It’s peak sunflower season right now and the Kansas roads are brightened on both sides by swaying bright yellow. They’re the wild, self-seeding kind and thick as weeds.
As on any road trip, the houses, stores, signs and people dispersed along this portion of 50 were fleeting and colorful blurred images, some committed to permanent time-place snapshots in the mind, others eventually getting jumbled into other times, other trips. There was the sign along the road that said: “Feeding the World.”
The tall and sturdy pale stone church flanked by two stone outhouses. I imagined black widows suspended in their webs, waiting patiently under the seats. Another sign announced: “Westward-Ho Round-Up Suppers!” and at Walton we stopped for gas and walked the dog down a brick sidewalk. At the end of a long dirt driveway, a boy in a baseball cap played with his dog and further on, three people had gotten out of their car to pet a calf through a fence. Tourists. There was the town with acres of quails and pheasants in huge covered coops.
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