Opposite ends
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
In early October, my dad and I drove around a bit on the western wing of the state — Barton, Rush, and Ness counties.
Then in late October, Dave and I visited Kansas City, Kan., and the metro area.
Both trips were fun — and enlightening. Night and day difference, of course.
Upon entering Kansas City on Interstate 70 and being bombarded with all the visual stimuli — billboards, traffic and buildings along the roadway, I flashed back to Western Kansas and the empty plains.
Out west were pastures of short-grass prairie, newly planted winter wheat and fields of milo. There you’ll see a smattering of farmhouses and the occasional small town with water towers and grain elevators off in the distance. Many of the towns Dad and I cruised through in Rush and Ness counties had little more than a post office, the co-op, maybe a church and a tavern.
Dying towns are not exclusive to Western Kansas; there are many in the eastern half of the state as well. But this Western Kansas trip hit me hard because one after another after another, the towns had lost their punch: Heizer, Timken, Nekoma, Alexander, Bazine, Brownell, McCracken. These towns have shadows, but few of those shadows move.
In those communities, Main Street hosts a line of empty storefronts. The barber shop, bank, grocery store, the downtown café, closed, closed, closed. A beautiful brick and limestone school in Alexander has been offered up to the elements.
It was a sharp contrast to go from the small towns of Western Kansas which can’t support a grocery store, to Kansas City where I stood in a swirl of shopping opportunities.
There’s not much open space here.
Kansas City has a zillion acres of pavement — roads, sidewalks, parking lots. There are countless apartments, houses, churches, schools, museums, hospitals, parks — just everything, and a lot of it. In any one glance, dozens of buildings reflected in my glasses. Roads shot off in every direction: two lanes, four lanes, eight lanes of concrete.
Our first stop was at the Village West shopping area near the Kansas Speedway. First we went to Cabela’s to get Dave a new coat. And, while Cabela’s has a walk-thru aquarium and motor boat showroom, it was small compared to the business next door: Nebraska Furniture Mart.
As we entered the Jetson-like storefront of Nebraska Furniture Mart, I was loose-jawed, like a Kansas tourist in New York City, in awe of the sheer size of the store and quantity of merchandise.
I was Dorothy who had just flown in from the black-and-white plains, landing in the colorful Oz. The furniture store is enormous — an 80-acre campus. Their rug section alone must take up half a city block.
While driving through Kansas City, my head was in swivel mode; there’s so much to see in every direction — colors, shapes, words on signs and buildings. On the Missouri side, we spent some time hanging out at the City Market, an indoor-outdoor combination of a farmers market and storefront merchants.
There’s so much to see in Kansas City that you can’t absorb it all. In the blur of quantity, it’s easy to miss the subtle things: architectural detailing, a hand-painted sign, a quaint store tucked into a row of buildings.
There are decaying parts of the metro area, sure, but compared to the western end of the state, Kansas City is a carnival of commerce. And it’s a good thing; our state needs all the sales tax revenue it can get.
The city offers options and it is pure joy to have an abundance of choices — a selection of things to see or do or buy, new places to eat.
Kansas City is the opposite of the quiet plains. It’s energy and neon, a fun place to visit. I’m glad it’s a short drive away, but I couldn’t live there — just too many people and too much traffic.
Give me an absence of concrete, wide-open spaces, and I’m good. And if you can throw in a prairie sunset, all the better.
“Flyover People” is online at www.flyoverpeople.net. Cheryl Unruh can be reached at cheryl@flyoverpeople.net.
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