In denial
Cheryl Unruh
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
IT WAS AKIN to being told I was adopted. I learned one little bit of information and was forced to rethink my entire childhood.
You see, I was raised on level land. From Pawnee Rock, we’d drive 8 miles west to Larned or 12 miles east to Great Bend, and all around me the horizon was one straight-as-a-ruler flat line.
Conclusion: I was a child of the plains.
The image of my homeland, the picture that is etched into my brain, is from the top of Pawnee Rock State Historic Site. Known locally as the Rock, that outcropping of Dakota sandstone was used in the 1800s as lookout point along the Santa Fe Trail – and it was from that high vantage point that I memorized the wide view of the Arkansas River Valley.
Standing on the Rock on a haze-free day, I’d spot the Burdett water tower about 20 miles to the west; closer to me were the towers in Rozel and Larned.
About a mile and a half south of the Rock was a line of trees marking the Arkansas River. To the southeast, I could spot the grain elevators in Radium and Seward.
Flat land. Flaaaaat land. As in no hills to block the view.
But then this past summer, Jim and Susie Aber, friends of the geological variety, suggested in their book which details the Kansas physiographic regions, that my hometown rides the border of the Smoky Hills.
Oh, no, no, no, no, no. This cannot be right. There were no hills around us.
While reading “Kansas Physiographic Regions: Bird’s-eye Views,” my eyes stopped, stunned, on page 37. There, the Abers include in the Smoky Hills region the rock formation known as Pawnee Rock.
Apparently, a thin stripe of the Smoky Hills province slides through Barton, Pawnee and Hodgeman Counties. The town of Pawnee Rock teeters on the boundary line between two regions: the Arkansas River Valley and the Smoky Hills.
The Rock’s Dakota sandstone helps define it as part of the Smoky Hills. Similar sandstone is found at Coronado Heights near Lindsborg, Mushroom Rock State Park in Ellsworth County and Rock City near Minneapolis.
The river valley part of my childhood landscape was a given, but it just never would have occurred to me that the Rock was part of the Smoky Hills — as in hills.
Sure there are hills in Kansas, but not where I grew up … or were there?
Well, of course, we had that one obvious hill, Pawnee Rock State Park, whose mound of rocks impressed journalist Matt Field in 1839. He wrote, “Pawnee Rock springs like a huge wart from the carpeted green of the prairie.”
Yep, it’s definitely a hill, although I always thought of it as more of a freak of nature than a legitimate hill.
And let’s see, from the Rock, there’s not really a view to the north. Trees aside, you can’t look 20 miles northward like you can in the other directions. Instead of the long vista, the land just kind of ends. OK, that indicates soft rolling hills – which, I’ll admit now, do exist north of town.
For it was on those rolling hills that my grandfather gave us a roller coaster simulation, that sensation of leaving one’s stomach behind.
In the pre-seatbelt era, my brother and cousins and I would already be bouncing in the backseat of Grandpa’s Chevy Impala. On those hills near his farm, we’d shout, “Make us lose our stomachs, Grandpa!” He would chuckle and speed up, cresting the hills and flying over them.
So the hills were steep enough for that.
Yet if anyone had asked me during my youth about topography, I’d have said, no, no hills, the land is flat.
Since the geologists tell me my hometown is on the edge of the Smoky Hills, well, I’ll have to go along with it. Because, after all, it is from the top of a hill that I have my treasured view of the flat land.
Maybe I just can’t see the hills for the plains.
“Flyover People” is online at www.flyoverpeople.net. Cheryl Unruh can be reached at cheryl@flyoverpeople.net.
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