By Fred Owens
The
car broke down and we found a campsite on the Smoky Hill River just
outside of Lindsborg, Kansas. It was July, 1976, and we were newlyweds.
The Travel All was not a reliable vehicle, as we found out, and it broke
down. So there we were in Kansas and it was hot.
I had a
world view that all the earth was sacred, not just the pretty places.
Not just snow-capped mountains and towering trees, lush landscapes,
rushing rivers and beautiful islands -- all that from the Skagit Valley
in Puget Sound where I had spent some time, but now crossing the Plains
and seeing the flat, featureless landscape, not pretty enough for a
post card, and never going to be "saved," or cherished as it should be
cherished.
My father taught me to dance with
all the girls not just the pretty ones, and don't act like you're doing
anybody a favor either, he said. I transferred that thinking from girl
friends to landscapes -- to see the beauty in all things.
That made Kansas in July all right -- hot, flat and square as it was.
So
when the Travel All broke down we camped by the river, and then we
walked into Lindsborg, about 3,000 people surrounded by wheat fields,
sunflowers and a big blue sky. Lindsborg seemed good enough and we found
work, first at a diner. We spent three days scrubbing grease off the
walls and going under the counters, as the owner of the diner was glad
to find some awful chore that we might do for him and we got a bit of
cash to hold us over.
Then we found jobs at a small
factory that made aluminum windows -- about twenty people worked there.
They had a simple foundry that melted the aluminum ingots and then
squeezed the lava into an extruder that made long lengths of window
frames.
The outside air temperature approached 100 degrees
on most days, and it was very hot inside the factory, but it was a
spacious facility with tall ceilings and wide garage doors that let in
the fresh air. It was tolerable and not toxic.
There
were maybe 10 people on the assembly line. We made windows for apartment
projects in Wichita and other big cities. so we would make like 50 of
one size, then 100 of another size, and so on, filling orders. They cut
aluminum lengths into the right size and stamped them into a frame, then
sent them down to me. I was the glass cutter.
That's where
they put the new guy because you could get hurt handling large panes of
glass, although I never imagined I would get hurt and I never did get
hurt. I didn't even wear gloves. I handled hundred of panes of glass and
broke a lot of glass doing so. I found out quickly that they didn't
care if I broke any glass. All they cared about was could I speed up and
stay with the line as the frames came by.
I worked on a
big table. Grab the frame off the line, then grab a pane of glass to fit
over the frame, then scribe it twice by hand and break off the
overlapping part of the glass. Then put the frame with glass back on the
line and grab the next empty frame. Do it fast a thousand times, and if
you break any glass, just toss it in this bin. Fast is all that
mattered.
It was the most boring job I ever had in my whole
life although I can't complain about the people. The supervisor was a
nice guy. We had coffee breaks and lunch breaks and we sat outside on
the grass in the shade of a tree. Got paid better than minimum wage.
Writing
this 39 years later, I think it was easier to get started in life in
1976. We camped. We found jobs. We got paid. Then we rented a small
apartment. Just like that. Instant family. Mom and Dad.
I
paid money to get the Travel All fixed. I liked that vehicle but it did
not like me. It would not serve, but we drove it as we could. Sometimes
in the evening, when it was cooler, we drove out to Coronado Heights -- a
small hill, but in Kansas this was the biggest hill for a hundred miles
and when you drove up to the top you could see a long way in every
direction -- solid wheat fields and a big, big horizon. Soft breezes on
a summer evening. It was said, not proven, that Coronado, the Spanish
conquistador, came here in his journey across Kansas in 1541.
We
rented an apartment in back of the Swedish Bakery. It was a red-brick
building, had been a shop or a garage, converted for living with a
functional bathroom, a kitchen area and a painted cement floor. It was
like a large studio apartment with a high ceiling. It kind of looked
like the factory where we worked, only smaller. The alley was clean of
garbage but full of weeds and tall grass. This was actually a good
feature -- the lack of garbage and the tall slovenly weeds -- made it
kind of homey.
And we could walk into the back door of the
Swedish Bakery, through the baking area, up to front where people had
coffee and bought their sweet rolls. It always smelled nice from the
bakery.
Lindsborg was founded by Swedish immigrants and so
much different from your mythical redneck Republican hard core farm town
in Kansas -- different in its pronounced Scandinavian flavor and its
civic concern for the average resident. Lindsborg had a municipal
swimming pool of grand proportions, a park with a band shell for summer
performances, a four-year liberal arts college with a Lutheran
affiliation -- that was Bethany College. Lindsborg had its own
electrical power plant and a proficient, small industrial area -- that's
where the small factory was where we worked. To cap it all, they
promoted their Swedish heritage with trinkets and festivals and that
made for a prosperous downtown retail center. Lindsborg was a small town
just waiting to be "discovered."
Anyway, it was better than
your average bozo small town, at least to our liking. And that's where
the car broke down -- the Travel All -- worst car I ever owned, but at
least it broke down in the right place -- could have broke down in
Oklahoma and thank God we got out of there.
We
camped by the Smoky Hill River. As I said, we were newly weds and we had
gotten out of Oklahoma. We cooked our dinner over a fire and after that
she waded into the river to wash the dishes in the stream. She lost her
wedding ring doing that. It just slipped off. It was a simple band, no
big dollar loss, but I took it as a bad sign -- not like it was her
fault or anything like that, but just bad luck.
I was
30 years old that summer and we had gotten married, expecting to have
children and get jobs and buy a house and do all that regular kind of
stuff. No more hippie stuff. No communes, no fantasies, no hitchhiking,
no riding freight trains, no making shelters out of plastic sheets, no
organic wonder gardens. None of that. Not like a rejection or a feeling
that we had done anything wrong. No, it was just we were finished. Had
gotten ourselves certified with a Ph.D. in advanced Hippie Studies and
it was time for whatever came next, which for us was a big dose of
normal.
It didn't help at all that I had decided to
become a writer three weeks before the car broke down. Not a good career
choice if I was looking for normal. I wish somebody had talked to me
about that. I wished my Dad was still alive. He would have liked my new
wife a lot. A pretty one, he might have said. And settling down to start
a family, yes, he would have liked that a lot, and said so, and backed
me up on things, even if I wanted to be a writer -- he might have
cautioned my about the uncertainty of that income.
I'm
thinking all this many years later, but not at that time. All I knew is
that I had turned 30 and gotten married and I needed to become
something, so all I could figure out was to be a writer. I bought a
portable manual typewriter while we lived in the alley apartment in back
of the Swedish Bakery and I began to write -- probably ten words a day
at most. It didn't flow.
This is a short story, so I
will wrap it up. Susan became pregnant and this baby didn't want to be
born in Kansas so we left after a few months. We moved to Chicago and I
got another job, but I will tell that some other time.
Kansas, to this day, remains unappreciated.
What Prompted This Story. A
young woman I know in Bellingham, Washington, talked about the
incredibly high price of real estate in her area -- she said you just
couldn't buy a home unless you have family money. That's true on the
West Coast, the sky high prices. But you're paying for the view and good
looks are superficial. If you want value, you might consider Omaha, or
Wichita, or St. Louis, places like that, less trendy, but you can have
your own place.
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