2022 KC/MI Trip: Day 3

 This is the third post in a series. You really should read them in order, so here's a link to Part One. And here's a link to all the pictures from this trip, should your anal-retentiveness or OCD require it.

One thing I can never hear too often on these long cross-country wanders is the phrase "Nice car." I've heard it four times so far, a little more than once a day. Just enough to satisfy. First time was on day one, while I waited for the engine to cool enough for me to pour some water into the coolant reservoir. A woman filling her gas tank thirty feet away shouted it. I shouted "thanks" back to her, and only later noted that she, too, drove a Jaguar. But hers was a later-model XK -- the version that supplanted mine in the Jaguar line. I thought briefly about complimenting her car, if belatedly, but couldn't bring myself to do it: the XK is a bulbous, overinflated version of the svelte XK-8, and I just don't much like its aggressive looks. 

Yesterday -- Thursday, day 3 of this trip -- I had set my alarm for 6AM on my phone, then woke up at about 5:58AM, wondering what time it was. I'd had a hard time getting to sleep and had ended up on the computer, practicing my timewasting techniques, until probably 1:30 in the morning. So I was sure I'd slept through the alarm, or else that it was only 3AM. But as I went across the room to check the time, the alarm started beeping, making me feel like a real-life version of Jack Reacher, the Lee Child character who can set his internal alarm clock with just that sort of precision. 

I was in the car -- top down under pristine sky -- by 6:30, and then in the parking lot of a local breakfast place called Jimmy's Egg five minutes later. I had what they call the Garbage Breakfast: eggs with a little of this and a little of that, all kind of dry but satisfying enough. The coffee was good and the service was better than good, so I was happy. 

I drove up the road to start my planned route with the Flint Hills Scenic Drive, along State Highway 177 from Cassoday to Council Grove, a distance of just over 50 miles. Along the way I'd planned to stop at a belvedere south of Cottonwood Falls; at a small waterfall near a reservoir; and at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve north of Strong City. It didn't work out that way.

For starters, Highway 177 is under construction, being re-paved with a new asphalt surface. The work has just begun, and only a stretch of about a tenth of a mile has any actual work being done on it; but the vehicles involved in ferrying materials back and forth are being marshalled at the belvedere 15 miles up the road, and so that entire stretch of highway is marked down to a single lane, requiring a pilot truck to escort travellers through the construction zone. I pulled up to the flagman at the south end of the zone not long after the pilot had left on a northward run, so I had time to get out and spend half an hour or so chatting with the flagger, a Texas boy from Jacksonville who'd come to Kansas for his father's wedding, and met the love of his life. Long story short, he's still here.

The driver of the pilot truck came back ("Nice car! What is it? That's a Jaguar? Looks really nice.") and was replaced by my flagger friend, who led me at breakneck speed past the belvedere where I'd planned to stop -- it was full of dump trucks and graders so I couldn't have stopped anyway, but I could tell from the view beyond it that it wouldn't really have been worthwhile anyway -- to the end of the construction zone in Cottonwood Falls, where I turned off to go to Chase Lake to see the waterfall. Chase Lake is a small reservoir, and just below the earthen dam the creek drops, oh, maybe six feet. I couldn't get to it. The dam is fenced off and the creek exits the reservoir at the farther end, so I just watched the play of sun on water for a few minutes before heading (slowly) back down the gravel road to the highway. 

Masai Mara, 2008: feel that feeling

The Flint Hills are unimpressive bulges in the landscape, mostly covered in grass and livestock, pretty enough to be comforting as background scenery but not so photogenic as to warrant stopping for pictures. I can read the comments of people who have made the stops I'd included in my itinerary, comments about how small the landscape makes one feel, and remember feeling that feeling at various places in the Great Plains (and elsewhere) over the years. I didn't feel inclined to experience it yet again. So I put the next destination into my GPS and headed off. 

 

The Buster Keaton Museum

That next destination was the Buster Keaton Museum in Piqua (pronounced "Pick-way"), Kansas. It turns out to be a tiny room in the office of Rural Water District #1, just off the highway. I drove around the tiny town two or three times before I saw the little "Buster Keaton, Silent Film Star 1895-1966" sign mounted on the side of the building. The Water District employee inside told me that in 1895, a big storm forced a passing train to stop in town unexpectedly; Mrs Keaton, a passenger on that train, chose that time to go into labour, and so Buster acquired Piqua as a point of origin. He stayed two days in the town before heading off to great fame and fortune in Hollywood, though he did come back later in life to acknowledge the little community's celebrations of him as its own claim to reflected fame. The museum contains a couple of cases of memorabilia and hundreds of 8x10 photos, movie posters, letters and newspaper clippings. I mainly found it interesting for what it says about Us, the general public, and our desire to cultivate imagined relationships with people who accomplish anything noteworthy in life. 

On the way to my next stop I finished listening to the Ron & Clint Howard book and started up a series of Great Subjects lectures on the American Revolution, bite-sized talks that covers the Big Event from the French and Indian War to, presumably, the Treaty of Paris. (I've heard 4 or 5 of the lectures so far, and am just up to the encirclement of General Gage in Boston following the Shot Heard 'Round the World.)

The next stop was in Osawatomie, Kansas, in a park at the confluence of the Osage and Pottawatomie rivers -- creeks, really, that immediately flow into the Marais des Cygnes River less than a mile away. That park was the scene of the largest single battle in the Bleeding Kansas phase of American history, when pro- and anti-slavery people flooded into the Kansas Territory ahead of a vote on whether the South's Peculiar Institution would be a part of the future state's legacy. (It was not.) John Brown, later to gain fame for an unsuccessful raid on the US Armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia before moulderin' in his grave in North Elba, New York, came as part of that influx of voters, and after the sacking of Lawrence, Kansas by pro-slavery forces, he got up a bunch of anti-slavery settlers and retaliated with the Pottawatomie Massacre. Things got ugly, and confused, and so I'll leave you, reader, to your own researches on the subject. The park in Osawatomie contains the cabin of the Adair family, relatives of Brown's. He "hid out" in plain sight there for a couple of years before going on to greater acclaim or notoriety at Harpers Ferry.

John Brown

 In this (hopefully) post-Trump era of Proud Boys and anti-Constitutional insurrection, it's hard to know whether Brown should be condemned or praised for his role in provoking the Civil War. He was convicted of treason following the Harpers Ferry raid, and executed. But a part of his legacy is that slavery is gone, and the Union lives on. Those are good things. But slavery in this country was not talked to death; it only drowned in the blood of hundreds of thousands of people. And its end is not a solution to our problems as a society, only a big step along the road to the general Welfare of a more perfect Union.

Okay, end of sermon. After a short nap in the shade of a tree near the Adair Cabin (which is enclosed for preservation in a slightly larger rock building) I drove on to Kansas City, where the temperature surpassed my limit of 94 degrees and forced me to put the top up for the last fifteen or twenty minutes. I probably won't put up nightly posts while I'm in KC, but will try to do a single all-encompassing description of my time here before I leave on Monday.

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