'Land and sky' ... a Kansas sunset.
Last year I caught a Greyhound bus from LA to Vegas. I had no food, no music, no reading matter and I was sat next to a one-eyed Mexican croupier with enough scars on his arms and face to make a game of noughts and crosses a distinct possibility. I have never spent so long with my face pressed firmly up against a window only to be presented with a vista of endless, interminable, barren desolation. I had misgivings, based on what other riders had said, that Kansas would be the cycling version of that journey, minus the Mexican. Wrong!!! Kansas is by far and away my favourite state to date.
True, the wind makes you feel like you are cycling through a blast furnace on treacle (why is there not a forest of wind farms here?) but Kansas is epic in its simplicity. Its lines are clean and uncluttered. Land and sky. That's it. Three colours - yellow, blue, green. Nothing hems you in, no barriers, no hurdles just endless horizon. It feels like this is America in its pure form, as if power, freedom and opportunity found their physical expression in this landscape. And the sky is stunning. But it doesn't feel like sky, it feels like the surface of the ocean and you're underwater watching as the waves roll in. I just can't get bored of this place because I have never experienced space like it.
When the first settlers started fencing in their land at the end of the 19th century they did so using stone fence-posts. Why, I hear you cry? Because there are hardly any trees in central and western Kansas. Cut back to the 21st century and watch while Susan Greenwood fries in 110-degree heat with a total lack of shade for the next 60 miles (average distance between major towns.) But worse than my blistering skin is the fact that Kansas is in the middle of its fourth year of drought. I have seen very few full creeks and even the Arkansas river was dry as a bone. It's having a major effect on farming with a projected shortage of hay for cattle feed this winter. I'm sure lots of people will deny it has anything to do with climate change but you can't help but wonder.
On the brighter side the fact that farming is such big business here means there's been lots of opportunities to eat fresh and people seem to take a real interest in the earth around them - people in Kansas are big into alternative fuel cars and there is a welcome absence of that pervasive weed cannus bud lightus which seems to be a peculiarly American roadside blight. And traffic is absolutely minimal although everyone should at some stage in their life experience the backdraft from a lorry carrying 50 hot cows rushing past at 65mph. Nothing like manure in the eyeball to arrest all those lofty daydreams of power and opportunity.
