Picturing Kansas
Life, as it was in small towns and out of the way places before Coronavirus
Flint Hills, Kansas. The light is good here. In October, the sun is not so deep overhead, and there are long mornings and deep afternoons that give shape to the landscape. There are fields and rolling hills and miles and miles of dirt roads that take you to places little seen. Then there are the towns. Hundreds of them, each with its main street and a few blocks of houses spread around, each unique in its own way, almost all alike in that they are shrinking.
Kansas came to life, its American white man’s life in the mid-1800s. Pushing the Indians aside, the new American settlers tore up the prairie, threw down railroad tracks, built small settlements every fifteen miles or so, places where farmers could bring their grain and send their children to school. The towns prospered as long as farming was the work of families, and their muscles supplied the labor. Then machines came, and farming got bigger, the work of combines and capital, and the small farmer was pushed aside. We liked the results, we city people. Cheap food and plenty of it was a lot more visible to us than the farmers leaving their…
