IdyllopusPress Presents

(Lots of pictures below the fold.)

It was too late Sunday to start back out so we stayed that night at Hiawatha and then in the morning began the next leg of our trip to Arizona. I wanted to go through the glacier cut Flint Hills along the way. And I wanted to take a slight detour through Chautauqua County, Kansas and Sedan, where my great-grandad once owned a seed and feed store on main street. When I got down to Phoenix my dad said that the storefront would still be there, next to a bank. I didn’t know that or I would have taken pics of every store situated next to a bank. And there were three that we saw, I believe, on that short, scenic bit of main street that is endeavoring to become a tourist/art attraction after years of having turned into a virtual ghost town. Wouldn’t imagine a small town with a population of about 1300 would need 3 banks.

The Flint Hills are beautiful. Do I have any pictures of them to show you? No. Kansasflinthills.com does. We appreciated but didn’t stop. What do I have pictures of? Junkyard sculpture in Howard, Kansas. Hubbell’s Rubble. In the midst of it all a big sign for Longhorn Realty. I saw, we passed, I yelled to stop, stop, stop. Marty sighed as we were running against the clock. I said stuff the sigh, you don’t pass a field of junkyard sculpture on a backroad highway without stopping and appreciating the wonder that is humankind, we are here to be an example of this for H.o.p. and besides it had a T Rex and H.o.p. would love it. He said OK. Look to this website for more pics from I guess 2004, taken on a day that wasn’t drained of color by a burning sun. I began to remember how that area of Kansas and Missouri has its own special kind of hot in the summer that had me coming in from the drives to radio stations when I was a kid and despite the air conditioned car, collapsing onto the cool greeny carpet of the sage greeny living room floor, too brain dead to even care about turning on the television and wanting to nap until the usual cold cuts dinner (they took the main meal at noon) but pulling myself to my feet to fullfill plate and silverware obligations.

My favorite was the above pink Nessie which has lettering that reads “I love people”. I at first thought it was a dino but H.o.p. immediately understood it was Nessie. He for some reason is fascinated with Nessie and says he wants to go to Scotland and see the loch where Nessie has been rumored to live. It’s one of those fascinations that won’t let go. I was informing on citrus and Florida and Saint Augustine (where cousins are vacationing) to him today, and some castle like fortifications led him to want to see pics of castles and when he saw one that was in Scotland it was back to Nessie and that’s all she wrote.

Time has done a number on the stagecoach. The horse is unrecognizable from 2004.

Nor has time been kind to this lady. In 2004 she looked like this.

We went from the tin man at Howard to Sedan, which has a yellow brick road and a congratulations engraved on the sale of the 10,000th yellow brick (correction: oops, I did put in initially 10,000 tons…hmmm…wasn’t thinking).

Sedan, Kansas is now principally Bill Kurtis’ “Red Buffalo Country”.

Kurtis lives in Chicago but now owns an 8000 acre ranch outside Sedan that has weekend getaways and another 3000 acre ranch nearby where stands Laura Ingalls’ “Little House on the Prairie Home”. Bill Kurtis started buying up Sedan and rennovating main street. Sedan’s industry is now weekend tourism and has an art gallery and antique stores. It was a store that I guess is part of the Red Buffalo antique store into which I went to ask about something, I forget what, and saw they served real coffee and ordered some and talked a bit to the woman working there, who wasn’t from Sedan. It was Monday. Nothing was happening. She took care with the lattes and they were good.

I took pics but the sun bled them all out so go to the above website to get a small glimpse of current Sedan.

Sedan’s public library is located next to city hall.

I went to the Court House to look for old wills. The Court House was larger than City Hall. It looked like an old school and had two floors. In the office that handled probate there was a large medical-looking poster showing the muscles of the body and if I remember correctly discussing the effects of alcohol on the body. H.o.p. stared and wondered at it. The woman who brought me the probate book, a Deputy, was so unenthused and put out that even my husband noticed. I was startled that there was one probate book and that in that one probate book there were about three pages of Mc’s. That’s all. From way back when to now. Same with C’s and so on. And I thus learned that my ancestors didn’t bother much with probated wills. Most of my father’s father’s line and their relations were in Chautauqua from the 1870s to the 1970s and there were only two wills, neither what I was looking for. I hoped for a pen and paper to write the numbers down on but the woman waiting on me wasn’t about to trust a pen and piece of paper to me, for which reason she had cause to be extremely exasperated with me when she went to get the docket of the newer will and brought me the wrong one, she having written the number down incorrectly. She told me the place I’d have to go to in order to get a copy of one of the old wills (but neglected to tell me they were closed). The old will perhaps will tell me where the Crockett homestead was so that I may one day perhaps go there to see if any one knows where is the boulder that has the Crockett name carved on it.

I left my sunglasses in the office and the woman who never cracked a smile was kind enough to catch me at the water fountain on the second floor landing and return them to me. I was glad I’d stopped to take a drink because I believe if I had gone on down the steps that would have been the end of my sunglasses.

At the Court House I remembered that Emmett Kelly was born in Sedan.

On the first floor I found another office and asked where the museum was. Then it occurred to me I have a distant relative on my father’s mother’s side who works with the Emmett Kelly museum and I asked the woman if she knew him and she said yes and looked for his phone number. She was very amiable, as was another woman who appeared to be working with her in the office. She told me the museum was probably closed and it was. I ended up not calling my relative because I’d thought about him too late and we needed to be on our way, our goal being Amarillo, Texas that night. I think he will be disappointed in me when I let him know we drove through Sedan and didn’t phone him. I’m disappointed we didn’t have the time. I have several distant relatives in Oklahoma and Kansas who I want to meet and haven’t yet had the opportunity.

H.o.p. sees the above picture and says he’s sorry the museum was closed.

We went through Pawhuska. We went through Ponca City where my dad grew up, delivering newspapers on Main Street. We went through Oklahoma City where we got the worst coffee we’ve ever had. Marty took a taste and said it was horrible coffee, the worst he’d ever had, not even coffee, and I thought well it’s probably bad coffee like all convenience store coffee is bad. I took a sip and spat it back out. Whatever it was, the liquid was pure foulness. Mostly hot water with maybe some essence of hazelnut thrown in and a shot of powdered milk (we’d gotten it black) and god knows what else that made it so bad it deserved to be spat out.

We noticed something was smelly in Oklahoma City and then passed by the cattle yards. There were a lot of neon signs partially burned out in Oklahoma City.

Eventually we drove into the Texas panhandle where we were confronted with the Holy Lone Star Sepulchre of the Windmill.

Marty stayed in the car with H.o.p. I had to go in. It was a must visit. There was a trucker inside and we each read, in respectful silence, the Stations of the Sacred Windmill.

It was a working windmill that twirls in accordance with the outside winds, and a panel informs those winds reach up to 100 miles per hour in that area during storms. It must be pretty harsh in that building during a storm on a cold day. I’ve decided that after I die, on one of those cold, stormy days, I want my ashes dispersed in that building by that windmill. Attendants will have to hold open the doors so that a few of my ashes may be perhaps blown outside, unless the outer winds are aiming directly into the building, in which case the sifting will have to be delayed until the winds blow proper. I’m not sure how I feel about a good part of my ashes probably being spread all over the interior of a rest station. I’m not even sure I feel very good about any of them coming to rest on Texas soil. I don’t like Texas. It’s just the windmill and Don Quixote and some queer idea I have of breezing my Bush Empire contrary remains over a bit of Texas highway and ranch land. I am already thinking of ways it can work out. For instance, my ashes that settle in the rest area, some of them may perhaps be picked up on the soles of visitors to the narrow panhandle, travel back out to their cars and trucks and on to other states. But I may change my mind about all this by tomorrow, since I only came up with the idea a few minutes ago.

We spent that night in Amarillo.