“Main Street” [I-70] Kansas (Day 29)

With regret, we departed our pleasant campsite at the Air Force Academy this morning and headed east.  I made four wrong turns within the first 15 minutes of driving out of the Academy and Colorado Springs, even with the GPS telling me where to go!  I think the “day off” was having an effect.  At any rate, we finally made it to Route 24 which took us east to I-70.  I noted that Kansas calls I-70 its Main Street and that seems appropriate.  We drove eastward through the foothills of the Rockies—the Colorado high plains—for about 150 miles before entering Kansas.

Now some may say that Kansas hasn’t much to offer in terms of sight-seeing, but that just isn’t true.  Driving through on the western Kansas “Main Street” (I-70) one can observe “skyscrapers” in every little town.  These are grain silos!  Some are even higher than the church steeples, and I’ll bet there was much harangue in the church councils over the silos superseding the steeples!  There are corn, hay, sorghum, and milo fields all along the way.  (Milo is harvested to feed the many cows, which can also be observed along with thousands of those big round bales of hay along Main Street, Kansas).  Now these fields of corn, hay, sorghum, and milo are interesting because some have hundreds of huge windmills in them, and in front of the windmills are oil wells (and oil tanks to store the oil).  The power of the wind, the power of fossil fuel and  industrious farming go together here in Kansas.

We arrived in Russell, KS late this afternoon and found a comfortable RV Park.  I spent some time with the hostess, who needed to talk about a 3-year old boy in the neighborhood who died today from injuries when the tailgate of a pickup truck pinned him to a garage door.  How sad!  Every community, every family, every person, carries sorrows and wounds that we often know nothing about—but when we are told—we need to listen (for listening is a form of healing and love).  I now carry the campground hostess and this Kansas farming family, who have lost a son, in my bundle of care and prayer.

Taking some liberty with Kahil Kibran’s words, let me put it this way:  Whenever the storm is singing a wild song and dancing a passionate dance, whenever my heart is bare and quivering, wounded, sad, or

Odysseus at Yosemite

hurt, I feel the terrible need of someone to listen to me and to tell me that there is a tomorrow for all bare and quivering hearts.