“It’s easy to see what binds us together,” he said. “When someone gets into trouble, neighbors jump in and help. That’s always been the case out here.”
Driving away, I asked myself if that sense of community would survive the depopulation of the Great Plains and all the places like it. I had my own vision of the America my grandchildren might inherit: huge, sprawling megalopolises with nothing in between, galaxies dense with humanity separated by vast reaches of empty space. People would be connected by social media, or whatever their equivalent will be at midcentury, but could the impersonality of electronic links ever replace the intimacy of a few words exchanged over a fence, the joys or sorrows or needs revealed in the expressions on someone’s face, in a tone of voice, a touch? Would neighbors jump in to help someone in trouble; would they pull together or pull apart?
* * *
At Lovewell State Park, I nudged Ethel into a space above a reservoir created by a dam on the Republican. (The river, incidentally, hadn’t been named by political partisans, but by early French fur traders who’d mistaken the Pawnees’ form of tribal government for a republic.) After we set up, Leslie went off to exercise the dogs. Dead tired, I broke out a camp chair, splashed a double shot of Johnny Walker into a tin cup, and sat down, my mind as blank as the prairie sky.
Leslie and the dogs returned early from their excursion, her left wrist swollen, her forearms bruised. She tossed the leashes my way.
“I’m through as dog wrangler.”
She glared at Sage and Sky, a look of caninicide in her green eyes.
“What happened?”
She’d been walking them, in her flip-flops, when they scented something interesting, lunged, and yanked her off her feet onto the gravel path. She broke her fall with her arms. We still had no ice—the minifridge’s tiny freezer couldn’t seem to keep anything frozen—but a chilled bottle of vodka served well to reduce the swelling in her wrist.
It was still puffed up and sore in the morning, when, filling in as dog wrangler, I took the miscreants for a stroll along the river. They pulled like sled dogs and nearly tripped me as they crisscrossed in front of me, tangling the leashes around my ankles. There was bird scent all over the place; swallows were nesting. In unison, Sage and Sky froze on point, straining forward, their eyes and noses fixed on something in the grass. It was a newborn swallow, smaller than an egg, covered in fuzz. Its mother dive-bombed me and the dogs. I saw by the trembling in their muscles that their instinct to pounce was about to overcome their training to hold fast, and I practically tore a rotator cuff pulling them away.
We hiked back to the trailer, man and dog seasoned with ticks. As I plucked them off with tweezers, I explained to Leslie the reason for the dogs’ behavior. It did not mollify her. The one-woman Union of Dog Wranglers would be on strike till further notice. Her wrist remained swollen and painful. Treatment took us to the nearest hospital, across the state line in Superior, Nebraska, for an X-ray. A kindly nurse proclaimed a sprain, applied a Velcro splint, and gave Leslie a mild painkiller. Then we left for the middle of the middle of the country.
17.
In 1940, two surveyors, L. T. Hagadorn and L. A. Beardslee, determined that the exact geographic center of the contiguous United States was at 39 degrees, 50 minutes north latitude, 98 degrees, 35 minutes west longitude. Its location was inglorious—a hog pen on a farm owned by one Johnny Grieb. A monument was to be erected, but farmer Grieb did not want tourists tramping over his land, so another site was chosen half a mile away. The marker stands there today, at the junction of County Road AA and Kansas Route 191. Thus it only purports to be at the middle of the nation. As a matter of fact, it’s a fiction of a fiction; there is no such thing as an exact geographic center. Here’s why: if the continental United States were as flat as a playing card and each square mile of uniform weight, the precise center would be its balance point. But because coastlines are ever shifting, reaching out here, shrinking back there, that point keeps moving, even if by only a yard or two.
Anyway, for the sake of convenience, let’s say we arrived at the exact center, 2,582 miles from Key West, including detours and side trips. We were the only sentient beings out there, besides two horses grazing nearby. A low, lead-colored sky and a high prairie wind heightened the feeling of desolation. A tourist publication we’d picked up at the campground advised that “there really isn’t very much to see and do at the geographical center of the United States.” That was a half-truth. Yes, there wasn’t much to see, but there was absolutely nothing to do except to stand there so you could later tell your friends that you’d been there. Leslie videoed the scene. Sound: complete silence except for the whoosh of a buffeting wind. Picture: a small park with a covered picnic table; a tiny frame chapel; a defunct motel that a rich Texan had converted into a hunting camp; a stone pyramid with an American flag snapping from a pole embedded in its top; an age-greened plaque with a sketch of survey lines and the inscription:
THE GEOGRAPHICAL CENTER OF THE UNITED STATES.
And one other thing: a glassed-in display of press clippings and a copy of the remarks delivered by State Supreme Court Justice Hugo T. Wedell when the marker was dedicated on April 25, 1941. He said: “We have here in Kansas something distinctive which should be preserved at any cost. It is the spirit of the pioneer who settled in the center of this great nation. That spirit is worthy of its definite and distinct qualities. That spirit is neither radical nor ultra-conservative. The spirit of the Kansas pioneer of necessity possessed the rare combination of idealism and realism.”
Lebanon, two straight-line miles from the marker, also claims to be “the Center of the U.S.A.” Or, as a resident once put it, “Lebanon isn’t in the middle of nowhere, it is the middle of everywhere.” Huddled on the horizon-to-horizon expanses of wind-ruffled wheat, it didn’t look like the middle of anywhere. On both sides of one street boarded windows stared from derelict houses, porches sagging, paint peeling like skin from a sunburned back, NO TRESPASSING signs tilting in neglected yards. The siding on one place appeared to have been sandblasted by someone who’d quit with the job half done. In the business district—“historic,” of course—overlooked by grain elevators and storage bins, rubble lay in vacant lots where buildings had once stood. Stores had CLOSED signs pasted to their locked doors. A fair-sized redbrick church was in good shape, as were a few residences nearby, but all in all Lebanon was a wreck.
“What happened here?” Leslie asked. “It looks like it was hit by a tornado.”
To find out, I went to city hall, only to discover that it, too, was defunct. The municipal offices were now in a steel-sided box that looked like a construction-site trailer. There I met Sondra Kennedy, a blonde, solidly built woman who wore several hats: town treasurer, town clerk, mayor’s assistant. After I explained what I was up to, I remarked, as gently as I could, that Lebanon looked in rough shape.
She bit her lip. She’d lived in Lebanon all her sixty-one years and in that time had seen its population fall from almost a thousand in the fifties to three hundred at the turn of the century. Today it was—she flipped through some papers on her desk—218. The school closed years ago—there were so few young people left, no jobs to hold them here. The pharmacy was gone, the hardware store, the grocery store. The bank had shut its doors, the building condemned and demolished.
“The bank was the hardest for me,” Kennedy said. “I worked there for twenty-one years.” She choked back tears. “It’s hard, so hard to see this happening to your hometown.”
The same slow death we’d seen elsewhere, but in Lebanon the condition had progressed. Present trends continuing, the town would be uninhabited in less than twenty years. I felt as if we were touring a kind of demographic ICU ward and had come upon a patient with no hope of recovery.
Were there any plans to bring new life to the town? I asked. Tourism? Light industry? None that Kennedy knew of. She suggested I talk to the mayor, Duane Ream.
I found his place, a neat, modest
yellow clapboard on U.S. 281, across from Lebanon’s last remaining gas station. He lives there with his wife, Joan—pronounced Jo-anne—a lively woman with short, silver hair whose hobby is making porcelain dolls.
Ream and I spoke in the den, where a grandfather clock ticked over our voices. Outdoor scenes hung on the wood-paneled walls; photos of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren stood in easel frames on bookshelves. Ream’s thick, dark hair took a decade off his eighty-six years. The only sign of advanced age was the quivering in his hands. Dressed in a maroon shirt and jeans held up by blue suspenders, his accent pure country, he looked and sounded like a son of the prairies, but he was no provincial with a narrow view of life. He’d studied photography at the Yale University School of Art when he was young, had traveled all over the country with Joan, and he read three newspapers a day and kept abreast of events on CNN and the Internet.
“This is a farming community, ever’thing is tied to the farm, there is absolutely no industry,” he said, sitting in a lounge chair. “And the farms got big, there was nothing for anybody to do, the young people go to college and head for somewhere else. I read somewhere that the average age of a Kansas farmer is fifty-eight.”
He paused, plucking at his jeans. The clock’s ticking seemed to deepen the silence.
“When I was a kid—that’s quite a while ago—there was at least one family living on each quarter section, so there was at least four families on each square mile.1 Well, I have a nephew out here who farms six thousand acres. Wheat, corn, soybeans, milo. He owns some, leases some from retired farmers and farm widows who can’t work the land themselves.”
Ream remembered the day when farmers like his father plowed with horses and considered a yield of twenty to twenty-five bushels per acre a good harvest. Now, mechanical marvels like giant combines and GPS-guided tractors that plow furrows as straight as yardsticks allowed one man, like his nephew, to cultivate huge tracts of land and bring in sixty to eighty bushels an acre.
Technology had likewise shrunk the need for human labor at the grain storage facility at the north end of town. It handled a million bushels each harvest but employed only three people full-time, a few more to operate the scales and keep books during the season.
“Downtown Lebanon at one time had a business on every lot on both sides of the street for two blocks,” Ream said “We had six grocery stores, we had hardware stores, we had ever’thing. But then farmers started to retire and there was no one to replace them. Well, you can’t have a grocery store if there’s no one to buy anything.”
And so, he went on, Lebanon was fading away “a little bit at time.”
How did he feel about that?
“Ever’body here is happy,” he answered.
Happy? I was thinking of Sondra Kennedy, stifling a sob.
“If they need something, they drive fifteen miles to Smith Center or two hours to Salina or Grand Island in Nebraska. Nobody minds that.”
Was it difficult to be the mayor of a disappearing town?
He shook his head. All he had to do was maintain the streets, keep the sewers working and the water running. Periodically, he organized clean-up campaigns, hauling junk from abandoned houses or from houses occupied by people too old to do the heavy work themselves. And, no, there were no plans to rebuild the bank or put new businesses on the vacant lots, some of which out-of-state buyers had bought on the Internet, sight unseen.
He gave the impression that he was resigned to Lebanon’s plight; it was a natural process, and he couldn’t do anything more about it than he could about the weather. He’d lived a long time, and some of it had been tough, and maybe that’s what made him so placid. He remembered how, during the Depression, farmers never went hungry but they never made a nickel, either, bartering surplus eggs for groceries, a bushel of wheat for flour. He remembered the Dust Bowl, when clouds of dirt blackened the sky.
“I’d seen my dad scoop dirt off the floor in the house with a scoop shovel that blowed in from a dust storm. I had to go out and dig a trench around the pig pen. The dirt had come up over the top of the fence, and the pigs could walk over it. You left your machinery out, the dirt would bury it. It was bad, it really was. We raised very little in those years.”
To him, the Great Recession wasn’t even an inconvenience. “We didn’t know it happened,” he said. “Nobody here has any money to lose. What they have got is invested in machinery. A tractor costs twenty to thirty thousand, a combine two hundred thousand. People out here were madder’n hell when they read about what the big banks and the mortgage lenders were doin’. All that was caused by people stealin’ money. They wanted to loan money and get that interest. They didn’t care if you went broke.”
The clock ticked on, gonged the hour, and then Ream threw out a question: “Why do we have to have a four percent increase in the gross domestic product every year? We’re gonna die if we don’t get the prices raised four percent every year? I don’t know who dreamed that up. The workin’ guys in a factory have to get a raise. So the guy makin’ the stuff they buy has to give his workers a raise, and prices go up, so they have to get another raise. Why can’t we just live the same?”
Although he was one of those Kansans whom Justice Wedell described as “neither radical nor ultra-conservative,” this was a radical proposition. I’m not sure he realized how radical it was; were it put into practice, it would subvert the consumer society top to bottom. We would have to redefine the cherished belief that our children must live better than we, even when we’re living pretty damn well.
He didn’t expect an answer, which was good because I didn’t have one.
“Thanks for giving me your time,” I said.
“That’s okay,” he replied with a wry grin. “My time isn’t worth much.”
Wondering if Ream’s comment that everybody was happy might have been mayoral propaganda, I returned to Lebanon the next day with Leslie to snoop around. In the post office, next to an empty lot once occupied by a hardware store, we found the postmaster, Debbie Whitman, waxing floors. A slim, strawberry blonde, Whitman was as open as the plains, as cheerful as a sunnyside-up egg. She’d been the town’s postmaster since 2003.
“This is a manual station,” she said. “No automation. I sort the mail, stamp everything by hand.”
Often, letters arrive with just a name, no address, but Lebanon is now so small she has no trouble getting mail into the right hands.
“There used to be five rural routes here. Now we’re down to two, and they’re not big routes. Lebanon was a booming town then. It held celebrations that drew people from all over. It had a bar, the Wagon Wheel, restaurants. A lot different now. The old bank building had to be torn down because bricks were falling off it during harvest, from the big semis driving past. Overall, it’s kind of sad.”
Was she sad? She was not. She had only two complaints: one, everybody knew everybody else’s business, and two, Lebanon was too big for her and her husband, a retired Kansas state trooper.
“This is too big?”
She nodded. They lived on the edge of town, and sometimes she curtained off the windows facing other houses to create the illusion that she was out in the country.
“We’re rural people. When we get into Omaha or even Salina, it’s too fast-paced. I wouldn’t mind living someplace where we’d get into town once a month. That would be awesome.”
It turned out that Lebanon did have a grocery; also a hardware store, a variety store, and a café. All were consolidated under one roof, in a two-story brick building beside the American Legion Hall, Post 185. This was Ladow’s Supermarket, and the whole of it would have fit into one department in a Walmart superstore. The second-floor windows were boarded, but the café downstairs was bustling with some twenty customers while the owner, Randall Ladow, cut and packaged pork chops and breakfast sausage at the meat counter. The noon siren moaned, a sound I hadn’t heard since I was a kid in those small Wisconsin towns where my father serviced the canneries. We had
lunch: my cheeseburger cost a buck fifty; Leslie’s pulled pork sandwich was two dollars. I couldn’t find a soul as sorrowful as Sondra Kennedy. They weren’t in denial, and all pointed to Big Ag as the drum major on Lebanon’s march toward ghost-town status, but, like their mayor, they’d adopted an attitude of jaunty stoicism.
“I suppose we don’t like it,” Ladow told me, wrapping sausage in plastic, pasting price stickers to the package. “But we don’t know how to draw young people back.”
At fifty-four, he was one of the kids in town. He’d lived in Lebanon since he was four and, except for a year attending a technical school, had never been anywhere else. Talk about roots! He didn’t have time to mourn what was happening. Running a market, a hardware-variety store, and a café all at once kept him and his wife busy twelve hours a day.
“And there’s always something to do if you want to get involved.”
Like the musical review advertised on a poster in the market’s window: Give Our Regards to Broadway. It promised “songs, skits, fun.” Another announced a July Fourth fireworks display. A town spirit wasn’t dead yet, and if everyone wasn’t happy, most were. I might have been the most melancholy person in Lebanon, aware that I’d been talking to people who were the last of their kind. The adagio to Dvořák’s New World Symphony, wistful, solemn, played in my mind, and I felt as I imagined Edward Curtis did when he photographed Sioux and Apache and Hopi early in the previous century.
18.
It surpasses strange that the white race ethnically cleansed North America of its aboriginal inhabitants and then proceeded to name just about anything that could be named for them. Sioux City, Iowa. Cheyenne, Wyoming. Cochise County, Arizona. Pontiac. Mohawk. The Atlanta Braves. Red Cloud, Nebraska, is the eponym for the Oglala Sioux war leader who waged a textbook guerrilla campaign that stopped settlement in traditional Sioux lands for a decade.
The Longest Road Page 13
