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Where the wind comes sweeping down the plain<\/p><\/div>The red-rock hills between Santa Fe and Las Vegas (the one in New Mexico, not the one in Nevada\u2014although what happens there stays there too, mainly because nothing<\/em> ever happens there) quickly gave way to the grasslands of northeastern New Mexico and the Oklahoma panhandle. My first overnight was in Guymon, birthplace of Mike \u201cHeckuva Job Brownie\u201d Brown, who oversaw the botched response to Hurricane Katrina for G.W. Bush. I spent the night at the Corral RV Park and Drive-in Theater<\/a>, but the movies had stopped for the season a week earlier and my only entertainment was the whistle of passing freight trains all night long. (I learned that the final film had been the apparently execrable \u201cEmoji Movie,\u201d so perhaps I lucked out with the trains instead.)<\/p>\n All we are is dust in the wind<\/p><\/div>I rolled out early Sunday in a heavy downpour and gusty winds, both of which stopped by the time I crossed into Kansas 45 minutes later. There\u2019s a lot of Kansas to look at as you drive diagonally from southwest to northeast, and most of it looks exactly like the rest of it. I camped that night at a pretty Army Corps of Engineers park<\/a> outside Emporia, which had more trees than I\u2019d seen anyplace else in Kansas and more freight trains than I\u2019d heard the night before in Oklahoma.<\/p>\n My dog Zora, who is deaf as a tree stump and slept through all the train whistles, absolutely loved our grassy campsite by the lake and gave me a skeptical look as I urged her back into the truck Monday morning for yet another long day of driving. We managed to get briefly lost in downtown Topeka trying to avoid the toll road, but eventually made it across the Missouri River in Atchison and into The Show-Me State.<\/p>\n The buck stops here.<\/p><\/div>Missouri didn\u2019t have a lot to show me<\/em> that seemed much different from what I\u2019d already seen in Kansas, so I passed the time wondering if, given my route, the trains that had kept me up both nights were on the famous \u201cAtchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe\u201d railroad. That got me thinking about Judy Garland who, not surprisingly, seems to keep coming up in Kansas\u2014I had passed a replica of Dorothy\u2019s house<\/a> from The Wizard of Oz<\/em> the morning before in Liberal\u2014and before I knew it I was in Iowa.<\/p>\n Two days later, I\u2019m still here. The trailer is parked out at the farm of Maureen\u2019s Aunt Pat, and Zora and I are enjoying a respite from the road at my father-in-law\u2019s house in Des Moines. Tomorrow and Friday promise visits to the Iowa State Fair to see butter cows, smell the swine house, and eat trans fats, before Maureen joins for the next leg of our trip.<\/p>\n We got trouble with a capital \u201cT\u201d that rhymes with \u201cD\u201d and that stands for Dog.<\/p><\/div>That promises to be a somewhat more interesting journey than the trip documented above, featuring stops in the Badlands of South Dakota, Mount Rushmore (which will offer an interesting opportunity to reflect on what \u201cpresidential-ness\u201d really looks like), and the Black Hills. I\u2019m just hoping it doesn\u2019t feature too many more campsites next to the railroad tracks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On the afternoon that a bunch of white supremacist idiots marched in Virginia and murdered a young woman named Heather Heyer, I found myself crossing from New Mexico into Oklahoma, the state where a smaller group of white supremacist idiots killed 168 people in 1995. From a forensic perspective, there\u2019s no direct connection between these …<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/aultcommunications.com\/rambles\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/DDB9080E-9E7B-4459-986E-2B5D0F600CE6-300x225.jpeg\")
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