How to Get From There to Here
Lewis, Kansas was 10 minutes straight east; Greensburg (home of the world’s largest hand-dug well) 28 minutes south. Offerle, a few buildings huddling around grain elevators and a spindly water tower, 10 minutes west. Continue west 29 minutes more to Dodge City, and you could eat McNuggets and fries at the McDonald’s with a table inside a mock covered wagon. Head northeast for just under an hour, and you find yourself in Great Bend, a town named after some behavior of the Arkansas (pronounced AR-Kansas) river.
These were lovely drives, long-legged and straight as a well snapped chalk line. I had driven them so frequently — to movies, basketball games, school, roller-skating parties, late-night truck-stop breakfasts — that they induced a meditative state where the mind forgets to worry about the body and begins to run out on its own.
One of the best things about these drives was the alignment between distance and time, with one mile equaling one minute, no less pleasing for being arbitrary. I would meet few cars or trucks traveling in either direction, certainly not enough to dislodge the equation. There was more sky than anything and, if I was lucky, a whiff of skunk, a smear of coyote sprinting across the highway, or a hawk banking high above something crouching in a field of stubble.
