On the Road (Again)

A few days ago, with my two corgis in tow, I set out for Kansas from Baltimore. After a long two days on the road and countless stops (those were more for my sake and not for the dogs’), I’m now ensconced in the home in which I was born and raised in Leawood, Kansas.

Blackwater, Missouri (my photo)

There were two notable things I wanted to mention about my travels here to Kansas. First, my thoughts on climate change.

While I traversed through parts of West Virginia, we were slammed by torrential rainfall. At one point, it was so bad, even my nice car’s windshield wipers said, “Genug!” I slowed down to a crawl. My mind wandered back to recent news of when parts of West Virginia had been flooded and small villages there were washed out from heavy downpours. So, there I was, alone, driving through buckets of rain, incapable of seeing anything in front of me (even the lights of cars or trucks were obscured). Naturally, I began to think about the “what ifs” related to climate disasters. After all, we are now seeing clip after clip after clip of massive flooding all over the globe. Plus, as just mentioned, West Virginia has not been spared from such calamity. Thankfully, the rain passed, and was replaced by sublime, low-hanging clouds. They emerged elegantly, hanging over the green, sloping mountains, and everything was fine. But I realized there could be a next time when things might *not* be fine, as we now find ourselves in a climate emergency.

My thoughts moved on to a second thought, one which I have every time I travel. This one is an old thought, but nonetheless notable. There is never a journey I have without deep, pervasive thoughts about the history of this country, the land, its peoples, especially its original peoples. Moments pass while being on the highway when it seems one could be in just about any decade or century, but then there are markers of trees, which neatly demarcate fields from one another, a stark reminder of how that’s a false assumption. This is painfully clear when driving across Kansas (probably because I am a Kansan), as all of that expansive land was once extremely tall grasslands, filled with buffalo and the Native Americans who hunted them. Of course, the land hasn’t looked anything like that for centuries. It’s always an important thing for me to note when thinking historically, as any whiff of nostalgic sentiment presents itself with dangers. It creates immediate inaccuracies in the perception of what is immediately around you, especially when gazing at bucolic imagery (such imagery lends itself to whimsical, fascistic thinking when false history and sentimentality are combined). In short, history and nostalgia should never be bedfellows.

In any event, I must pack my belongings again, collect the corgis, and head back to the East Coast. I’m on the road again.