I’ve been busy this fall with work and other things, so even without the coronavirus, there have been reasons not to travel. We’ve fished for bass in freshwater and redfish in salt, but since early August all of our fishing has been close to home. I’ve studied maps, and concentrated on where we could reach driving. I’m not ready for airplanes, but I still want to fill in blanks.
And there are blanks to fill reasonably close to home. There are adjacent states I’ve been saving, Arkansas and New Mexico, and states a bit further that we can drive to without too much effort: Georgia, Kentucky, Missouri, Colorado, and Arizona, maybe South Carolina, maybe Utah. With the exception of Kentucky, I’ve been to all those states before, even if I haven’t been there to fish. What’s the point, though, of finally making it to Kentucky if I can’t visit distilleries? And New Mexico, one of my favorite places, requires visiting Texans to quarantine. Colorado is on fire. Then there’s Kansas, which is a peculiar problem that demands particular attention.
I can’t find a fly-fishing guide in Kansas, and I’ve spent hours on the internet looking. Over the summer I thought I’d finally found one, Paul Sodamann at Flats Lander Guide Service, so I called Paul. He’s a FFF certified fly casting instructor, and he’s taught a fly-fishing course at Kansas State, but he told me he’d stopped guiding. Zebra mussels have infested his local waters, and while the carp were still there, the mussels have so cleansed the water that the carp see you coming. Carp are spooky, and in the clear water he says there’s no reliable approach to spooky fish.
Zebra mussels and carp: America’s heartland has been invaded. See? Kansas is a complicated place.
Since I can’t find a guide I’ve focused on the least-populated Kansas places, and I will tell you there are plenty of least-populated Kansas places. In 2019 Kansas had an estimated population of 2,913,314, with 104 counties, and an average population density of 35.4 people per square mile. That’s a lot of land, and not a lot of people. And the population is not spread evenly. The ten most populous counties represent about 65% of the population, while the 65 least populous counties represent only about 10% of the population. There’s some weird symmetry in those numbers.
After map study we settled on the Cimarron National Grassland which is as far south and west as Kansas goes, with a stop at Meade State Park, an 80-acre lake just over the Oklahoma border, about an hour south of Dodge City. Meade State Park is 641 miles from Houston, or a roughly 12-hour drive. Cimarron National Grassland is about two hours further west, with a side trip to get the hell into Dodge. The description of Meade was of a good warm water lake, with bass, catfish, and sunfish. The descriptions of Cimarron said it had ponds, with bass, catfish, and sunfish.
Cimarron is in Morton County, Kansas. Morton County, Kansas, population 2,539, is not the least populated county in Kansas. That honor goes to Greeley, population 1,232, two counties to the north. Out of 104 Kansas counties, Morton ranks 91st in population. Urban as it is, one wonders, how do 2,539 residents support the communal things people need? A sheriff? A doctor? a high school football team? a high school?
It’s probably no surprise that Western Kansas is flat and rural, and that it doesn’t sport a lot of water or trees. The Cimarron Grasslands is located on the Cimarron River, which in Kansas is an intermittent stream, dry for most of the year. It was dry when we saw it. Even Middle Springs, a dependable watering hole on the Santa Fe Trail, was dry. Semi-arid, this is wheat country that depends on rainfall and aquifer irrigation, and every 15 or 20 miles along the highway there is a community with a co-op grain elevator, a farm supply, and a cafe. My friend Clark, a Nebraskan trained as a city planner, once explained it to me: the farming frontier communities are spaced by how far a pre-automobile farmer could reasonably travel to get to market and home again in a day.
Western Kansas is beautiful, but I may be unnaturally drawn to flat and sparse. It’s also In Cold Blood territory. Writers who trade in horror and violent confrontation should be drawn to Western Kansas. There’s nothing like isolated farmhouses to spur that creepy distrust of the stranger. But sparse as it is, isolated as it is, it’s not wild. This is industrialized agriculture, and everywhere there is evidence of cultivation and the massive machines and infrastructure that make it possible. In Western Kansas there’s rarely even the faux wilderness of uncultivated pasture. Every acre seems farmed. This is grain country, exactly what Kansas is supposed to be.
In 2016, Morton County voted 83% for President Trump, which is also what Kansas is supposed to be, and there was strong support of the President all along the highway. In every community there were Trump signs in yards and at businesses. At farm gates there were Trump flags. In contrast, yesterday morning on my run I counted 12 Biden/Harris signs in five blocks. Kansas was just like my neighborhood, but in reverse. instead of five blocks its political uniformity spreads across hundreds of miles.
On the drive from Houston I re-listened to a lecture by Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter with Kansas, based on his 2004 book of the same name. I haven’t read the book, and the lecture isn’t so much about Kansas as it is about conservative voters generally, with Kansas appearing mostly in the title as a bit of shorthand. If I follow the lecture correctly, the right on the left side of Kansas is no longer driven by economics; those Trump flags aren’t out there because of fiscal conservatism, but because of cultural divides. The Kansas Trump voters are now driven by anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-antifa, and anti-whatever, not economics.
Maybe there’s some truth to that, but I suspect Mr. Frank misses part of the point of all those miles of wheat fields. Farmers are business owners, and the people who work for them and depend on their trade are deeply tied to the success or failure of their business. I’d guess their political convictions were developed more from Jimmy Carter’s 1970s inflation, followed by the 1980 Russian grain embargo, than from any deep seated dislike of what’s happening culturally in Chicago or Denver or Dallas, or for that matter Wichita or Amarillo. As much as there is to admire about Mr. Carter, he didn’t do much for Kansas farmers, and I’d guess 40 years on Kansas farmers still see government generally and Democratic government in particular as less a help than an intrusion, or a ruination.
This corner of Kansas was also the heart of the Dust Bowl, and Cimarron National Grasslands only exists because of government intrusion in the 30s, when a bit more than a hundred thousand acres of environmentally ravaged land was purchased by the government to add to the national forests, sans trees. Even in the photo above, the trees are imports, not natural parts of the landscape. There are also bits of the national grassland throughout the dustbowl plains, in Colorado, Kansas, and Texas, and it’s held as grassland in part to protect against a repeat of the Dust Bowl. In the urban mind, those Kansas farmers are always less cognizant of their dependence on the government aid they receive than they should be.
Meanwhile, we traveled to Morton County, Kansas, to fish. We may well be the only people hereabouts who can say that. We drove about 1400 miles and I didn’t catch a fish, not a bass, catfish, nor sunfish. Not a one fish, two fish, red fish, nor blue fish, of either the Republican or the Democratic variety. At least I get to think more about Kansas. What’s the matter with Kansas? We didn’t catch a fish.
