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George de Randich
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After a half-century of travel, a 50-state quest ends in Kansas
Full story: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/travel/2003124983_travelstates16.html
By Jack Broom
Seattle Times staff reporter
KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Brace yourself, a voice inside my head warned. This guy is going to think you're nuts.
Standing on one side of a two-lane street, I waved slightly to get the attention of a red-shirted man pushing a lawnmower in a yard on the other side.
I was about to ask him a question, even though I was pretty sure I knew the answer. Why else would this be called State Line Road?
Still, it had taken me years to get here, and I had to be certain. So when he looked my way and killed the lawnmower motor, I asked: "Are you in Kansas City, Kansas?"
I was willing to look like an idiot to this stranger because there was a larger issue at stake. I was standing in Kansas City, Mo., and I was virtually certain that when I crossed this street, I would be -- for the first time -- entering Kansas.
On a global scale, it was no big deal. Countless people enter Kansas every day. Is it not, after all, the heart of the Heartland?
But ever since I was a child, I've kept track of which of these United States I have "colored in" with a visit. And Kansas was about to become No. 50.
I asked my wife to record the moment with her new digital camera, catching my sneakers striding across the border. "We're in Kansas now, Toto," she said.
On this trip, Kansas was the fourth and final state in a 10-day, 1,600-mile driving loop that already had taken us through my other "missing" states -- Oklahoma, Arkansas and Missouri.
We had flown from Seattle to Oklahoma City, where we visited the heart-wrenching memorial to victims of the 1995 federal-building bombing. Then we drove east to Little Rock, Ark., to tour the boxy, aluminum-and-glass Clinton Presidential Library, which some liken to a double-wide trailer.
And after a long rainy-day drive to Kansas City, Mo., we had followed a friend's instructions to bury our faces in plates of smoky meat at Arthur Bryant's, a barbecue joint dating back to the 1920s.
In Kansas, we would head to the tiny town of Wamego, home of the Oz Museum and its collection of 2,000-plus posters, dolls, games, porcelain figures, coffee mugs and video clips, all related to Dorothy's tornado-driven ride over the rainbow.
(Movie trivia: Did you know that the late Buddy Ebsen, best known as "The Beverly Hillbillies' " Jed Clampett, was originally cast as the Tin Man? An allergic reaction to aluminum-powder makeup sent him to the hospital, and by the time he recovered, the part had been given to Jack Haley.)
Kansas didn't offer any twisters on our visit, but it completed a quest begun in 1958, when Dwight Eisenhower was president, when Elvis was in the Army and when gasoline -- not that this 7-year-old would have noticed -- was 30 cents a gallon.
Color the states
We ate our Cheerios from plastic bowls in the back seat of the Chevy wagon that summer, restaurant breakfasts being an extravagance for which parents traveling with four kids had neither time nor money.
On narrow highways, cars and trucks swooshed by so close our Chevy would rock in response, but we were under divine protection: Just before we left Seattle, the parish priest had blessed our car.
We were zooming to Wisconsin, land of my mother's birth and kin.
Forests, farms and towns scrolled past our side windows like backdrops to a television show. Power lines dipped and rose again with each passing pole. Jagged blue mountains anchored the distance.
But no single feature outside the window etched itself in this passenger's memory more deeply than an item we had brought with us, a coloring book of the states. Each page showed a landmark or scene from one state, but it was the U.S. map in the center spread that kept demanding my attention.
From the large shapes on the left -- California, Nevada, Montana -- the eye slid across to the tighter array on the right, where the likes of Delaware, Maryland and Rhode Island were so small and bunched up that some of their names had to float in the Atlantic Ocean.
There were only 48 states then; it would be another year before mapmakers had to find room in the corners for Alaska and Hawaii.
Alongside the map was this suggestion: Color in each state once you have visited it.
At every state line, my sisters, my brother and I bounded out of the station wagon for a photo at the "Welcome to" sign, then we colored the state on the map. We set foot in seven states (not counting Washington) that summer, dipping south on the return trip to "color in" Wyoming.
Layovers don't count
For nearly five decades, I have held on to that map. Not as actual book, unfortunately, but as an image, a memory, and at times, a goal.
With a friend, I flew to Hawaii the morning after high-school graduation, staying at the Honolulu YMCA for a couple of bucks a night. With another, I hitchhiked to Georgia a year later, sometimes sleeping alongside the highway. With a third, I wandered the slushy streets of Juneau, Alaska, one January weekend.
My quest has added detours to vacations and work trips alike. During a weeklong assignment in Boston, I took time out to drive to Maine for lunch, getting the additional bonus of coloring in New Hampshire.
And don't ask my wife, Judy, about Rhode Island. I had the bright idea, while we were driving in Connecticut on one vacation, that we could hit Rhode Island by dinnertime. "Dinnertime" ended up being 10 p.m. and the only restaurant we could find served up a plate of clams that gave Judy a case of food poisoning lasting the rest of the trip.
Deciding what "counts" as visiting a state can be a personal matter, although I have seen people debate it on the Web. I don't set rules for others, but for me, an airport layover is insufficient.
For years, my only Texas experience was changing planes at Houston or Dallas, not enough to color in the vast Lone Star State. So last year, I tagged along when Judy's job sent her to San Antonio for a convention. We added a few days to see Austin and a Gulf Coast beach -- arriving at the shore just in time to get scared out of the water by news of a shark attack near Galveston.
I'll admit that some of my state "visits" have been rather cursory. Like that lunch in Maine. Or a couple of hours in Delaware. Or hitchhiking through Kentucky without stopping for much more than a bathroom break.
Truth be told, if my feet were paint brushes, they wouldn't really have "colored in" any state, merely laid down a few smudges inside the boundaries of each.
Paris, Tuscany, Wichita
Last winter, realizing that chance alone wasn't going to get me to my "final four," I informed Judy that come May, I would head out and hit all of them, and she was welcome to come along if she'd like.
As an enticement, I promised it wouldn't be all state lines and highways, that Oklahoma City offered a beautiful botanical garden, that Arkansas' Ozark Mountains were said to be picturesque. And the prospect of authentic Kansas City barbecue didn't hurt.
Still, I remember the evening in February when she came home from her book club, where the women had been discussing vacation plans for the year -- stuff like Paris, Tuscany, the Galapagos. No one else had even mentioned Little Rock. Or Wichita or Oklahoma City, for that matter.
In fact, if I had a dollar for every person who scrunched up their face and said "Arkansas?" when I told them about my travel plans, I'd have ... well, six or seven dollars, anyway.
Craig Smith didn't scrunch up his face. Smitty is a Seattle Times sportswriter who notched his 50th state a few years ago. He had a standing bet with a college buddy, Gregg Herrington, a longtime editor and writer at The Columbian in Vancouver, to see who could get to 50 first. Smitty won and collected a dinner out, 33 years after the bet was made.
Arkansas travelers
For the record, Judy and I had a great time in each of the states we visited, including Arkansas, taking no personal affront at the pickup's bumper sticker defining a liberal as "Someone so open-minded their brains have fallen out."
The Clinton library was informative, even fun. Its video clips included a humorous look at Clinton's final days in office, with a scowling Helen Thomas demanding, "Are you still here?"
A couple of blocks away, the grilled shrimp were yummy. And a woman at a state "welcome center" helped us book a room at a rustic state-park lodge perched on a mountain ridge.
In Conway, an Arkansas town of about 50,000, we timed our visit to hit the annual community festival, "Toad Suck Daze." Seems in the olden days, when steamboats traveled the Arkansas River, the water wasn't always deep enough at this bend, so the crews would have to wait it out, parking themselves at a local tavern.
And, says local legend, the rivermen would "suck on the bottle 'til they swell up like toads."
At the street fair, we sampled pulled pork, short ribs, roasted ears of corn sprinkled with Cajun spices and for dessert, strawberry shortcake -- all that leaving no room, darn it, for gator-on-a-stick or deep-fried Twinkies.
And we somehow managed to miss the celebration's marquee event, the toad races, because I was out playing golf. Guess that gives us a reason to go back.
We'll also need another trip to see a big Kansas claim to fame, the world's largest ball of twine. From what I hear, August is the time to go, when Cawker City's "twine-a-thon" expands the ball even more. (It's approaching 9 tons now, and measures 40 feet around.)
In visiting all 50 states, I make no claim to being an accomplished traveler. Outside this country, I've managed just two trips to Europe, a dozen Mexican vacations and assorted work and play trips to British Columbia.
Still, even catching these glimpses has been a learning experience. From the ground, from the byways and cafes, the bookstores, the supermarkets, the town squares and the roadside produce stands, America's states don't look red or blue, the way they do on TV on election night.
Each has its own concerns, priorities, internal disagreements. Among the newsy issues in Oklahoma was whether it would become the 50th state to legalize tattoos. It did.
A neighborhood intruder
The afternoon I set foot in Kansas, even though I knew I had completed my mission, I was still seeking a sign.
Not a bolt of lightning or a voice from the clouds. Not a sign from God, necessarily. A sign from Kansas. The only "Welcome to Kansas" sign we knew about was along Interstate 70, with no place to pull over for a photo.
For several blocks, we looked along State Line Road for any mention of Kansas. A "Lost Dog" flier was fading on a telephone pole. A blue-and-white "House for Rent" sign was stuck in the parking strip, but nothing included the name of the state.
Finally, I found it. Rectangular, metal and extremely authoritative. It wasn't a welcome per se, but it was a confirmation in black and white.
"Notice: We call the Police," read the sign, placed as part of a neighborhood-watch program. It was the sign's lower line that delivered what I needed: "Kansas City, Kansas," it read. "Not your ordinary cow town."
I stood underneath it and had Judy pull out the camera again.
Jack Broom: 206-464-2222 or jbroom@seattletimes.com
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