This Town is For You

 “That one was made by one of the best potters in Lucas. He passed away a few years ago,” said the woman as she wrapped up the purple pitcher I’d bought. Her colorful reading glasses matched the colors that permeated the store.

“If you like that, let me show you something else you might be interested in,” she said, smiling expectantly and leading me through the store. Mobiles made out of garbage, mosaics of broken glass, abstract paintings on wooden pallets, jewelry made from dyed noodles; the store felt like a Pre-K classroom, only if you broke it you bought it. We passed the rainbow doilies and metal roosters. She motioned towards some white statues. It took me a second to distinguish what they were.

“These bearded lady statues were made by hand! And they are on sale!” The bearded ladies were made out of white clay, garbed in large robes with hoods. They were complete with saggy boobs and facial hair that looked like Dumbledore. It seemed as though the store clerk thought that if I was aware that someone had gotten the notion to make such spectacles themselves, surely I’d buy one. Who buys manufactured bearded ladies? And who wouldn’t buy a handmade one on clearance?

 I froze in a smile as she eyed me hopefully. “Ummm…those are very nice ma’am! I’m not really looking for bearded lady decor at the moment, but I know where to go if I ever need any!” I was worried I’d offended her, but she just shrugged and led me back to the front of the store.

“So why do you love living in Kansas, in the middle of flat-nothing?” I asked her before walking out. “Well,” she answered as though it was her favorite question, “We who live here are forced to make our own magic, and we’ve got the time and the space to do it.” She gushed, “It’s like the flat-nothing is the blank canvas, and the people who live here are what color it.”

Amber and I were 2 of the 15,000 people who annually visit Lucas, Kansas. However, it felt like we’d walked into our own outlandish dream as we walked the quiet, sun-baked sidewalks. If anything, it was colorful. I had a few questions after visiting. For instance, what is it about me that a stranger might see and think, “Man, that girl needs a bearded lady in her life”? But that’s the tip of the iceberg.

If you’ve ever had a burning desire to see a tiny replica of the world’s largest can of spinach, “The World’s Largest Collection of the World’s Smallest Versions of the World’s Largest Things” in Lucas, Kansas is for you. There was an actual museum, but the owner was out of town. However, she had some of the goods displayed in her yard, so we walked around sheepishly as you do in a stranger’s yard. There was a tiny replica of the world’s largest tomato, one of the world’s largest water tower, and another of the world’s largest ball of yarn. Name the world’s largest anything and this lady had made a tiny replica of it.

But maybe you aren’t one for tiny replicas of large things. Maybe you prefer giant replicas of smaller items. Don’t worry, this town has something for you as well. If you’ve ever taken a dump, and you were disappointed that the bathroom wasn’t made to look like a giant toilet, the public bathroom in Lucas, Kansas is for you. Not only is the building shaped like a giant toilet, but the sidewalk is made to look like a roll of toilet paper. As if that isn’t enough, this isn’t just an ordinary giant toilet; it’s fancy, as colorful glass pieces decorate the concrete.

My favorite part of the experience was the ceramic toilet bowl. The store clerk explained that all 300 citizens of Lucas got together and made a list of everything they’d ever dropped in a toilet bowl, so that’s why there’s random items floating around. These people have dropped some toothbrushes, some wallets, and I recall seeing an alligator in the mix. If you have questions about this, so do I.

There is also a giant, ceramic, Kansas-themed bowl that sits by the gas station, if you’re into that. 

You’re probably thinking, “This town has it all.” But you’ve only scratched the surface. In the heart of Lucas sits The Garden of Eden. It’s like the one in the Bible but different.

    P.T. Dinsmoore served in the Civil War. He came home to his wife, and after seeing his yard, I’m only guessing their conversation went something like this:

“Honey, having been gone awhile, I’ve thought of some home-improvement ideas.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yep. I’m gonna build our house to be a log cabin, only it’ll be concrete. Then I’m gonna make some yard art, spice it up a little.”

“That sounds nice! What kind of yard art?”

“I’m thinking of some naked statues of Adam and Eve. I’ll probably throw Satan in there, too. Maybe some other Biblical characters…

Also, I saw someone shooting a native American recently, I might throw that in the mix…

 I’ve also got some ideas about the government that would best be symbolized by a statue of a woman stabbing a monster...there’s a few others, I’ll run them by you…”

    Dinsmoor’s Garden of Eden consists of a plethora of 40-foot statues that surround his concrete log cabin. The town used to make him put clothes on the nude ones, but today the nipples are out for the general public. From what I’ve gathered, most of them are symbolic of his views of the Bible and the government, but even with that they’re a little hard to follow at times. I guess this is what happens when some people survive a civil war.

    After his wife died, Dinsmoor impregnated and married his Czeckoslovakian servant (at 80 years old and pre-Viagra, so that’s something). Call him a loony, but he was an entrepreneur, or at least he would be. The man combined his dream of being a part of his own creation with his hopes of providing for his family, even after he kicked the bucket.

    If you’ve ever wanted to pay $15 to see a civil-war-era corpse, The Garden of Eden in Lucas, Kansas is for you. Dinsmoor built a glass coffin, and he was laid in it and put in a 3-story tomb in his yard. He wrote that nobody would be able to see him for less than $5. People do come to see him, and the man still brings home the bacon.

    Admittedly, we did not pay the $15 to see Mr. Dinsmoor. Maybe next time, when I go back to pick up those bearded ladies.

Billboard Messiahs

     The first marvel of Kansas that we encountered was Jesus Himself...sort of. Jesus was always with us, whether we were under a bridge or in a sketchy hotel room. Well, Jesus is also in Colby, Kansas. 

    He’s on a giant billboard, hanging out in a wheat field. From the looks of it, He just popped his head right up out of the wheat. It would be creepy, but He’s the Messiah and all. He proudly shows off his bouquet of wheat, like, “Hey guys, look at this wheat, we’re gonna make it into bread to break it in remembrance of me.”

I would love to know more about this Kansas Jesus’s story, but all that I’ve gathered is that there is a married couple in Colby who pay to keep Him up there. They even keep Him lit at night so the late-night long-haulers can experience this spectacle.

We see a lot of billboards with lots of Jesus on them; whiter than your Caucasian baby’s behind, sitting in a beam of light, eyes bluer than chlorine that seem as though they’d look through you rather than at you. Forget the long walks on dusty roads across Israel or the sweat and grime that comes with carpentry. These Jesuses have been scrubbed clean and bleached spotless. They look as though they’d shrivel in the Middle Eastern sun, much less save me from sin.

I would assume that the people who pay to keep these billboards up think they are helping lead the lost to Christ. However, I have never heard anyone say that one of these signs changed their lives like the Jesus of the Bible promises He can.

“Man, so I was headed towards this exit to meet a hooker, buy some cocaine, maybe do some shoplifting if the opportunity stood, usual afternoon stuff…

And then I saw a sign of this pale guy standing in a rainbow, and I was like, ‘nope!’ So I’ve gotta ask the hooker for a refund now. I’ll probably use the cocaine money to buy khakis and a polo shirt, I don’t know if they’ll let me in church with my marijuana-leaf shirt on.”

Maybe you’re reading this and you’re that one person who saw whitey-Jesus on the highway and it changed your life. I would love to hear from you if you’re out there.

Nonetheless, if I had to pick a favorite billboard Jesus, I’d choose the one in Colby. He’s unexpected. He’s a little browner. He looks into your soul as your driving past. He reminds you that Jesus can be anywhere. Sometimes it’s weird.

Tornadoes and Twisted Chainlocks

 “I really wanna go to Amarillo,” I said to Amber as I picked her up in Denver. She looked puzzled. “Why?” 

“I don’t know. I just have this feeling about it. There’s that George Strait song, and it just looks enticing on the map. I like how it’s right in the middle of the top of the state.”

It made sense in my head.

We looked it up on the GPS. It’d be about 6 hours off course. We had three days to head east because she had work, and I was already planning on missing the first couple days of college.

“I will go to Amarillo with you some other time,” she said.

I love Amber. She has this voice of reason without the condescension which makes for a good road trip partner. 

I’d just finished my summer job in Wyoming. Amber had gotten a flight to Denver so she could ride back to North Carolina with me. We figured we’d get into something; we just didn’t know what.

Well, the Good Lord must have known what. We were on the edge of Colorado (the part that might as well be Kansas) when the hail started to beat down like a BB Gun attack from the heavens. We felt the wind sweeping against the Subaru. 

We parked under a bridge, alongside a few other vehicles, and a bald fellow with a tobacco-stained wife beater and sleeves of tattoos motioned for us to roll down the windows.

“Listen, now”, he hollered over the wind, “When this shit hits the fan, you ladies better be ready to run underneath the bridge!”

“What’s the shit,” we asked, “and why is it hitting the fan?”

“TORNADO!!!”

He didn’t have to say another word. We ran out of the car, which shook in the midst of the wind, booked it to the bridge, and huddled underneath. We reacted like a couple of mountain people who’d never driven through a tornado warning: wide-eyed, holding hands and praying. We reminded ourselves that Jesus was right there with us under that bridge. Amber was almost crying while I was laughing to keep from crying, so it evened out. 

I can’t remember how long we’d sat under the bridge for, but we saw some of the cars leaving, so we decided to keep driving till we found somewhere to hunker down.

We were about 20 minutes from the I-70 Diner. If you’ve ever done a road trip driving through Flagler, Colorado, and you got hungry, you’ve probably eaten there. It’s in the midst of a desolate highway, the only thing around in the middle of flat nothingness, adorned with checkered floors, neon lights, and scuffed red booths.

Amber got what most vegans would, a plate of fries. I got pancakes. The waitress was not amused by the worried looks on our faces. Surely we were just a few of the many inexperienced travelers who’d wound up at that table, paranoid and sopping with rain water for her to wipe up later.

“Do ya’ll get tornados a lot here?”

“Yep,” she said dryly, smacking her gum.

We’d found this barn with a bed in it that someone had put on Airbnb. I’d reserved it a few hours before.

“You think we can make it?” I asked. I looked up the mileage while she looked up the weather.

“We’re a couple hours away…”

“And we’ll be driving in the midst of the tornado zone.”

My heart sank as I threw $75 down the drain and cancelled the Airbnb, but based on the leaning of my gut and the look on Amber’s face at the mention of keeping on, we weren’t leaving Flagler, CO this evening.

To the chagrin of the waitress, we hung out in the diner petting an old lady's puppies and calling our families until closing time. Then we drove 50 feet to the Little England Motel.

We walked into an office with carpeted walls, decorations that your grandmama loved in the 80s, and buckets along the floor to catch the water from the leaking ceilings. 

A couple of men sat in the back of the dark room spitting dip into styrofoam and watching TV. A lady with reddened skin and a blank expression wandered towards the counter. We told her about our situation and asked for a room.

“Yeeaaaahhh….best not drive in this, uh...weather,” she said. “That’ll be $66. And, uh...if the tornado comes this way, you girls, uh...sit in the bathtub.”

We were greeted by cigarette fumes and dog hair on the carpet. 

Word of advice: if you are traveling in the midst of a tornado warning and there’s nowhere else to go but the sketchy hotel off the interstate, please don’t read the reviews as you’re in the room, about to try and sleep.

We learned from experience. The first review was just, “BED BUGS!” One person said they had a hard time sleeping because of the all-night shenanigans that went on in the parking lot, and another said they got so sketched that they left before morning. “This is where you go to get robbed or murdered.” Nice. 

On top of this, at the time, I was reading this historical account of outlaw women in the American west. One of the chapters was about Kate Bender, the hostess of the Bender Inn, an inn in 1870s Kansas that doubled as a serial killer scheme. We were near Kansas... 

But what do you do when there’s nowhere else to go and you don’t want to drive into a tornado? You try to forget that chapter you read, keep your knife and a can of Alaskan bear spray on you, watch some funny videos of cats, and pray a lot.

Our next Google search was “how to spot bed bugs.” We took all our stuff from the car. We were locking the door, and as we went to lock the door chain, we discovered that it was nailed on backwards. “It’ll still work, right?” I asked. “Watch,” said Amber, her eyebrows raised. She demonstrated that it did not work as she slammed the door open and the chain swung free. “I’m going to open the window,” she said, paranoia on her face, “So that way if we hear bad guys at the door we can escape through the window.” That sounded good to me, as the words “robbed” and “murdered” floated around in my head.

 

In the meantime, I rigged the backwards door chain with a piece of wadded up paper in the lock. Somehow, it seemed to work. Never before has a wad of paper given me more assurance.

After following some YouTube instructions on how to spot bed bugs and finding that the sheets and mattress were void of black spots, we sank into bed, a knife and a can of bear spray between us. We prayed, reminded that Jesus goes with you from underneath the highway’s bridges to the sketchy hotel rooms of America, and tried to sleep.

The parking lot wasn’t too noisy, bad guys didn’t knock, the tornado didn’t creep around, and despite the itchy feeling I had all night, I did not awake to bed bug bites. So we packed up and drove towards Kansas, forgetting our paranoia and laughing at the pansies on TripAdvisor. 

Alma Towns

 

A is for Alma, KS, Alma, AK, Alma, GA, and Alma, me!

I am the only white, young, and non-Mormon Alma that I’ve ever met.

I get called all kinds of variations.

“Elma?”

“Ulma”

“Elmo?”

I never thought it was that difficult, but never underestimate the power of mispronounced vowels.

Once, the lady at a Wendy’s called out “Almond” over the speaker. Sure enough, the name of the nut was written on the receipt.

And unlike Sarahs, Katies, and Maddys, I will never have the opportunity to go to a gas station and buy a souvenir shot glass with my name on it.

Once, when we were kids, my friends and I were on vacation in the mountains with our families. They were all buying matching pocket knives with their names on it (as you do). I wanted to be included, but of course, there were no Almas, so I found one with my last name, Russ.

But the road introduced me to three other Almas in Georgia, Arkansas, and Kansas. 

The Georgia one came first. Our family was taking the backroads home to Florida for Christmas, and we passed through Alma. I got so many pictures with so many signs. I told everyone I was the queen of Alma, Georgia. It was better than a shot glass or a pocket knife.

And then I was driving through Kansas. Folks might say that Kansas is the nothingness you have to get through before you get to the Wild West. I wanted to prove them wrong. I wanted Kansas to be like a quiet, plain friend who you’d get to know, and come to find they secretly have something interesting going on. Maybe Kansas is like a seemingly boring person who is actually a virtuoso at the tuba, or maybe they have a dragon tattoo on their back, and they just haven’t shown you yet. I have driven through Kansas a few times and this has proven to be true. Kansas has secrets to behold.

For me, one of these secrets was Alma, Kansas, only it wasn’t actually a secret at all. There were blaring yellow billboards for a couple of miles. I had no idea what Alma had going on, and little did I care that it was 20 minutes out of the way. I pulled off the interstate.

Alma was nobly called the “City of Native Stone” because apparently it was the prime place to get flint back in the day. The old stone buildings made up the tiny Main Street. No McDonald’s, no Taco Belle, but a little drug store, some churches, a couple rusty gas stations, a diner here and there. The main thing it had going for it was its cheese. There were signs for “Alma Cheese” everywhere. It makes sense that an Alma town would have Alma Cheese, because this Alma right here will eat a block of cheese for a meal. All kinds of cheese, too, from the kind that tastes like plastic to goat cheese, from Velveeta to muenster.

It was good Alma Cheese, too. I got some cheese curds for the road, and the lady in the creamery even told us about her and her husband living in a camper because their house had flooded, so I suppose it rains a lot in Alma. 

Screw shot glasses and pocket knives. I got a shirt with “Alma” on the front and back. It was all I’d ever wanted.

The last Alma I stopped at was  Alma, Arkansas. I was on my way back east on that same trip, and I drove another 20 minutes out of the way to see my 3rd Alma, because then I’d have been in more Alma towns than I had met Alma gals. I got a picture of an old fire truck that said Alma on it.

One thing that all these Alma towns had in common was that, when I told the locals my name was Alma, they’d all recall another girl named Alma who’d passed through.

“Oh yeah, I’d met another girl named Alma who passed through a while back, she was almost as excited about it as you are.”

So Alma gal, maybe one day we will meet in an Alma town. Maybe our names will connect us somehow. There could be similar life stories we may share. Maybe there will be telecommunication involved. Who knows. 

Let me know if you find yourself a gas station shot glass.