They have their pride in Meade

So, I checked work e-mail last Wednesday and one of my co-workers asked where I was. I replied “Dodge City.”

Comment back: “You are not following the Google suggested route.”

True, I was down in the Southwestern part of Kansas to go to the town of Fowler and possibly Copeland. Why? Cause its about the most out of the way place in Kansas you can get. I based a character from a short story I’m writing from out there. The character moves to San Francisco to seek whatever people seek there and realizes there is direct correlation between B.A.R.T stop and economic social status. He devises a plan to climb the social ladder by getting off B.A.R.T earlier. Anyway, I started writing this story by looking at web pages from Copeland etc. I now know when movie night is at the local school and that some Civil War stuff went on and the Dalton Gang hid out in the nearby town of Meade.

Now, my driving companion, the person who cooked up this plan for me to fly to New York and drive back with him, after he convinced Greg, my occasional roommate, to ride out to New York with him, made the mistake of asking after we got car searched the other day, if there was any place I wanted to go on this trip. (Besides the sides of Interstates for pat downs.) That’s a bit like asking one of the characters from the Wizard of Oz if they could have anything they want what would it be? Me being from Kansas, and having been given one wish, I chose obscurity. Plus the whole story idea came from an observation said driving partner made to me and Greg one day about riding B.A.R.T. So he was stuck.

So we went. Mainly because I felt I really needed to get a better feel for Fowler and its surrounding county before discussing it in a short story I’ll likely send off to be rejected. Couple things I found out about Fowler:

­ It has a Equity Exchange Grain Elevator rather than a Farmer’s Cooperative. I’ll have to research that.
­ It has the smallest cement jail in Kansas. Built in 1912. It’s about five feet tall and wide and six feet long. It didn’t look like a pleasant place to spend a summer afternoon.

We drove around looked for a house to put in the story. We didn’t really find one, so I’ll steal one from another town in Kansas. Then we started the process of getting out of the most back road part of Kansas which led us to the neighboring town of Meade. Big claim to fame: hide out of the Dalton gang. As we are passing down Main Street my driving companion says: “There is a rainbow flag flying back there?”

I say, “Yeah right, prove it.” So we turn around and back up the street in front of an old hotel, now posing as a bed and breakfast is a rainbow flag flying beneath the Stars and Stripes on a flag pole. We both look at each other then we both look at the flag again.
“Okay, there is a story there.” I say. We looked at the hotel restaurant. It was closed, so no story then. We needed to get to Denver, so we left. We had an appointment with Greg. (Who has now moved to Denver.)

Now, I’m not saying Southwestern Kansas is the last place I’d expect to see a flag like that. They are all over Berkeley being the lesbian capital of the Bay Area. But in Southwest Kansas as one of my cousins put it. “We’re a bit churchy.” So it’s a bit of a miracle. I mean other Kansas miracles have happened, Clark Kent fell from outer space and was adopted by barren farmers. Toto and Dorothy did survive a ternader once, and got a few friends gifts from a fat guy behind a curtain. But I got to wondering about that flag. When I got to Denver I did a bit of internettin. Search on “Gay Meade Kansas” and you get almost as many articles as you would if you typed in penis enlargement. Turns out that old diversity flag was a present to the owners of the Bed and Breakfast from their twelve year old son who had gone on a trip to San Francisco. He saw it in a store there, thought it was cool and reminded him of “Somewhere Under the Rainbow” or something and bought it for his parents. They put it up on the flag pole outside their hotel. Three or four weeks went by before anyone figured out what the flag meant. Though to be honest, if you asked anyone on the street they probably couldn’t tell you. They just know it has something to do with gay people. --Those people that stretch their vowels and accessorize too much for the average Kansas farmer.

That’s when the trouble started. Not with the people of Meade, who just sort of shrugged their shoulders and shook their head with a bit of chortle as they walked by the bed and breakfast. “You know they are from California.” The trouble came in the form of the Reverend Fred Phelps, who upon hearing of the “zealous” flying of the multi colors in outskirts of his home state sent his daughter down to Meade from Topeka with a group of followers to protest. They were equipped with their usual signs. Now, I never really had heard of Fred Phelps till my grandmother (she lived just South of Topeka) pointed him out on TV back in 96 when I was in her living room, the night we had her 90th birthday party. “I don’t like him.” She said, “If you gay you’re gay. He should leave them people alone.” She filled me in on other details later. We’ll just leave it as she didn’t think Phelps was very churchy. He’s kind of on the fringes of Christian behavior. But apparently the appearance of his daughter and followers kind of got the ire up of the good people of Meade, and they had a counter protest. Not necessarily in defense of what the flag stood for, but their right to fly it if they wanted. Nobody was coming down from Topeka and telling them what to do. This apparently irritated the gay community. -Not the local one. There isn’t one. Hence why no one new what the flag was for, but the national one. They got upset that the people of Meade were upset for the wrong reason.

Well, the flags been stolen a few times, and the windows smashed in the bed and breakfast. Lots of newsprint and HTML has been wasted on the subject of who is more indignant. In the Kansas vernacular we would say, “We had words, and people aren’t talking anymore.” But the flag, a little weathered, still flies a year later.

So anyway, I found some depth for my characters from Fowler, if I ever finish the story.

Course there is part of this story I left out. When I got home and looked up what I had wrote about the home of Layton Ray Hotchkiss, main character of the story, I realized I had him growing up outside the town of Offerle and Kensely and not Folwer and Copeland. I was off by sixty or so miles. So, I should have never been in Meade. Had their local sheriff realized it, he probably would have pulled us over as potential story setting traffickers.

Profiling in America

Now on the trip out, my travel partner, told me he was stopped for speeding in Battle Mountain Nevada. Upon finishing writing the ticket the cop suggested he smelled Marijuana in the car. Given that about the worse thing the driver of the car has ever done in life if eat ice cream with a liquor flambéed banana toping, this was somewhat laughable. However the cop persisted, and was offered the opportunity to search the vehicle, at which time he backed down. I suggested to the accused drug addict, it was probably his scruffy goatee when he told me about the incident.

Now, this wouldn't make it into a blog entry, were it not for Simon L. Lies Hamilton County Ohio Sheriff, who decided have one of his deputies hang out on Interstate 71 just outside of Cincinnati. We drove by the deputy doing exactly the speed limit. A few miles down the road we noticed we were being tailgated by said deputy. He followed us for another two miles, before finally flipping his light bar on. We pulled over. Then one of the strangest conversations I’ve ever been involved in with a cop ensued. Our deputy wanted to know where we had just come from. We said Columbus. He wanted to know where we were going. We said St. Louis via Louisville. –Not the most direct route. He then asked why we flew into Columbus. We said we had not, and had come from New York. He got a bit of terse look on his face. “You flew into Columbus?” he said.
We tried to explain our route. He cut us off as asked to see our identification. We complied and he went back to his car.

“Something is up.” I said.
The deputy returned after a few minutes, asked if we could get out of the car to explain a few things. Turns out he’s from the regional narcotics interdiction force. Anytime they see a large out of state vehicle (which apparently a Toyota 4Runner is. Well in Cincinnati.) They pull it over for a routine narcotics search. He was looking for large quantities of Methamphetamine or Cocaine. Not single use. Would we mind if he searched the car. We laughed and said sure. I was a little less amused as I have supplied liquors for the flambé eying of bananas over ice cream before. I had more to hide. Anyway the deputy poked around in our suitcases, ice chest etc. and found: nothing.
He gave us our ID’s back, apologized, explained his job again, and got back in his car.

So I guess we were profiled. One, out of state car, going someplace with two guys (one wearing a scraggy goatee) and you have drug traffic suspects. You pull them over, interrogate and see if they break. We were cooperative. We got to go free. Plus I shaved of my goatee last summer, which I think kept us out of jail.

I guess what lingers in my mind as disturbing about this program is the asking to search a vehicle of people who are basically law biding and are just on vacation in another state. Looking at SUVs as suspect in America is a bit like looking for who pissed in the public pool last. When asked for a search, we certainly complied. We didn’t have anything to hide. But somehow back in my mind I got the impression refusing the search was going to cause me a lot more hassle that it would be worth in lost time. But somewhere I can’t help but think this program skirts the 4th amendment to the constitution. Where was the probably cause to assume a Toyota 4Runner with two guys was transporting a large amounts of narcotics? If driving a SUV with out of state plates is the only reason the Hamilton County Sheriffs department needs to pull vehicles over and search them, they’ll need to hire a lot of deputies for the summer vacation season. Everyone heads for the pools. Few of us are snorting crank.

I did mail a letter to the Sheriff inquiring how effective his program was. So far it has netted a banana flambéer and an accessory the flambé eying. Guilty as suspected.

The Phantom and the Bigelk

How I found myself driving in a rented Toyota 4 Runner from just North of NYC back to Berkeley is another entry. But I have. Today’s goal: get to Columbus Ohio. Home of Schmidt’s in German Village. They have cream puffs the size of your head there. That’s the way the Reverend Dan Paul, put its. I’m not so sure. The puffs weigh a half pound. I’ve had them once before, with Dan, back in like 94, when he was just Dan, not the Reverend Dan. I think they are more than slightly smaller than my head. Maybe Dan meant they were bigger than his head? Wait, no. They couldn’t be. His head is bigger than mine. Hmm, anyway. I didn’t get one. Normally one can cross Pennsylvania in about 6-7 hours. I’ve done it, many times, normally on the Turnpike. Today I took Interstate 80. A little revenge was taken on me for all my cracks about angels in this Blog I think. There was too much road construction. Traffic actually came to a standstill at several points for as much as a half hour. That blew the first hour. Then there was the fire. About eighty miles East of Youngstown Ohio, I’d been playing leapfrog with a trucker by the name of “Phantom 309.” I know this cause he had it “Phantom 309” emblazoned on either side of his engine cowling. He also had “Class of 81” across the back of his cab. You get the hint of how many times we passed each other by how much I observed on his Kennworth. It was bright red pulling a 40 foot bright red trailer. Old Phantom would tailgate then pass me in his semi on the downhill, and I’d pass him again on the up hill. We’d been playing with each other for about sixty miles. That was just enough miles, that I was beginning the wonder what old Phantom looked like, maybe he me. We got our chance. Another semi about a half mile ahead caught fire, and threw up such a good set of flames it pretty much blocked the freeway. Traffic came to a stop for another 90 minutes. I was up the hill, with a fairly good view of the flames. Phantom pulled up right behind, shut down his engine and cleared out of his cab. He was about 5 foot 9 inches tall, slight build, with skin leathery enough to let you know he’d been smoking since he was the “Class of 81.” He walked up beside me looking at the flames. “Looks like this going to take a while. Well, I got some hot dogs, we could cook. Course, not sure how’d they’d taste with that heat source.”

Phantom went on to say a few other things. We talked briefly to a woman (30ish) who had a small girl of about four with her. They were part of the crowd of onlookers too. We chatted about each the fact my car had California plates, and them she walked on. Phantom, leaned over to me a bit. “She ain’t bad lookin, even if she is carryin baggage.”

Now as I remember the particulars of the Phantom 309 song. Big Joe (the Phantom) died in a big rig jackknife trying to save a group of school kids crossing a road. Now every so often, he appears on a hill above the accident and gives a wayward soul a ride. My Joe, had another kind of ride in mind apparently. But as time passed, he entered into more conversation with me. His theory on the cause of the fire: too many computers etc hooked up in the sleeper compartment.” But as he reminded me of computers there on the side of the road, I decided to check my e-mail. Someone had responded anonymously to this blog asking where I came up with the handle Bigelk, He or she, had their theories. (My name could mean “Nobel? Loner? Insurance Salesman? In a dark mood? Try vanilla ice cream out of the box, just not the soft stuff?” --That’s their quote not mine.

I’m not sure where he or she was going with that. But truth is I probably stole the name, like Phantom 309. Difference is I stole it from characters I made up, not ones Tom Waits made up. Well, I just stole their surname. I’m sure Lisa, Norton, and the Bigelk twins wouldn’t mind, as I pretty much gave them the life they may have someday, if I ever finish the novel and convince someone to publish it. In the meantime, I borrow their name. (I’ll write a little section into the novel later where the Archangel Michael asks Lisa permission for me use the name, she’ll say ok. Who can refuse an angel, especially, if you are a fictitious character?)

But Phantom and Bigelk and quite a few thousand others of us, stood there watching a semi trailer pretty much burn and melt. The fire trucks from Emlenton, PA eventually showed up an put the fire out. The whole process took another 90 minutes. So, total loss in time on highway 80 was about 2 ½ hours, which got the Toyota 4 runner into Columbus at about 9:15 PM. Fifteen minutes after the cream puffs as big as your head had went sleep for the night.

I did stop at a nice truck stop in Sharon Ohio where stuff peppers were the special. I ordered them. They weren’t bigger than my head either.