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.
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.
posted by Stan at 11:19 PM
2 Comments:
You should vacation more. Just leave the drugs at home. CAK
If you have never been to New Orleans, come on down and look me up. You think the sheriffs from Kansas are fun. Try the Causeway policia... And the politics... you'd have a field day down here. I can see it now "Big Elk - Putzlier Prize winning author of "New Oleans - the underbelly and loving it".
CAK
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