Too Long in the Wind

July 2008

A few thoughts about Berdene Russell

[July 8]   Her Hutch News obituary contains few details -- relatives' names and dates of death, birth, and marriage -- but Berdene Russell's life must have been fairly active. (Update: Tribune obit has more information.)

I didn't know her well when I was a child, but I did see her at 4-H events and school games and programs. She and Charles Wilbur Russell had five children, and they always were doing something good.

The Russell farm was just west of Pawnee Rock on the north side of the correction line, too close to town to be a big farm and too close to the country to be a city house. The Russells were playful; theirs was the only farm I knew that had a tall ranch gate built over the driveway, and I think it said "Chas Russell."

Because of that sign and how much I enjoyed going out to their farm, I thought of Berdene as a rancher. Whenever I needed a face to put on a ranchwoman's character in a novel I was reading, hers came to mind. I imagined her to be tough, and I remember her as kind.

Berdene Russell was 85 years old, having died nine days past her birthday. She and Wilbur had been married since 1942. Their daughters are Rosalie Burns, Jacquie Russell Haynes, and Lynda Russell Wilson, and their sons are Mark and Wade. She leaves a sister, Jacqueline Williamson, and eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. She was the niece of one of Pawnee Rock's early ministers, the Rev. Beverly E. Parker.

Her funeral will be at 11 a.m. Friday morning at the Pawnee Rock Christian Church, and she will be buried in the Pawnee Rock Cemetery. Wade, a pastor, and Don Paden will officiate.

Here are three instances of Berdene Russell in the pages of PawneeRock.org and the SantaFeTrailResearch.com: Pawnee Rock Community News, and Easter pageant on the Rock, and the Santa Fe Trail newsletter.

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At the end of the fence

[July 7]   For as long as I can remember, our old home place on Santa Fe Avenue had a white picket fence. It ran from the fire station to the house and then from the house to the property line we shared with the Tutaks.

It was a fine fence. I considered myself an adult when I could step over it.

But my favorite part of the fence was the post at the end of it. I couldn't tell you when the post was placed there, but it was worn smooth by the time I got to know it. The post was about four feet tall, and it was set in plain brown dirt inhabited by doodle bugs. Maybe it was a trunk of osage orange, which lasts practically forever. I often ran my palm over it as I walked out of our yard on the way to school.

My wife, who sometimes gets exasperated with me, says that I would argue with a fencepost. Maybe I would, but not with this one.

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Berdene Russell dies

[July 7]   The Hutchinson News reported this morning that Berdene Russell died Sunday at St. Joseph Memorial Hospital in Larned. Services will being arranged by Beckwith Mortuary in Larned.

The Russell family place was just west of Pawnee Rock along the correction line and practically on top of the Santa Fe Trail.

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Cutting yesteryear's grass

I mowed the east side of the Pawnee Rock Cemetery more than 30 years ago, when the cedars and I were young.

[July 6]   I mowed the lawn today -- second time in this dry year -- and got a good coating of dust and macerated cottonwood fuzz. It's a small yard, and much of what is not taken by the house is alive with trees, so it doesn't take much mowing.

Still, the dust and heat brought back to mind mowing the township cemetery in Pawnee Rock, which is one of the finest pleasures ever bestowed on a teenager. Dad always did the cutting around the gravestones, but as I got old enough to drive a straight line he let me handle the eastern section, which at the time -- the early 1970s -- had only a handful of graves.

Old-timers will remember the white shed that stood in the northwest corner of the cemetery; that's where we kept the mower, shovels, and wooden frame that we laid around the place where we'd dig a grave. The mower drove in and out of the building on a ramp with three long boards, one for each wheel.

Compared with today's riding mowers, the township's battleship-gray mower was a beast. It was tall and had handlebars that resembled a bicycle's, and the metal seat belonged on a tractor. It had a clutch, if I remember right, and a gas pedal; you let off the gas to stop. The Briggs & Stratton engine was brought to life with a three-eighths-inch knotted cord that fit into a slot on a flared tube attached to a flywheel (perhaps someone will remind me of the proper term), and I wound the cord around the tube, gripped the wooden handle at the other end of the cord, and pulled. Sometimes the knot flew into my face, and sometimes the mower yanked the cord out of my hand.

But once the mower was running, I was a king on wheels. I'd engage the blade and send the unlucky grass, weeds, and sometimes floral wires flying. Dad used to mention the bull snakes and blue racers he scared up, but those were rare on the east side, where there were too few ground squirrels to attract predators.

The main attraction of mowing was that I was driving; I was at that age when any kind of driving was worth the effort. I doubt whether I wore a cap in those days, so I must have gotten a good tan. I know my arms got a good workout holding the vibrating handlebars.

The only part of me that didn't work on the mower was my brain. It didn't take long for my muscles to remember what to do -- drive straight south down the wheel mark of the previous trip, slow down for the turn -- drive back north -- so I was off in la-la land in no time, dreaming of rescuing girls from some dire circumstance, or of building rockets, or of the camera I'd buy with the dollar or two I was earning. The work was greasy, dusty, dehydrating and perfect for me.

I think Dad liked to mow as well, but it probably wasn't the most profitable way for him to spend his sexton's salary and he gladly passed the easy part to me. And just as I now think of those happy days whenever I crank up my Sears mower, maybe Dad in the 1970s thought back to his teenage days in the 1940s when he drove a bone-shaking tractor on the farm.

We all have our secret pleasures. One day I'll try to explain this one to my sons, but to them it may be more of Dad talking crazy. It might be something they can't understand until they've spent seasons in the wind and sun, riding alone for hours on the dusty grass.

But you know what I mean.

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A photo I like: No. 94

[July 5]   I made this shot while flying from Wichita to Denver, and it must be the 10 millionth photo ever made of a wing. What is special about this one is that it's over Pawnee Rock.

I'm sure many of us have made this photo; it's hard not to if you want to photograph anything outside the plane. But I think wing photos go beyond that.

Human flight occurs because we have learned to operate within certain physical laws. Still, I can't see the air scoot over the wing's curved upper surface, yet the wing provides lift. I can't see the superheated air blast its way out of the engines, but we are pushed forward. I can't see where our overstuffed, uncomfortable aluminum tube is headed, but we hit the runway every time.

Although flying shouldn't be an act of faith, it is. Once in a while I need a photo like this to reassure myself that it works.

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One morning on the Fourth of July

[July 4]   The neighbor lady offered each of my boys a long sparkler. Her granddaughters, up from Texas, already had some burning by the time we got to our block's usual gathering place in the middle of the street at the cul-de-sac.

Even though it was almost time for the 12:01 a.m. ignition of the annual fireworks show down the hill, Sam wanted to burn a sparkler. I huddled my hands around the ends of the sparklers and our neighbor went through an entire box of matches trying in vain to light them in the breeze.

We gave up on the sparklers. The boys sat on their camp stools, and shortly after midnight this morning we turned our faces toward our town's Fourth of July fireworks.

A couple of late arrivals from a block up the street walked up behind us. Then a dad and his daughter, she running ahead, arrived from the house across from ours.

Always thinking of what I'd write, I was trying to draw parallels between what I was seeing and what I last saw 30 years ago at Memorial Stadium in Larned, but it just wasn't working. I asked myself whether I had lost my sense of wonder.

The sky was illuminated by the reds, the greens, the blues, the shells leaving a tight spiral of sparks on their way up. Our elevation was 600 feet, about 400 feet above the park where the fireworks were launched, so some of the shells exploded at our level, albeit almost a mile to the west.

"Maybe next year we'll go down to the park and look up at the fireworks," I told the boys, who despite having colds wore shorts. They were squeezing their knees together against the 48-degree wind blowing off the inlet and up the sloping street into our faces.

I heard someone walking in a yard behind us but saw no one when I turned. That must have been Sam rubbing his legs, I figured.

Two nights ago, the sky was clear and I could have read the newspaper outdoors at 2 a.m. Last night at midnight, clouds sat heavily and the fireworks exploded against a gray curtain.

"You guys can't see the mountains across the way, right?" I said. "That's because there's a big rainstorm over the inlet."

More fireworks. I relaxed my view and saw how they were framed by our neighborhood's birches and spruces. "It wasn't ever this pretty in Larned," I thought.

We counted the seconds between the flashes and the retorts. Four seconds, almost a mile.

Sam pulled at my sleeve and pointed south to Hiland Mountain. The interceding valley was filled with puffs of gray smoke, moving en masse as the wind willed. We watched a jetliner approach the fireworks and talked about how three years ago we had seen this show from a 767 red-eye as we flew off to vacation in Pawnee Rock.

The grand finale arrived with its sparkles and chest-shaking bangs and red flares that turned into a swarms of crazed birds. Dogs barked and car alarms went off. And when it was over, we heard the applause from the park.

The boys folded up their stools and waved goodbye to the neighbors and the kids from Texas. As we turned, Nik spotted three moose -- a cow and her twin six-week-old calves -- just beyond our house.

The moose, so dark we could hardly see them until they moved under a light, had gone through our yard and crossed the street behind us while we watched the fireworks. Now the cow was daring anybody to walk close; no one did because no one wanted to die at the hooves of an overly protective horse-size animal.

So I invited our up-the-street neighbors into my Civic and taxied them past the moose. When I got home, I collected the boys and we lit the leftover sparklers at the end of the driveway. That got the mooses' attention and even from a hundred fifty feet we could see the mama's ears and hackles rise. I instructed the boys to drop the sparklers and go in the house if she ran at us; I'd like to think they would do that anyway but an overly protective dad has to make sure.

The sparklers soon died and now lie in ashes on the asphalt. The moose have moved down into the woods. The scent they left on our grass drove our beagle puppy crazy when I took her outside later.

And that was the first half-hour of our Fourth of July. We had our annual community gathering, we had distant fireworks and those at hand, and we had wild Alaska. It wasn't like in Larned, and it wasn't like in Pawnee Rock. It was, however, perfect for where we are now.

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Things that go boom in the darkness

[July 3]   The loudest Fourth of July I ever tried to sleep through was three years ago in Great Bend.

The boys (then 9 and 7) and I had flown into Denver that morning and then drove the nine or ten hours to Great Bend and Pawnee Rock. If you remember, it was a hot, breezy day (87 with an increasingly east wind). We were tuckered, but I was determined to show the boys a good time.

We bought firecrackers at a stand in Kanorado, and I shot off a couple for the boys at Mount Sunflower. When we arrived in Barton County, I thought it was a good time to do it right, so we headed to the Dundee dam and the boys got to jab their burning punk at the fuses of a few dozen Black Cats.

We were dilettantes. Another fellow there had a roll of ten thousand firecrackers, and they cracked for a good five minutes. But that was nothing compared to what we heard later outside the Black Angus motel.

When we went out the next morning and drove up Madison Street, I was stunned to find the pavement covered with shredded paper and tubes and bottle rocket sticks. And so was the next street, and the one after that.

When we were kids in Pawnee Rock, we were relatively frugal. For my first few years of launching cans, firing "cannons" by dropping firecrackers into pipes, separating leaves from plants, and blowing up piles of driveway sand into which I had arranged twig "soldiers," I spent only two or three dollars. It was a big deal when someone in the neighborhood bought a half-dozen screaming nighttime fireworks or a package of roman candles.

I used to think that our firecrackers and sparklers did signify something special about Independence Day, but it was a vague feeling then and anymore I'm even less sure. As all kids do, I tried to imagine the bottle rockets being a symbol of the rockets' red glare, but that wore out quickly as it became more fun to aim the rockets at my friends.

One kid in a hundred might have gotten a lecture about how those little explosions mimic gunfire and military detonations, which have the purpose of killing people. I think we all understood that to a degree, however, and we played God until we settled certain issues in our hearts and minds.

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Larned and the wild Pawnee

The happy side of the Pawnee wall in Larned's Schnack Park.

[July 2]   The recent flooding in Iowa and Missouri brings to mind the excesses of our own Ash Creek and Arkansas River. That stream in Larned -- Pawnee Creek or Pawnee River, depending on your upbringing -- also made its way into the news occasionally.

Although I understand the desire to protect houses built in the flood plain, I was disappointed back in the 1980s when the city scrapped its earthen dikes and erected a tall concrete wall between itself and the Pawnee.

To me, one of the best parts of Larned had been its day-to-day association with the Pawnee. Families came to picnic under the big cottonwoods in the park and fish in the creek. People -- our family, for instance -- sometimes went to Larned on Sundays just to drive slowly along the bank, admire the trees, and talk about whether the water was actually moving.

The Pawnee and Larned interacted; at the least, the people of Larned acknowledged the Pawnee. That doesn't seem to be the case anymore. For practical purposes, the Pawnee is out of sight and out of mind.

It just amazes me that Larned doesn't make more out of its connection with the Pawnee and Arkansas, but then there's very little of that before you get to Wichita, where the Arkansas and the Little Arkansas are dammed and have become the city's main natural attraction. (Of course, Wichita doesn't have a flood problem now that it has the big ditch around town.)

On recent visits to Larned, I have driven through the park and relived the church picnics, the little railroad rides, and the Saturday evenings when I walked hand-in-hand with a friend to the swings for a bit of canoodling. The Pawnee was always there, gurgling gently as it slid beneath the branches.

"Country" begins on the other side of a barbed-wire fence on the south side of the Pawnee. Deer and other animals still come to the Pawnee in town, but now fewer people see them. Fewer kids fish for bullheads or dig clamshells out of the banks. Like children who don't know where milk comes from, they know less and less about the lifeblood of the plains.

And that's what Larned lost when it walled in its people and houses and told nature to go away.

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Houses of Pawnee Rock

The house of the Hixons, Countrymans, Eppersons . . .

[July 1]   Most of us now live in towns and cities where new houses -- even new subdivisions -- go up every year or two. It's quite a change from our days in Pawnee Rock, where the houses we knew as youngsters are pretty much the ones that are still there.

There are a few new ones. Kirk Smith's, near the salt plant, is one. There's the new Bright place on the way to the Rock. The house above the former American Legion basement was erected with lumber from my Unruh grandparents' farm.

There is the house (Lillian Sweeney's?) the Welches moved to their corner along the Mennonite Church Road. The Meads put their house in on Houck, and the Bowmans built a home near the tennis court. Galen Unruh built a house on the hill, Gerald Schmidt built a house in the 1960s along Santa Fe Avenue, and I think Art Sayler built the only house on the south side of Santa Fe in the old nursery. The Hixons took a piece of the old school grounds and built their odd-angled house at Pawnee and Houck.

No doubt there are older folks who liked the view of our part of town before my dad raised a one-story home over our basement house next to the red-brick fire station.

That's as far back as I go. Everything else, I think, was there when I was born.

Not much has changed over the years among our town's 160 or so houses, 130 or so of which were occupied when the 2000 census was performed.

I will admit that I get a little antsy when I see a new house being built. It's not that I resent a new family or a family moving up in circumstances; it has nothing to do with them.

I think it does have to do, however, with memories of when my life was most nearly perfect and my deepest geographical emotions were drawn. I want to put a fence around that landscape. I must be afraid I'll lose a piece of my childhood if a vacant lot is filled or a dilapidated house is replaced with a livable structure. I'm afraid that somebody will lay claim to a place where I have special memories.

Perhaps every person who moves to Pawnee Rock has that feeling too; I imagine that their map is the one imprinted in their minds on their first day in town. Youngsters build their maps as they go and fill in the blank areas when memorable things happen.

But things change and we all have to adapt if we're going to understand our place in the pageant of history. Still, I'd appreciate it if you'd check with me before you build.

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