Road Trip
An hour or so into the drive I was already thinking about lunch so I pulled out the Kansas road map I'd picked up at a rest stop. I suggested a town with the inviting name of Garden City. We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into but that's half the adventure of a road trip so we set the GPS and continued on our way west.
We could smell the place miles before we could see it. Jenny and I are from Wisconsin, "America's Dairyland," so we know a thing or two about cows, but this was worse. It was beyond words. Two minutes on Google revealed that the town is home to a meat packing plant and several stock yards. A ten second glance at the Google query "Garden City Smell" pulled up descriptions such as “God-awful,” and “it smells like cow's ass." You get the picture.
Lunch was out of the question. Jenny has a sensitive stomach and unfortunately in this case, an even more sensitive nose. As we worked our way through the town and made our way back out the stench became unbearable. I watched as she tried to drive while simultaneously plugging her nose and gagging. "Watch what you're doing!" I joked that our nightmare scenario was to crash outside the stock yards. Imagine lying wounded in some dung slathered field gagging on the smell while waiting desperately for help to arrive. Eventually made our way past the stock yards and continued our adventure.
Our detour through Garden City turned out to be one of my favorite stories about the road trip. Have you ever heard of the movie "Sharknado?" A ridiculous disaster movie about a storm that drops thousands of sharks on Los Angeles. I imagined a different take on that horrific scenario: tornado hits the stockyards and we watch in disbelief as our fearless storm chasers track the "Shitnado." We follow anxiously as the brown menace claims one helpless victim after another. Sure Garden of the Gods and the Rocky Mountains were more photogenic locations but how do you compete with "Shitnado”?
When we got back home to Milwaukee we shared pictures of our trip with friends and family. As summer faded into fall Jenny and I both got back to school and forgot about Garden City until I came across it unexpectedly in the news about terrorists in America's heartland. But unlike the hysterical narrative we've been hearing about recently the immigrants in this story were not the terrorists - they were the intended victims.
The New York Times ran an article featuring our favorite aromatically challenged Kansas town. It turns out that the FBI foiled a plot by three members of a Kansas militia group appropriately named the "Crusaders" who were planning on blowing up a mosque/apartment building that was the home of immigrants who'd come to Garden City to work in the stock yards. There were approximately 120 people living there at the time.
Turns out these true patriots had stockpiled weapons and nearly a metric ton of ammunition in addition to bomb making materials. They were planning on carrying out their attack on November 9, the day after the presidential election. It's chilling to think that even as Jenny and I drove the gauntlet of Garden City's olfactory assault others had been planning an assault of a very different kind.
The tragedy of this whole embarrassing episode is that it's so obvious we’re dealing with dangerously hateful people here who were fighting for nothing more than their Constitutional right to be assholes. Think about it. Were they concerned that Kansas was soon going to be overrun? Just spend an hour or five on the roads between Wichita and Garden City, or nearly any other stretch of road on the windswept plains of the state and you'll quickly discover that there's plenty of room.
They may have complained that the Somalis were taking jobs away from red blooded Americans who needed the work. But think about that too. Here we have a group of people who have survived a bloody civil war in the land of their birth and the often equally deadly effects of disease in refugee camps who now travel eight thousand miles to a land where many of them won't speak the language. Yet somehow the members of the Crusaders can't compete with these people for jobs. Don't you think that if white Kansans really wanted those jobs in Garden City they could have landed them more easily than the Somalis?
Our little detour through Garden City revealed more than one shitnado brewing on the plains. While rural Kansas appeared peaceful enough when we drove through it hasn’t always been that way. In the years leading up to the Civil War the territory was such a hotbed of violence that it was nicknamed “Bleeding Kansas.”
In 1854 Congress passed the Kansas Nebraska Act placing the decision about whether Kansas would enter the union as a slave or free state in the hands of the voters. Thousands of settlers from the North and South swarmed into the territory hoping to influence the state’s future. Dozens died in this prelude to the Civil War. We drove through without stopping. There was nothing to see. But there’s much more to Kansas than meets the eye. Like so many places in this great nation the most important elements lie just below the surface.
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