Have and Have-not

I'm gonna leave this city, got to get away

All this fussing and fighting,

Man, you know I sure can't stay.

--Canned Heat, Going Up The Country

   The Have and Have-not had been at war for years. Eventually, by virtue of their superior numbers, the Have-not began to drive the Have from the cities. Out at dawn, checking fences, I came across a small group of Have making their way westward to Colorado. They were old men, women and children being led by a young man.Three vehicles loaded with personal possessions were all they had other than the clothes they were wearing . . . fine clothes, soiled beyond repair by the journey. They had been traveling nights "to escape detection," the young man said.

   "Where are we?" he asked, his eyes adjusting to the vast expanse before him.

   "Kansas," I said.

   "My God!" he exclaimed in awe of what the day was revealing. "The bastards have totally leveled it!"

glwarren, 2014 

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   In 1964, returning from a year's stay in the shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains, en route to my home in southern Kansas, I boarded a train in Kansas City before daybreak. When the day dawned I was blinded by the sun-brightened landscape. My eyes ached trying to take it all in. I had forgotten how boundless the prairie appears from afar and after a three hour trip was still not wholly adjusted to the change in perspective. One can easily understand how intimidating such a view might be for the newcomer.

   When Robert Louis Stevenson crossed the Nebraska plains by train in 1879, he wrote: "We were at sea -- there is no other adequate expression -- on the plains of Nebraska. [. . .] It was a world almost without a feature; an empty sky, an empty earth; front and back, the line of railway stretched from horizon to horizon, like a cue across a billiard-board; on either hand, the green plain ran till it touched the skirts of heaven."  (RLS, "Across the Plains", The Travels of Robert Lewis Stevenson, Wordsworth Classics, Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2010, p. 167.)

   But what of the settler who has come to stay? "He is cut off from books, from news, from company . . ..  A sky full of stars is the most varied spectacle that he can hope," writes Stevenson.  ". . . We are full at home of the question of agreeable wallpapers, but his is a wallpaper with a vengeance -- one quarter of the universe laid bare in all its gauntness." (p. 168)

glwarren, 2014