plains speaking

I was staying in southeast Kansas for a while, helping clean out a great aunt's possessions for the family, and thought I'd drive down to Texas for a weekend to visit an old friend. While I was down there tornadoes passed through the area, up around Tulsa specifically, allegedly moving a semitrailer from the westbound rest area to the eastbound; this kind of caught everyone's fancy, and it was all over the news at my friend's house.

The main question, though, I thought, was whether that trucker had some business to get turned around, like he'd left a wife back east or something, or had some personal drama where somehow God would be telling him, you're going the wrong way, turn that truck around. We'd kind of had that discussion a lot; my extended family was all from Kansas, and they'd often talk about how a tornado would hit one church and leave the other intact, or would only hit one street of a town, or something like that. There was a general agreement that it wasn't random and yet if you tried to pin anyone down they'd get offended, as they all knew someone who'd been affected, and you didn't want to imply that that person was somehow deserving of God's wrath or more likely somehow to get it than someone else.

My great aunt, for example, had been driving through the middle of this tiny town in Kansas, when the street caved in, and the car ended up about fifteen feet down a deep hole that had at one time been made by mines; the whole area had been mined heavily. Now she was all right, and so was her passenger, another old lady friend of hers, but the city spent a few hours trying to extract them and her car from that hole safely, and everyone was a bit traumatized by the event. The other old lady in particular rarely went out driving after that; she got her younger relatives to do it for her, and my great aunt always felt a little responsible, although we'd tell her, there's nothing you could have done; how could you know when that street was going to cave in? It could have happened to anyone.

Could have, but didn't; it happened to her. And that hung over the whole situation, unexplained, as if, like the tornado, maybe someday you'll find the reason it would do something the way it did. So, I was reflecting on this as I was driving back from Texas, and as you might know it's a long way through central Oklahoma with not much to think about, and generally the signs that tell you not to drive through smoke make it worse, not better. But I decided to stop for gas and coffee and ask around a bit about that trucker. I couldn't find out anything, though; the only person who'd even talk to me admitted that, yes, it had happened right near here, a truck moved from the westbound to the eastbound rest area, but they didn't know anything about that trucker, whether he had any good reason to be turned back around and headed back the way he came. "Sure ain't random, is all I can say," this guy said, but even that didn't explain much, though it sure was in agreement with what all my relatives would say.

A surprise was waiting for me, though, when I got back to my great aunt's house, and was looking through some old papers that she'd had stored away. It seems a distant ancestor, might have been mutual ancestor, hers and mine both, had sold quite a bit of land throughout that area to the mining companies. And his wife didn't agree with it, and told him so in a brittle letter I held in my own hands. She said, in so many words, that wasn't a good idea; they'd dig up the coal, or bauxite or whatever, and leave those huge gaping holes under everything and ruin it forever, which was pretty much true, I suppose. But the money was too good, and he did it anyway, sold off lots of land, and his descendants, people like me, lived all the better for it.

I could have stayed another month or two reading those papers, but life called, and I had to get back to work, which was up in the cities up north. What struck me was that those mines had pretty much been shut down for years, and the area would have died altogether if it weren't for this ammunition factory that had been put near there a few years back. We knew there were big holes under lots of the houses in the area, big old mines that had never really got filled in, My great aunt accepted it, like it was just part of living there; you felt like anything might cave in at any time, and that incident out on the main street of that little town just goes to show. It's part of life, and you can't avoid it.

Her friend, the one who was in the car at the time, died while I was in town. But I didn't know the family well, and never got to hear her version of the story. She also was probably related to those old coal barons, almost everyone was, in some way or another, but I'd never know; I had to head back up home and I was kind of glad to do it. the storms were still raking up the area, coming up through Oklahoma, and causing serious damage to these small towns, which always seemed random, but in some wierd way, surely wasn't.