Tomorrow is Kansas Day.
It’s funny, but the date Kansas admitted to the union was the one that came to mind when, seven months ago, I found myself on the sidewalk next to the fuel pump of a convenience store in Missouri Valley, Iowa, in the middle of what looked like gallons. of my own blood. The idea bothered me because there was IArray on the verge of unconsciousness and in all likelihood death, and Kansas Day trying to get my attention.
Of course, there were other things in my brain in the moments after I felt dizzy and vomiting blood.
The past: One Christmas Eve when I was a kid, when my salesman father come in through the door with store-wrapped presents in his arms; walking as a kid across the abandoned streetcar bridge over Spring River to the wooded dark on the other side; the telephone poles leading to infinity out near Dodge City during a westerly vacation; the whisper of a summer night spent outside a farmhouse at the edge of town with a girl who broke my heart. And a jumble of memories of my mother, my friends, my own kids.
The present: the sharp smell of gasoline, my vision narrowing, the increasing effort needed to keep gravity from pulling my head to the ground. My favorite shirt a damask of blood. My wife, Kim, frightened and dashing inside the convenience store for help in summoning an ambulance. A biker in leather kneeling beside me, a former EMT if I remember what he said correctly, talking calmly but saying things were serious and I needed immediate attention. I managed to mumble my thanks and then, ever the reporter, asked for his contact information because I was sure Kim would want to thank him when it was all over if I couldn’t.
It wasn’t my life that was unfolding before my eyes, but rather a series of connected ideas clustered in the back of my mind. And among those insights was the wisdom that it was only a 4-hour drive to my home in the east. -Central Kansas, only 4 hours from a familiar place and yet I couldn’t walk through the parking lot. The idea of returning home sparked Kansas Day. The state was admitted to the union as a free state on January 29, 1861. on the eve of America’s first and only civil war, if we’re lucky. If I was lucky and survived, I’d put this in a Kansas Day column.
Then I took my first ambulance ride. This led us to the emergency department of the small Missouri Valley hospital, where I retired in combination and the emergency room doctor asked me what my career was because I was very eloquent (though I’m sure it was irritatingly) and I told him I was an academic. teacher. That was pretty true at the time, but there’s no explanation as to why for a story here. I will never forget my satisfaction that the doctor called me a professor even as he explained that the hospital was too small to treat my emergency, which appeared to be severe upper gastrointestinal bleeding, and sent me by ambulance to a municipal hospital. . Lanterns.
If I expressed concern about the cost and the uncertain status of my insurance coverage, I don’t remember it, because the rally had passed. I recall being shorn of my bloody clothes and Kim putting them in a plastic bag and being draped in one of those silly hospital gowns with no back and then getting very cold. During the second ambulance ride, I was not quite coherent and weirdly obsessed with the mechanics of the pneumatic system that raised and lowered the gurney I was on.
Then I was at Council Bluffs Hospital, where doctors hoped an endoscopy would help them identify and smoothly fix what was wrong with me. But it wasn’t that simple. The first check couldn’t stop the ulcer from bleeding and I became weak. Kim was sleeping on a couch in the hospital room and had a momentary scare when I fell while trying to get out of bed, I don’t. Forget about that a lot. Then there was an attempt to fix the timing and it stuck, even though it took me another 4 days in the hospital to be well enough to travel.
During this time, there wasn’t much to do yet. My preference for returning home became more acute. By the time Kim and I returned to Emporia, I had a list of things I should never take for granted again, from fitness to the strength of love. It took me months to fully recover, but I ate bland food and avoided spirits as a small value to pay for the cure.
I am aware that this case of peptic ulcer bleeding, although serious, was not an exclusive or even particularly attractive disease. It affects millions of Americans, and approximately 1 in 10 people will suffer from a peptic ulcer during their lifetime. It affects celebrities like Bruce Springsteen and other everyday people, and diagnosis is smart with proper medical care. Medical thinking about ulcers arises from confidence that anxiety can play a primary role, especially in disorders such as unemployment.
What I found compelling about my experience was how it triggered a test of how I defined myself or allowed others to define me. And I have an idea of this Kansas Day column and how I would say that our hardest stories, from the Odyssey to the “Wizard of Oz,” are about traveling home.
And home, God help me, has always been Kansas.
I was born in Baxter Springs, in the small part of the Ozark Plateau in the far southeast of the state, so I’m not only from Kansas but also from Ozarker. My father was born in Missouri and I, my mother, was born in Oklahoma. , although my recollection of what he told me is doubtful and some archival studies will be needed to be sure.
Ever since I was old enough to borrow e-books from the Johnston Public Library in Baxter Springs, I’ve been a voracious reader of Kansas history and culture. My first e-book, “Quantrill and the Border Wars,” through historian William E. Connelley, already an e-book old at the time but morbidly appealing for its account of what happened to the guerrilla leader’s skull and bones after his death. It’s a theme I would return to in my career as a novelist.
Much later came the “WPA Guide to 1930s Kansas,” republished by the University Press of Kansas in the 1980s; “What Kansas Means to Me,” a collection edited by Thomas Fox Averill and published in 1990; and “PrairyErth,” William Least Heat Moon’s deep map of Chase County released in 1991.
There were many other books, shelves, including Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” the brilliant 1966 true crime story about the Clutter family murders; Gordon Parks’ 1967 autobiography, “A Choice of Weapons”; and Robert Day’s 1977 novel, “The Last Cattle Herd. “And then there were the “Spanish Bit” novels written by my old mentor, Don Coldsmith, who imagined Kansas from the attitude of a lost conquistador and his circle of Native American relatives followed by 1541.
Most recently, there was Scott Phillip’s 2001 novel “The Ice Harvest,” my friend George Frazier’s 2017 nonfiction book, “The Last Wild Places in Kansas”; and “No Place Like Home: Lessons in Activism from LGBT Kansas” through C. J. Janovy, published in 2018. Janovy was an opinion when I started writing columns for the Reflector. I only mention the books that have influenced me the most; I regret that there is rarely space here to give a full bibliography.
So, having grown up, in any and every sense of the word, with books about and about the Sunflower State at my fingertips, it is with an internal clash that I seek to address on Kansas Day. These books reflect the evolution of the cultural and ancient dating that Kansans have with their state, from the arrogance of white men in the early 20th century to the more varied voices of the last few decades.
“There was a time when it was said in Kansas that the Republican Party and the Methodist Church were the religious forces that controlled the state,” Emporia editor William Allen White noted in the 1920s in an article later collected in Averill’s anthology. Kansas had a state ban from 1881 to 1948, the longest of any state, and we will most likely be the last state to have medical or recreational marijuana. Most Kansans seem to be worried that someone, somewhere in the state, is having fun.
Kansans are the most enthusiastic about their home state, at least according to a Gallup poll that found citizens of Montana and Alaska were the proudest. About 8 in 10 people in those cold, mountainous regions thought they were living better. Texas also ranks high, with Kansas somewhere in the middle, with 39% of us saying it’s “the best” or “one of the best” states to live in. The survey was done 10 years ago and I wonder what the effects are. say today.
Most recently, Fort Hays State University’s annual “Kansas Speaks” opinion poll for 2023 found that 43% of Kansans consider the state to be a “very good” or “excellent” position to live in. 11% said the state is “poor” or “very “bad” to live in, which is less positive than in the past two years, and 1 in 5 Kansans said they would move to another state.
Kansas can be a difficult position to live in, especially if you feel like an outsider in your own state. If your politics are more blue than red, you may feel like your presidential votes mean nothing, and with our winner-takes-all electoral school. system, that’s necessarily true. If you’re from somewhere else, like Kim, even if you got married in the captivating Chase County Courthouse and had a bouquet of sunflowers, like this Missouri woman, you’d possibly never feel right at home. .
Moving further away would make things worse. Imagine how Somali refugees in Garden City would have felt as targets of the 2016 bomb plot. Or today’s black citizens of Johnson County, named after the Rev. Thomas Johnson, a Methodist minister and slave owner. who led the Shawnee Indian Mission.
But even if your family has been in Kansas before there was a state, you still might not feel at home. There are plenty of Indigenous Peoples who justifiably believe their cultures were oppressed and exploited, right down to the name of the state, which derives from the Kanza nation. It means “People of the South Wind.”
There’s much to appreciate in Kansas, from its writers and artists to its views of the prairies, but others have written extensively on those topics. I’m not a spicy guy by nature, distrust silly constancy in anything, and this column doesn’t pretend to spice it up yet to challenge.
For years, I put “Kansas native” in my biographies, whether short or long, without thinking much about it, unless it had some weight among an influential component of the population. Yes, literally, it simply means to be born here, however, as with many things, the meaning is in the connotation, a sign that one is greater or at least more original because of the instances of birth. I’ve been thinking about this “indigenous” designation for the past few months, and now it’s divisive and, frankly, unnecessary. My claim to Kansas citizenship is no greater than that of someone whose circle of relatives moved here five generations ago or someone whose circle of relatives moved here recently, seeking safe haven from a bloody civil war and ocean or two away.
So let me look for kinship ties with my fellow foreigners in the Sunflower State.
Since I’ve recovered pretty much from last summer’s damn scare, it looks like I’ll have a little more time to think about what it means to be here. But. . .
When I die, and with luck and love that will be many years from now, let my obituary simply say that I was a Kansan. It is enough.
Max McCoy is an award-winning journalist. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to magnify the voices of others affected by public policy or excluded from public debate. Find information and add how to submit your own feedback, here.
by Max McCoy, Kansas Reflector January 28, 2024
Tomorrow is Kansas Day.
It’s funny, but the date Kansas admitted to the union was one that came to mind when, seven months ago, I found myself on the sidewalk next to the gas pump of a convenience store in Missouri Valley, Iowa, in the midst of what gave the impression of gallons of my own blood. That thought bothered me because I was there, on the verge of unconsciousness and maybe death, and Kansas Day was trying to get my attention.
Of course, there were other things in my brain in the moments after I felt dizzy and vomiting blood.
The past: One Christmas Eve, when I was a child, when my father, a salesman, walked through the door with wrapped gifts in his arms; walking like a child across the deserted tram bridge over the Spring River to the dark forest on the other side; telephone poles leading to infinity near Dodge City while you’re vacationing out west; The whisper of a summer afternoon spent in front of a farm on the outskirts of town with a woman that broke my heart. And a jumble of memories of my mother, my friends, my own children.
The present: the stinky smell of gasoline, my vision narrowing and narrowing, the increasing effort needed to keep gravity from pulling my head to the ground. My favorite blouse is a bloody damask blouse. My wife, Kim, frightened, hurried into the store to ask. asking for help to call an ambulance. A leather biker kneeling next to me, an ex-paramedic if I don’t forget what he said, speaking calmly but saying that things were serious and that I needed immediate attention. I managed to mumble my thanks, and then, still to the journalist, I asked for his contact details because I was sure Kim would have to thank him when it was all over if I couldn’t.
It wasn’t my life that was unfolding before my eyes, but rather a series of connected ideas clustered in the back of my mind. And among those insights was the wisdom that it was only a 4-hour drive to my home in the east. -Central Kansas, only 4 hours from a familiar place and yet I couldn’t walk through the parking lot. The idea of returning home sparked Kansas Day. The state was admitted to the union as a free state on January 29, 1861. on the eve of America’s first and only civil war, if we’re lucky. If I was lucky and survived, I’d put this in a Kansas Day column.
Then I took my first ambulance ride. That took us to the emergency room of the small hospital in the Missouri Valley, where I struggled a bit and the ER doctor asked me what my major was because I was so articulate (though I’m sure it was annoyingly so). and I told him that he was an academic professor. That was true enough at the time, but there’s no explanation as to why have a story here. I’m glad the doctor called me Professor even though he was explaining that the hospital was too small to treat my emergency, which gave the impression of being a serious upper gastrointestinal bleed and sending me by ambulance to a Council Hospital. Bluffs.
If I expressed fear about the position and doubtful prestige of my insurance coverage, I don’t forget it, because the demonstration had passed. I don’t forget that they took off my bloody clothes and that Kim put them in a plastic bag and was wrapped in one of those stupid backless hospital gowns and then feeling very cold. At the time of the ambulance ride, he was incoherent and strangely obsessed with the mechanics of the pneumatic formula that raised and lowered the stretcher he was on.
Then I was in the hospital at Council Bluffs where the doctors expected an endoscopy would handily help them identify and repair whatever was wrong with me. But it wasn’t that simple. The first try failed to stop the bleeding from the ulcer and I just got weaker. Kim slept on a couch in the hospital room and had a second scare when I fell when trying to get out of bed, although I remember little of that episode. Then there was a second attempt at repair and this one held, although it took another four days in the hospital for me to be well enough to travel.
During this time, there wasn’t much to do yet. My preference for returning home became more acute. By the time Kim and I returned to Emporia, I had a list of things I should never take for granted again, from fitness to the strength of love. It took me months to fully recover, but I ate bland food and avoided spirits as a small value to pay for the cure.
I am aware that this case of peptic ulcer bleeding, although serious, was not an exclusive or even particularly attractive disease. It affects millions of Americans, and about 1 in 10 people will suffer from a peptic ulcer in their lifetime. It affects celebrities like Bruce Springsteen and other ordinary people, and the diagnosis is smart with proper medical care. Medical thinking about ulcers stems from the confidence that anxiety can play a primary role, especially in disorders such as unemployment.
What I found compelling about my experience was how it triggered a test of how I defined myself or allowed others to define me. And I have an idea of this Kansas Day column and how I would say that our hardest stories, from the Odyssey to the “Wizard of Oz,” are about traveling home.
And my country, God help me, has been Kansas.
I was born in Baxter Springs, in the small part of the Ozark Plateau in the southeast corner of the state, so I’m not just a Kansan but an Ozarker as well. My father was born in Missouri and I, my mother, was born in Oklahoma. , although my recollection of what he told me is doubtful and some archival study will be necessary to be sure.
Ever since I was old enough to borrow e-books from the Johnston Public Library in Baxter Springs, I’ve been a voracious reader of Kansas history and culture. My first e-book, “Quantrill and the Border Wars,” through historian William E. Connelley, already an e-book old at the time but morbidly appealing for its account of what happened to the guerrilla leader’s skull and bones after his death. It’s a theme I would return to in my career as a novelist.
Much later came the “WPA Guide to 1930s Kansas,” republished by the University Press of Kansas in the 1980s; “What Kansas Means to Me,” a collection edited by Thomas Fox Averill and published in 1990; and “PrairyErth,” William Least Heat Moon’s deep map of Chase County released in 1991.
There were many other books, shelves of them, including Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” the 1966 seminal true crime story of the Clutter family murders; the 1967 autobiography of Gordon Parks, “A Choice of Weapons”; and Robert Day’s 1977 novel “The Last Cattle Drive.” And then there were the “Spanish Bit” novels of my late mentor, Don Coldsmith, who imagined Kansas from the perspective of a lost conquistador and his adopted Native American family from 1541.
Most recently, there was Scott Phillip’s 2001 novel “The Ice Harvest,” my friend George Frazier’s 2017 nonfiction book, “The Last Wild Places in Kansas”; and “No Place Like Home: Lessons in Activism from LGBT Kansas” through C. J. Janovy, published in 2018. Janovy was an opinion when I started writing columns for the Reflector. I only mention the books that have influenced me the most; I regret that there is rarely space here to give a full bibliography.
So, having grown up, in any and every sense of the word, with books about and about the Sunflower State at my fingertips, it is with an internal clash that I seek to address on Kansas Day. These books reflect the evolution of the cultural and ancient dating that Kansans have with their state, from the arrogance of white men in the early 20th century to the more varied voices of the last few decades.
“There was a time when it was said in Kansas that the Republican Party and the Methodist Church were the religious forces that controlled the state,” noted Emporia editor William Allen White in the 1920s in an article later compiled in Averill’s anthology. Kansas had a statewide prohibition from 1881 to 1948, the longest of any state, and we will most likely be the last state to have medical or recreational marijuana. Most Kansans seem to be worried that someone, somewhere in the state, is having fun.
Kansans are the most enthusiastic about their home state, at least according to a Gallup poll that found citizens of Montana and Alaska were the proudest. About 8 out of 10 people in those cold, mountainous regions thought they were living better. Texas also ranks high, with Kansas somewhere in the middle, with 39% of us saying it’s “the best” or “one of the best” states to live in. The survey was done 10 years ago and I wonder what the effects are. say today.
More recently, the Fort Hays State University annual “Kansas Speaks” opinion poll for 2023 reported that 43 percent of Kansans thought the state was a “very good” or “excellent” place to live. Eleven percent said the state was a “poor” or “very poor” place to live, less positive than the previous two years, and 1 in 5 Kansans said they would relocate to another state.
Kansas can be a difficult position to live in, especially if you feel like an outsider in your own state. If your politics are more blue than red, you may feel like your presidential votes mean nothing, and with our winner-takes-all electoral school. system, that’s necessarily true. If you’re from somewhere else, like Kim, even if you got married in the captivating Chase County Courthouse and had a bouquet of sunflowers, like this Missouri woman, you’d possibly never feel right at home. .
Moving further away would make things worse. Imagine how Somali refugees in Garden City would have felt as targets of the 2016 bomb plot. Or today’s black citizens of Johnson County, named after the Rev. Thomas Johnson, a Methodist minister and slave owner. who led the Shawnee Indian Mission.
But even if your family circle lived in Kansas before the state’s creation, you probably still wouldn’t feel at home. Many indigenous peoples are right that their cultures have been oppressed and exploited, right down to the call of the state, which derives from the Kanza Nation. It means “People of the South Wind. “
There are many things to appreciate about Kansas, from its writers and artists to its views of the prairies, though others have written extensively on those topics. I’m not an enthusiast by nature, nor do I distrust foolish loyalty to anything, and this column isn’t meant to encourage challenge just yet.
For years, I put “Kansas native” in my biographies, whether short or long, without thinking much about it, unless it had some weight among an influential segment of the population. Yes, literally, it simply means to be born here, however, as with many things, the meaning is in the connotation, a sign that one is greater or at least more original because of the instances of birth. I’ve been thinking about this “indigenous” designation for the past few months, and now it’s divisive and, frankly, unnecessary. My claim to Kansas citizenship is no greater than that of someone whose circle of relatives moved here five generations ago or someone whose circle of relatives moved here recently, seeking safe haven from a bloody civil war and ocean or two away.
So let me look for kinship ties with my fellow foreigners in the Sunflower State.
Since I’ve recovered pretty much from last summer’s damn scare, it looks like I’ll have a little more time to think about what it means to be here. But. . .
When I die, and with luck and love, many years from now, may my obituary simply say that I am from Kansas. That’s enough.
Max McCoy is an award-winning journalist. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to magnify the voices of others affected by public policy or excluded from public debate. Find information and add how to submit your own feedback, here.
Kansas Reflector is owned by States Newsroom, a network of grant-backed news bureaus and a coalition of donors as a 501c public charity(3). Kansas Reflector maintains its editorial independence. Please contact Editor Sherman Smith if you have any questions: info@kansasreflector. com. Follow Kansas Reflector on Facebook and Twitter.
Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. A Kansan, he started his career at the Pittsburg Morning Sun and was soon writing for national magazines. His investigative stories on unsolved murders, serial killers and hate groups earned him first-place awards from the Associated Press Managing Editors and other organizations. McCoy has also written more than 20 books, the most recent of which is “Elevations: A Personal Exploration of the Arkansas River,” named a Kansas Notable Book by the state library. “Elevations” also won the National Outdoor Book Award, in the history/biography category.
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