Wichita County

The picture at the top of the page, if you are interested, was taken on October 1, 2008, at approximately one PM. The location is near the Logan/Wichita county line, in western Kansas. So much western that in 30 more miles you are in eastern Colorado.

You are looking west-southwest, from the shoulder of highway K-25. I stopped to take this picture on the Oakley-Leoti leg of my most recent photo-journey which looped through this part of the state. There are no towns nearby. Oakley and I-70 are 25 or 30 miles behind. Leoti, the seat of Wichita County, is 15 another fifteen miles in the distance. The emptiness is broken only by Russell Springs, the abandoned Logan County seat which is almost a ghost town. A few die-hard residents remain; the county maintains shops, and there is damned little else.

Several ranchers around here have homes close enough to the highway that you can see them, countable on just one hand. Even glimpsing a full-growth tree is an event. It was a nice day, however, and I liked this view; the line of trees in the distance forming the windbreak, and the vast blue sky--so I digitalized it for immortality. Maybe someone's home is engulfed by that vegetation, it's hard to say with certainty. What appears to be an old road, or maybe someone's private landing strip, trails away from the roadside.

Not visible here but just to the right, out of the frame, are "breaks" where the underlying sandstone has been uncovered. Looking barren to the untrained eye, under this grassland is a magnificent aquifer stretching from the Dakotas to Texas. From it water is pumped for homes, for irrigation and for livestock giving life to what Zebulon Pike called the "Great American Desert."

Folks who call this lonesome part of the state home are the ones who grow our wheat and raise our beef. Far from being isolated bumpkins, they are savvy businessmen and -women running multi-million dollar operations. Where there is a town, it is often neat, clean, and prosperous. Private aircraft are more of a necessity than luxury to many people here.

The sky and landscape are empty on this warm, early autumn afternoon but don't make the mistake of thinking there is nothing "out there" and that only loners and simpletons can be found west of Overland Park. Or New York, for that matter.