Big and beautiful

Published on Wednesday 13 February 2008 13:29

WHEREVER POSSIBLE, go on holiday to a place that is the opposite of where you live. Suppose you live in a cold, old, history-burdened land of sea-girt mountains, head for somewhere warm, pancake flat and relatively recently civilised in the middle of a continent.

Kansas, in other words. North, south east or west, this is a state where the maps are like Mondrians, where the skies couldn't be bigger, where sunsets take an hour and a half. Kansas, the home of the world's largest ball of sisal twine, the world's biggest hailstone (a replica actually, but still the size of a rugby ball), and the world's largest hand-dug well.

You are still, I can tell, unimpressed. So try this. Kansas, where you'll find at Hutchinson, right in the middle of the prairies, the world's best and certainly most unexpected space museum. Where, right next to the Kansas Teachers Hall of Fame, you can buy the sheriff of Dodge City a root beer. Where you can check into a B&B in Nickerson late at night and walk to your room past a dozen sleeping kangaroos.

No? Well, it worked for me, but let's start somewhere else – in the tallgrass prairie of the Flint Hills in the north-east of the state, and heading west, because that's the way our kind of civilisation came. Stand on those gently rolling hills and you can almost imagine it: covered wagons heading in a horizontal line across the vast, treeless prairie (they only switched to single file where natural obstacles forced them to). Buffalo, hundreds of thousands of them, grazing on wild grasses so nutritious that even now they fatten cattle faster than anywhere else on the planet. There's a million of them every summer, each putting on a steady 3lb a day munching the lush grass.

Some idiots want to build wind farms on these hills, the largest remaining tract of tallgrass prairie in North America. It makes sense, they claim: the south-westerlies blow strong here year-round, the bigger conurbations (the capital, Topeka, the beautiful university town of Lawrence, and Kansas City itself, confusingly over the state line in Missouri) are relatively nearby.

In reality, this would be ecological vandalism: already only three per cent of Kansas is tallgrass prairie like this, barely touched by man over the millennia, a place of eerie, unspoilt beauty and of greater varietal richness than any terrain apart from the rainforest. They might have stopped here, those first settlers, but only for a night or two. The soil was too thinly spread on the limestone for the plough to turn, so they moved further west again, towards Dodge City and Colorado, the streams ever clearer, the nights ever cooler, the stars ever brighter as they went.

I do the same, set the car on cruise control, turn up the radio to full blast and drive across the prairie. On the way I pass through Greensburg, a small town of some 1,500 people. Six months before, so did a tornado.

It's still relatively rare for a town to get hit by a tornado, but nothing can prepare you for it. Only about a tenth of the buildings are still standing, the rest bulldozed away, leaving only a Tarmac grid of roads through by now quite long grass and trees with shattered trunks like a Flanders forest after an artillery barrage. I'm tempted to take photos, but it feels wrong. Miraculously, only 12 people were killed, but there are still field hospitals, still workmen trying to repair torn-apart buildings. Instead, I drive on to Dodge City.

The prairie, which stretches all the way into Canada, is so unimaginably vast and, apart from occasional cathedral-like grain silos, empty that even in the cocoon of a car you feel as exposed as a mouse crossing a parade ground. You can see the weather long before it arrives. Forty miles away, rain is forming into dark tendrils. They seem to be bending, starting to corkscrew, but perhaps that's just my imagination.

For the last half century, this part of Kansas has been the headquarters of America's beef industry. Seventy per cent of the steaks on the country's plates come from slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants in Dodge City, Garden City and Liberal. Dodge, "the toughest town on the map" in the days when Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson wore the sheriff's star, is now a ghost of its lawless past.

Yet there are hints of that frontier spirit even now, even if you have to look hard. Most of the time, it translates into a friendliness that goes way beyond the "have a nice day" banalities. And there is a greater sense of community than anything we have here: hundreds of people (and not just parents), turn out to support their local high school athletics team and civic pride is intense. I mean, can you imagine a Scottish Teachers Hall of Fame? Why not?

Back on the Flint Hills, I'm talking to the mayor of Cottonwood Falls, who drives the tour bus on to the tallgrass prairie. He tells me that the other day, when it came time to summon the passengers back on the bus, a woman stood looking west at the endless miles of gently undulating prairie. He thought she hadn't heard him so he went up to her, touched her on the arm and repeated his request. "But you don't understand," she said, "I just don't want to go."

I know what she meant. Those huge skies. That strangely exalting feeling of insignificance, of feeling at home where the buffalo roam, where the deer and the antelope play, where seldom is heard a discouraging word and the sky is not cloudy all day. I can understand that.

Factfile

How to get there

Continental flies to Kansas City via Newark from Glasgow and Edinburgh with prices from 423 in low season to 738 in July. Tel: [phone] or visit www.continental.com for more details.

Where to stay

Grand Central Hotel, Cottonwood Falls, has ten (luxurious) bedrooms in a beautiful country inn/restaurant in a charming small town near the Flint Hills. Rooms 75 to 90 per night. Tel: [phone], or visit www.grandcentralhotel.com

Hendrick's Farm B&B, Nickerson has rooms from 50 per night. Camel rides free, also ostrich and pig racing. Tel: [phone], or visit www.hendricks.com

And there's more

The Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, Hutchinson, has US and Soviet space artefacts (including the Apollo 13 capsule). Tel: [phone], www.cosmo.org

Wichita's Old Cowtown is a living history museum from the city's earliest days. Tel: [phone], or visit www.oldcowtown.org