The First 300

I'm a numbers guy, so let me begin with some hard data:

• 300: The number of towns we have visited so far on our travels around the Sunflower State
• April 5, 2014: The date we started our adventures, in the lovely town of Westmoreland
• 2 months: The age of our son Zed when we started out
• 9 years, 11 months: The age of our son Zed now
• 11,222.6: The approximate number of miles we have driven on these journeys
• 39.4: The number of years it will take us to finish visiting the 1,271 remaining towns at the rate we've gone so far

The name of this blog is "Toddling Through Kansas" because we had two toddlers and a newborn when we started it. Today, those two toddlers are 13 and 11, and their 2-mile time is faster than mine has ever been. The newborn is about to turn double digits, he knows pretty much all there is to know about the NFL, and he's getting taller every day. And don't even get me started on the baby of the family, who wasn't even born when we started and is turning into a little woman right before my eyes.

If the years before us go anything like the years behind, then by the time we finish, I'll be the toddler. With the help of a walker. If I'm lucky.

In 2023, a 23-year-old Nebraskan named Seth Varner visited all 627 incorporated towns in Kansas, took a startling number of pictures, and has published an excellent book about it. That's how I dreamed our journeys would go. 

Which leads me to my first observation from our travels: Great expectations often don't materialize. You don't have to be a master of analysis to notice that around half of the towns we have visited are dead or dying. For instance, this town we visited on September 19, 2021:

Feterita is just a railroad with silos and a private drive leading to a few houses. Nothing more remains; this seems to be the way of a lot of towns out here. The railroad keeps going, often long after the people stop. (Though there was still a dog who seemed quite interested in us.)

Or this one we visited on July 5, 2014: 

Western Kansas has a lot of small towns that aren't much more than a co-op, a church or two, and perhaps a couple of businesses.

Mingo was one of these. We didn't see any businesses, but it definitely had a grain elevator and a small church.

Sometimes, I get depressed by towns like this one. They're growing smaller each day, and before too long, perhaps no one will be left. It feels like the life is slowly draining out of them, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop the trend.

Many of these towns were platted out by speculators who sold eager settlers on the idea that it would be the next Kansas City, or at least Dodge City. A century and a half later, many of them only have a railroad and a grain elevator to mark the fervid hopes of those early Kansans.

But even in our frustrated expectations, there is hope. In my post about Mingo, I go on to say:

To stop there is to forget that these towns are populated by a heroic people.

Farmers, ranchers, teachers, business owners, and many others are still there, and they will hang on to the end. Like the stalwart defenders at the Alamo or the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, these folks aren't contented to go gentle into that good night.

They are determined to keep living on their ancestral land, to keep sowing and harvesting, and, in short, to keep doing what they can to maintain the way of life they love.

And dedication like that, my friends, is something worth driving out to Mingo to see.

Which leads me to my final thought for now. Kansas is a place where people came with high hopes, and they stay with a dedication to making things better. Whether it's Brianna's Cafe in Montezuma, where they serve the finest pie east of Denver, or Muscotah, where the town banded together to turn the old water tower into a baseball-shaped garden shed, or LaHarpe, where some folks decided the park needed a zipline, so they built one, Kansas is full of surprising and delightful resilience. 

Yes, there will be difficulty. But beyond it, sometimes, we reach the stars.