The Middle Ground

Over at Another Man's Meat, Phil Dillon has been reflecting on his return to Emporia, Kansas, after two weeks away. His article, entitled The Little Wonders of Fly-Over Country, is well worth a read.

Phil is originally from Boston and so can appreciate the glories of Emporia and Kansas and the Midwest in a way that perhaps no native can. When you grow up amongst the peace and good sense of the Midwest, it is easy to take it for granted, assuming that the rest of the world is very similar.

I have seen Kansas with the eyes of an outsider, too, and I can echo Phil's thoughts as he sits in a local diner and watches "cowboys eating eggs covered with hot sauce, farmers in bib overalls wolfing down biscuits and gravy". In the little town of Hays in Central Kansas, true prairie country, I first witnessed the tradition of the farmer's breakfast meeting in some well-worn fast food joint. As they arrived alone or with a friend and made their way to the same table and seat they had occupied for probably the last thirty years, rumbling the same old greetings at each other and settling in for a long breakfast with all the trimmings, coffee ever-present at their right hands, the slow, unhurried conversation enveloping them with warm good humor and familiarity, their inevitable faded overalls and John Deere caps proclaiming their profession, I realized that I was seeing a tradition that was quintessentially Midwestern, that all over these Great Plains similar morning meetings were taking place and the heartland was re-asserting its position at the center of all that is good about America.

Now that's a big statement (and a long sentence!) but I believe it to be true. In common with all migratory peoples, the first settlers came for land. They came to own a small piece of the new country where they could run the soil through their fingers, knowing that it belonged to them, and to plant crops and raise herds, to be independent and self sufficient. And in the Midwest this remains the driving force of life, the center not only geographically but also in terms of stability, wealth and unaffected thinking.

In the cities we pretend to have forgotten these basic facts of life and we build towers of self-deceptive thought that we label "sophistication", pursue our dreams of a technological future, and imagine that our petty concerns are the true business of modern living. But there remains in the core of our being the knowledge that it is all built upon the hard work of the farmer; that, without him to feed us and clothe us, our cities would crumble and become empty husks, devoid of life.

It is this knowledge that induces an insecurity in the city dweller's inmost thoughts, an insecurity that he attempts to cover with condescension and scorn of the farming folk of middle America. He calls them simple yokels and hayseeds, sighs at their outdated political views, labels them the silent majority and blames them for preventing progress into some brave new world that is forever free of the dirt and sweat of man's existence to date.

Scratch the surface of this complex structure of self deception, however, and you'll find an awareness (but never an admission) that city life is unreal and insane, a state of being that is not natural to mankind. It is no accident that many who have made their fortunes in the big city use their wealth to retire to some idyllic pastoral spot in the agricultural heartland, there to rub shoulders with the very folk they have laughed at in a thousand cocktail parties.

You may accuse me, quite correctly, of making enormous generalizations, but that's what I do. If I concerned myself with all the hundreds of exceptions to my thoughts, I'd never get done. Let the detail man fiddle about with delicate nuances of meaning; I'll make my sweeping swathes of conjecture, locking whole populations into convenient boxes that help to reach some sort of understanding of what is going on. I can do this; I'm a city man and am double-minded and "sophisticated" therefore.

But being a complex mess of contradictory thoughts does not prevent me seeing the value of the single-minded man, the man who works the soil and for whom things are plain and clear. If he is closer to the realities of life and nature and weather and profit and loss, we should not be surprised that his values remain those of our ancestors, that his beliefs center upon an event that happened two thousand years ago.

It was chance that brought me to Lawton, a dusty, sprawling town in the plains of Oklahoma, but I love it already with the same intensity I read in Phil's articles on Emporia. I, too, am welcomed home from every expedition by blue hills rising from the horizon, not the Flint Hills of Kansas but the Wichita Mountains that spring so unexpectedly from the flatness of West Oklahoma. The town owes its existence to its proximity to Fort Sill, that reminder of a time when the Native American still moved from place to place and the grasslands were virgin, untouched by the plow.

I have said that I'm a city boy but that is not the whole truth; it's one of my sweeping generalizations. In fact, I am a mixture, a strange combination of a great city at the base of Africa, the empty savannahs of Zimbabwe, and the industrial heartland of England. If I find so much to agree with in the writing of Phil Dillon, a man of very different origin from my own, is this coincidence or are we both discovering a common humanity, encouraged by the huge spaces and straightforward folk of these, the Great Plains?