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Swallow Press Ohio University Press Athens
Contents vii
Acknowledgments ix
Prologue 1
Part I: The Town 11
House on Wheels 13
In the Land of Crashed Cars and Junkyard Dogs 33
The Identity Factory 57
Dragging Wyatt Earp 76
Part II: The Country 91
The Greatest Game Country on Earth 93
Sisyphus of the Plains 109
A Most Romantic Spot 123
The Search for Quivira 137
Part III: Of Horses, Cattle, and Men 151
Horse Latitudes 153
Wild Horses 164
Feedlot Cowboy 177
How to Ride a Bronc 201
Epilogue 216
Acknowledgments
Many people helped and encouraged me as I wrote this modest volume, and I would like to take a moment to thank a few of them.
My family: Bill and Patricia Rebein, David Rebein, Alan Rebein, Tom Rebein, Joe Rebein, Steve Rebein, Paul Rebein; my wife, Alyssa Chase, and my children, Ria and Jake Rebein; my mother-in-law, Andra Chase.
Friends and fellow writers: Mary Obropta, Anne Williams, Susan Shepherd, Karen Kovacik, Terry Kirts, Jacob Nichols, Joshua Green, Meagan Lacy, Christopher Schumerth, Kimberly Metzger, Joe Croker, Tim Cook, Benjamin Clay Jones, Nick Gillespie, Charlie Jones, Bryan Furuness.
Editors and former teachers: Kevin Haworth, David Gessner, Mark Lewandowski, Brendan Corcoran, Lauren Kessler, Randy Bates, Sarah Smarsh, Amber Lee, Lindsay Milgroom, Hillary Wentworth, Alys Culhane, Liz Dorn, Robert Stapleton, Mark Shechner, Bruce Jackson, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Wayne Fields.
Dodge City people past and present: Marilyn Rebein, Kim and Beth Goodnight, John Rebein, Shane Bangerter, Kent Crouch, Tyrone Crouch, Bill Hommertzheim, Cathy Reeves, Jim Sherer, Charles and Laura Tague George, Pat George, Bob George, Trina Triplett Rausch, Regina Hardin Eubank, Heather Fraley Schultz, Gina McElgunn Tenbrink.
To all of you I owe my heartfelt thanks.
Several of the essays in this collection have appeared, in somewhat different form, in the following publications: “Return to Dodge City” in The Cream City Review (Fall 1994); “The Identity Factory” in Inscape (2010); “Dragging Wyatt Earp” in Ecotone: Reimagining Place (Fall 2007); “The Greatest Game Country on Earth” in Grasslands Review (2009); “Sisyphus of the Plains” in Redivider (Fall 2010); “A Most Romantic Spot” in Bayou (2008); “The Search for Quivira” in Umbrella Factory (December 2010); “Horse Latitudes” in Booth (Summer 2012); “How to Ride a Bronc” in Etude: New Voices in Literary Nonfiction (Summer 2010).
Prologue
Return to Dodge City
Christmas Eve 1990. I’m in a car on my way west across Kansas, the heart of it all, the prairie-bound stomach of the country, headed for a white-frame farmhouse where I know one light still burns in the kitchen. Outside, a cold, dry winter has set in. The Flint Hills are brown. Six states lay stretched out behind me. And I’m thinking, Here comes full circle, here comes the loop the ropers say you rebuild every time it gets tangled. From the horse’s back you rebuild it, hand over hand, loop upon loop, until all the rope is in.
The road is dark, with just the white lines threading a path across the prairie. I squint my eyes, lean forward, switch back and forth between low and high beam, and for a moment it almost seems like the road itself is just a blurred projection thrown out by the headlights.
I see again the roughshod progression of my life, so many snapshots strung together like pearls: the early years in town, working with my father on the farm, school days, the time spent abroad, the coming back again. Returning home is like that. The future gets left behind, a piano dumped on a stark prairie. Suddenly you’re left with nothing but your life and the past. You have returned. Full circle. Everything else is just a blur.
* * *
There is one memory I will always associate with my father. It is early winter, 1978 or 1979, and he is standing in his work clothes before the doorway of the Knoeber place, a ramshackle farmhouse, hatless, his legs thrown wide, motioning to me with the back of his hand in the rearview mirror of a wheat truck: Back—and back—and back—and whoa! Without pause, his gloved hand turns palm up and stops. I set the parking brake, check the mirror again, and he’s already raking his index finger across his throat, a signal for me to kill the engine and join him inside. Another old farmhouse. Another relic from the age of one farmer for every square mile instead of one aging caretaker for every five. Like a lot of other contemporary farmers, my father acquired land the way some people acquire memories; and many times, the land came with a house, gratis.
Some of these places had been abandoned for years. Maybe an aging widow had lived there in the lingering aura of 1965, the year her husband died and she rented the land to neighbors. Or maybe the husband was the one who had survived, a widowed farmer who somewhere along the line stopped wiping his feet at the door, rebuilt carburetors at the kitchen table, and gradually let all housekeeping go to the dogs. Or maybe it was a long series of nobodies who stayed there—railroad men, pheasant hunters, bikers, what have you. The basements of such places would be filled to the floor joists with everything from prayer books to pornography: rusty knives, golf clubs, warped photographs and records, calendars and almanacs, canned vegetables grown murky in their ancient Kerr jars, bicycle parts, garden tools, children’s books. In the basement of the Knoeber place, for example, we found three thousand Dr. Pepper bottles stacked neatly in crates. In the overgrown yard, a mountain of Alpo cans and their jagged, rusted lids. The mountain extended downward past ground level, where we found the dull, discarded can openers. At a deeper level, the bones of two medium-sized dogs. For years afterward, every time we mowed the grass, another of the phantom lids would emerge, sharpened and propelled through the air like some weapon in the martial arts.
All of these things my father took in stride as the not-so-heavy burden of his inheritance. Anything without immediate use we burned or hauled away. He liked to keep the earth turned, the pastures mowed, and the ditches sprayed with 2,4-D. Wichita pheasant hunters would drive by our fields and marvel at the absence of cover. Only later, after he traded farming for ranching, did he and my mother take to roaming country auctions and roadside antique stores. By then he’d bought a horse buggy from the Amish in Yoder, liked to drive out through his acres behind the steady clip of a pacer. This was the man who at one time had embraced every advancement in modern agriculture. The man who in his prime had nine center-pivot irrigation systems draining the local aquifer at the rate of seven or eight thousand gallons of water a minute, who drove cheap Japanese pickups because they got better mileage, who took his worn-out horses to the slaughterhouse instead of putting them out to pasture.
Over the years he’d grayed, softened. The fierceness with which he’d once looked upon his life was replaced with a kind of awe. On the day he finally bought the ranch he’d had his eye on for years, he took my mother to the top of its highest bluff. Look down at that, he said. All my life I’ve wondered what Jesus must have been looking at when Satan tempted him the third time. Now I know. The land. All the kingdoms of the world.
* * *
By the winter of 1990, Dodge City was again an open town. You could sense it driving in from the east. The population had grown by a third since I’d left, most of it made up of young men come north from Texas and Mexico to work in the newly built packing plants. Like the cowboys of old, they are mercurial and often well armed. Roughly a million cattle a year are slaughtered at Dodge City. The Roundup Rodeo, which headlines the annual Dodge City Days celebration, has grown from a small, local affair to one of the richest on the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association