Thursday, August 21, 2008

Days Afield: Day 383 - Coffee, Barbed Wire, Beer, and (shhh) Catholics in Kansas


Leg 5: 502 miles from Oberlin, KS to Guthrie, OK
(2,951 miles so far)

(Sorry for the dearth of photos. Camera battery was dead.)

I love regionalism, really I do. I love things that are slightly different from area to area in a country, or a state, or a city, reflecting the particular folkways or mores that a certain group has developed or adopted over time. In a world of homogenizing corporate and media influences, it’s getting harder and harder to find these differences.

All that said, I prefer my coffee dark and this part of the country simply doesn’t do dark coffee. It’s not necessarily bad or weak coffee. But they certainly don’t have a taste for French roasts. Theirs are termed “mild” or “medium blend”. Lannie Tauber of Hena coffee roasters taught me this almost a year ago, and it didn’t particularly click for me until the third cup of rust-colored hot water that I poured for myself at a roadside stop.

Driving south and east from Oberlin, KS, this morning, it became clear to me that this part of Kansas is actually what I always imagined Iowa to be like: nothing in any direction other than planted crops. Here, along KS-4, there was truly nothing but crops straight to the horizons, 10 or so miles away. At that point, grey outlines of grain elevators and water towers and the occasional oil derrick were barely visible in the morning haze. They are FAR away… miles and miles.

All the drivers out here seem to wave to passing cars, even at 65 mph in opposite directions. For an attention glutton like me, it’s a pretty cool thing. I moved up from waving to passing cars to sticking my whole arm out the window to wave to a guy in a tractor in the field off to the side of one road. He waved back. I was thrilled.

Thank god for Rand McNally maps. I mean, I love Google Maps as much as the next person. But when you’re touring and traveling, there’s something about a paper map rich with additional information that is just great. It’s how I found the Barbed Wire Museum of Kansas, which is where I was heading this morning.

I pulled of KS 4 in La Crosse and turned south down Main St. The map had it as just off to the right after the turn. I went the length of the strip of shops and back up to the state highway. How big could a museum devoted to barbed wire—just in Kansas—be, I thought, so it seemed to deserve a second, more careful pass. No dice. So I stopped in for some directions at the gas station on the highway. Back through town, I was told, and make a right immediately after going over the bridge.

The bridge? I been up and down this road twice and I saw no bridge.

“It’s there, just after the train tracks,” the kindly woman at the register told me.

And off I went again. The “bridge”, it turns out, is a car-length section of road that passes over a dry culvert not more than a foot or two deep. In Kansas, that apparently counts as elevation.

And there it was, set back along with the Kansas Historical Society’s local branch and the Post Rock Museum: the Barbed Wire Museum of Kansas. Truth be told, it was the largest of all the buildings there. A pre-fab job from the 1960s, the size of a small warehouse.

Raymond George, well into his 80s, greeted me at the door and pointed me toward a startlingly large—no, encyclopedic—array of barbed wire samples from the mid-19th Century through the late 20th Century. There is a ridiculous number of variations, some of them so slight as to be undetectable to the untrained eye. But each has a slight, differentiating nuance and its own patent number. And there are several bound books (all offered for sale) that chronicle the many variations in painstaking detail. The museum also provides pointers on starting your own collection. (I can't lie... I bought a few strands.)

Mr. George, who farmed a section near Great Bend, KS, for several decades, walked me through some of the more narrative sections of the exhibit: how the first barrier fence of wire was made and patented in the 1850s (which seemed rather late to me); to the different methods for stretching, stapling and connecting barbed wire, to the dozens of different post hole diggers and augers that were used to sink the posts. Along the way, he shared some tricks of the trade, like always posting in the spring when the ground is soft and wet and easy to dig and before the heat of summer expands the wire too much before it’s stapled.

There were two other highlights of the tour. One was the small room containing portraits of all the donors to the museum (which was launched, remarkably, in the 1940s) with representation from (equally remarkably) nearly every Kansas county, another dozen US States, and two from Australia. They’re all white men, yes. But that’s still some remarkable geographic diversity for the Barbed Wire Museum of Kansas. The other was a 72 lbs crows nest made from barbed wire snippings. Apparently, a pair of ravens (which is what they’re called out here) proceeded to construct their nest over several seasons. It was finally cut out en masse, part and parcel with the fence posts it was nestled between, and bequeathed to the museum.

I have to say, given how little overall variation there is among the thousand plus samples of barbed wire, and the dozens of post-hole diggers and augers (I used one just a few weeks ago that looked just like one of the first ones from the 1800s), it seems safe to say that all three have been little improved upon in nearly two centuries. Which doesn’t lend itself to a very, well, dynamic exhibit. (Crows nest notwithstanding.) That said, Mr. George was one of the warmest folks I’ve come to know on this trip and we shared a lot of conversation about where we were both from and how different the places and generations that we’re each a part of are. And I couldn’t have imagined a more lovely way to spend an hour. I hope to make it back again soon.

I was back on the road on a mission to find, in an unlikely place, a brewpub. It’s called Mo’s Place in the unincorporated community of Beaver, KS. When I mentioned this to Mr. George before I left, he said, “Beaver. That’s a Catholic community.” There was neither a trace of judgment nor derision in his voice. He simply stated it as though I ought to know that before setting out. A point of information.

I waited a moment to see if there was something else coming, like maybe “They eat their babies.” Then I ventured, “Do you mean as opposed to a Protestant community? Is that unusual around here?” Aside from not eating babies, I know almost nothing about religion, so this was shaky ground for me to be standing on, especially with post hole diggers nearby.

“Yes, as opposed to Lutheran or Methodist, which we mostly are here. I’m a Lutheran. And Beaver’s just always been a Catholic community—since I was a boy. We have a few Baptists, too, in other communities.”

This should not seem as strange to me as it did. I live in a city that still largely organizes itself based on ethnicity. And very often that ethnicity also corresponds to a religion. Perhaps in a place as exceedingly white as Kansas, I didn’t consider differences in religion—certainly not differences among Christian beliefs—as being different enough to organize communities around, or to represent diversity. But they are powerfully different, and they matter a great deal to folks. I mean, I try not to be naïve about these things. (I have, after all, read Garrison Keillor.) But this was really surprising me. And yet I loved discovering it and talking to Mr. George about it.

Duly warned, I dug around in my duffel bag for my rosary and set out to get me some locally brewed beer.

It's hard to even call Beaver, KS, a town. (Being unincorporated, technically it is not.) It's far out, truly, on farm roads miles from state highways. The railroad spur was pulled up long ago. There's little more than a grain elevator, a dozen houses (some boarded up) and almost nothing going on at midday in August. Not much else except for a smattering of activity around the grain elevator, and some more on the next block at Mo's Place.

I wandered in around 2:00pm, well after the lunch crowd—such as it might have been—was gone. The lunch special was gone, too. There wasn't anyone else in the place when I arrived except for me and the husband and wife that own it. Len Moeder grew up around here and Linda spent some time around her in school. But both had moved to upstate NY and Orange County, CA, for 35 years while they had corporate jobs. Then they decided they wanted to cash out and pursue their dream of opening a brewpub.

“We looked at property in California, but by the time you got investors—“ Len’s voice trailed off.

So the decided to return to rural Kansas.

We talked as I sat at the bar in the long, prefab building that, from north to south, houses the kitchen, dining area, bar and brewery. Stacked up in the brewery area are bags of grain. They keep the bar stocked with all seven of their brews by making a few 20-gallon batches each weekend. So far, they’re doing fine enough to live in town, walk to work, pursue their passion as their living, and only be open four days a week.

Len & Linda’s model is this is truly the embodiment of how beer used to be made: at the scale of the local proprietor selling to his or her clientele. Before Prohibition, most pubs brewed their own beer and didn’t distribute it any further than the reach of their bartenders' arms. (This is the way a restaurant prepares its food. Beer was considered as individual a product as prepared food was.) And, like restaurants, some pubs brewed beer that was great and some that were terrible, but most were just fine in between. Mo's Place's offerings trended on the fine side with room for some more body and maltiness (IMHO). But I loved about knowing that Len & Linda were making beer for their neighbors in Beaver and some of the surrounding communities. Now, they just need to wean all of straggling Coors drinkers off that swill.

I am pleased to say that I was their first New Yorker!

And I note another regionalism. Around here, a pint of beer served from the tap is called a “draw”. A quart would be a “large draw.” I love it!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for including Iowa in this post. Even if it was an indifferent mention. We Iowans are familiar with such tone when our state is referenced.

Also, good one about the barbed wire museum guides providing pointers. That made up for the jab noted above.

qnsgirl said...

Sounds like you are enjoying yourself though if it were me, I probably would have freaked out encountering a seemingly deserted inn. And, I'm either ultra-paranoid or 12 years old (or both) because when I read the room was $69, my mind jumped right into the gutter and I wondered if the proprieter was already there. The exurbs really don't suit me, I guess.