Day 21, my third week begins

Tonight I sleep like a king on the floor of Lutheran Pastor Bob's office. Bob welcomed us with fresh vegetables from his garden. After hellos, we walked back into it to grab some fresh sweet cream corn. We ate it, made a puttanesca with the veggies, and ate chocolate cake in a Sunday School classroom. We are in Kansas.

The United States is the Saudi Arabia of food and here are our oilfields. The plains unfold in four directions like an awful perspective drawing of corn, highway, sky, corn, hay, corn, and telephone poles. What you can't quite capture on the canvas is the wind.

I do not believe having enemies is petty. Multiculturalism does not exist if you are so polite as to allow everything to happen (the cannibal's right to dinner does not eclipse my belief in the rights of all mankind). Of course it is a sad day when one makes a new enemy: so welcome headwinds, meet totalitarianism, anti-individualism, fluorescent lights, U2.

The ex-marine I spoke to a while back told me this bit of pseudoshakespeare: every state takes its pound of flesh. I left Missouri five pounds heavier (I had pie for breakfast), potbellied, and in tremendous spirits. Five miles of biking against a 10 mile an hour wind left me miserable in Kansas. My poor bike registered its dissatisfaction by blowing a spoke a little ways down highway 7 our of Pittsburg, KS.

Pittsburg is a neat little town. There is one block of turn-of-the-last-century American vertical architecture and then it quickly descends into two story houses, ranch homes, trailers, plains. The post office is spectacular. I went into a pawn shop and found myself torn between a poster of Buzz Aldrin, a handgun, or a Dolly Parton album. I left with nothing.

A while up the street I stopped a man to ask directions. He knew nothing. He was probably my age but his cheeks were hollowed out and he wore his t-shirt around his shoulders like it was designed to improve his posture. His empty, sunbleached blue eyes could have been ripped from a Walker Evans photo or, as Connor correctly noted, Larry Clark.

And that brings us to now. Or then. Since starting this post I have taken a shower and I have helped Pastor Bob trap a small cat in a cobwebby basement. He returned to his crime procedural and I to you, but not without walking through a field of 100,000 fireflies.

Tomorrow, I am having breakfast with Bob and then hitting the flat road. I hope to ask Bob what, exactly, is Garrison Keillor's role in the Lutheran Church. I have 200 miles to the next bike shop. With luck, Rocinante should hold up until we can get him seen to.

Some parting advice: drink milk.