Day 27, we're almost not in Kansas anymore Toto

Forgive me the obvious subtitle, but I think I've either earned it or Kansas and the heat have melted any archness from my brain.

It's 105 degrees here. I'm at the pool in Tribune. I'm sweating in the shade. I'm in Mountain Time. I was reading my Twain book.

Woke up early today so that we could wake up early tomorrow. We rode for about 50 miles today (perhaps my shortest day yet) in anticipation of 120 miles tomorrow (perhaps my longest). We got into town early and had an early lunch at the Chatterbox Cafe.

Sometimes places live up to their names. Everyone was talking at the Cafe. People were shouting to us from across the room. "Where you from?" "Hot enough for you?" "Where you heading?"

A gentleman with a respirator wished us well. His wife offered us the local newspaper, The Hutchinson Post. A sweet, round couple who wore their pants very high told me about their daughter's trip to my hometown. She worked as a nanny for the man who built our soccer stadium. She flew in first. Apparently, she drinks scotch as a habit; on the flight, she had two 20 year old glasses of Chivas.

"That's not even a single malt," he said.

I told him I've never understood why those are so expensive.

"Because somebody's willing to pay for it!"

Quite wise. I went to the library, sat in a BarcaLounger, cracked open a copy of Adventure Kansas, rested it across my face and went to sleep. I woke up at closing, we to City Hall, looked at some neat old photos and a barbed wire collection, and then I hit the pool.

That brings us to now with one big omission. I no longer eat beef. There are hundreds of reasons to avoid eating another animal. I have three of the least noble: I'm sick of looking at them, or them looking at me; I hate the machines they use to move them around; and I have driven by a feedlot.

Now I think it is completely fine to remain willfully naive about some things. You can't feel bad about every decision. If you love the taste of a good hamburger -- as I do -- ignore my last paragraph and head to Shake Shack.

When the prairie cow turns 3 he is fattened up before death (humans follow this arc somewhat). What does a 3-year-old grass fed cow eat? Cow! Not, perhaps, what you and I might recognize as cow unless you are particularly fond of hoof, horn, bone, anus, and intestine. This swollen cow is then killed, subdivided, and sometimes sold to you as grass-fed wondercow.

I just don't think this sounds healthy. And the bloody trucks they use.

Day 26

Kansas is subtly different today. Imagine her from yesterday, but less rain and flatter land has made her paler and short. I'll be honest, some of her beauty might be fading away too.

The grass is shorter in this part of the High Plains. Well I'll take it. The grass keeps everything down. Remember, this was once the Dustbowl. Best not to rip up the topsoil to grow potatoes here.

I had a minor depression today. The wind just would not get off my case. When it wasn't directly in my face, it decided to blow hard into the left side of my bike and body. To keep from riding into the shoulder (and up to Nebraska), I had to lean my entire body's weight on the right side on my handlebars. Fine. Then, settled, a Mack truck filled with cattle would come flying down the opposite lane and send a horrible gust of wind into your chest. It was like leaning into a punch or being sprayed by shrapnel made of cowshit.

This began to wear thin. I should never have drank a gallon of soy milk at breakfast. Elaine made the best granola and, after giving me a CD ROM of some kind of rapture inspired videogame, Dan played us one last song. "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down" is the perfect song for a Kansas sunrise and sweet goodbyes.

We walked outside and briefly met the 80-year-old man who farmed last night's sweet corn. As a teenager, he and his Sunday school class built a large sign outside of town that is visible from an airplane. It says: Jesus Pilot Me. Is it asking or saying in broken English? The man is a spry 80, and he says this is because he never drank or smoke or did anything but love the Lord. We took photos of him holding a rock with the sign carved into it. He sells them for 30 bucks.

But back to me being in a bad mood. Good feelings wear with the wind, and after three hours of cowshit shrapnel punches, I was about ready to stop my bike, run into a cornfield, grab an ear and shout a violent obscenity in one of the few parts of the country where that might still matter. It made me mad.

Compounding this all, the electric motor I've been using to power my bike died. It's Korean. It uses 37 hearing aid batteries every 70 miles. I hate buying new batteries because some teenagers slip them behind their eyelids to get high. You should see the dirty looks I get at the pharmacy. I broke a sweat just worrying about it.

Scott City couldn't have come fast enough. Towns pop up from about 10 miles out here. You can see a town's grain elevator take over the sky like the Emerald City itself. We made our battered way to a Mexican restaurant, ate modestly, and then hit the Athleticlub.

The Athleticlub let's cyclists sleep on the floor, use the showers, and, most importantly, use their jacuzzi. They also have a diving board. The room I am lying in now has little girl's gymnastics lockers, a series of trophies, a large fan, and a couple of framed photographs of George Bush and Regan on a white horse. Oddly (or not), this is the exact same trope used on my rapture CD-ROM.

And that is a full day. We have an easy one tomorrow to Tribune (named for the New York Tribune) and we're going to try and wake up at 5 and bang it out. I'll be in bed soon, but I want to leave the day with breakfast because what we were talking about (and that we were talking about it) was all quite interesting.

We talked about organic food, mad cow's disease, other wasting diseases, agribusinesses that don't allow you to keep last year's seeds, and agricultural talk radio. Dan is a sometimes phone in caller. One farmer called in and wanted to know why hormone free organic milk lasts longer. The host had no answer.

An angry farmer called in to say that all this organic talk is rubbish and we should just go back to doing it like we used to, like our grandparents did. He meant using pesticides and hormones like our grandparents did. Even if his family were prodigious breeders, I should have liked to have had the chance to correct him. Dan was in his harvester at the time, but he wanted to give the man hell.