Kansas City a photo essay--3

Third Picture

Later, while hiding it pretty well from the couple in 32, I take a picture of the topography around Kansas City. You can see the flat patches of farmland from which the city was raised, bisected by a long beige strip of freeway. It’s easy to imagine large herds of bison wandering around such a land, cropping grass and slipping down to the river at dusk to lap up water as insects hum. From up high the land makes more sense. You can see how everything is just a grid. You can understand that from such a distance, God could have conceived of the flood. The world is just a collection of rises and depressions of which we are but one relatively insignificant part. The land seems like it will last forever.

Eventually we land, and I feel that sense of relief—a release of tension that I didn’t even know I was carrying. I love the land. At the rental place, (digression: my friends tasked me the day before I was to get on a flight to rent a car for the weekend and check into the house. None of this turns out to be particularly hard, but it’s the sort of thing where you just know wives aren’t involved, because these sorts of details wouldn’t be getting sorted out at the eleventh hour. Also, I’m an easy going guy ((sometimes, when I am not being easy going I am kind of terrible)) and I don’t really have anything to do in Kansas City. I like to arrive for these trips early in the day to get a feel for the city. By the evening, everyone will be drinking, and the weekend will become a kind of blur. It’s only in these first quiet moments that I’m able to walk the streets and imagine what it might be like to live here. 

 A nice lady named Andrea recommends that I upgrade the vehicle, because: sales. She’s also nice enough to mention several neighborhoods that are fun, and we exchange some banter about whether I want the insurance. She says, “I can tell you want too.” And she was right. I did want to say yes to an SUV and full coverage, so I could drive that SUV into a river and not worry about it, but I’m an adult so I turned her down. When she asked what I was traveling for, and I told her a bachelor party, she said,

 “Which one of you is from Kansas City?”

“None of us,” I told her, and she looked at me like I was crazy

Perhaps that should have been a sign.