The author makes no claim as to the sanity, safety, or legality of any of the practices described in the following. Readers are advised to exercise common sense before attempting any of the practices here described while driving a motor vehicle.
When the Kansas Turnpike opened in 1956, it was a magical passage through the Flint Hills. As a six-year-old from Wichita, I knew nothing of the concerns of ranchers, farmers, or the Department of Transportation. The Turnpike and the Flint Hills were simply there. For a child already given to flights of imagination, this sudden exposure to the immensity of sky and land surrounding the flat, predictable capsule of Wichita opened a mysterious door.
Immediately, as if triggered by the gently rolling land and vaulting sky near Emporia, I started performing child-size experiments. On family trips to Topeka, my brother and I hid from the wind under blankets in the backward-looking rear seat of our station wagon. I didn’t weigh much, and I fantasized about how far the wind might carry me if I jumped up just right. If I sat facing forward, I would fasten my sight to a distant point on the road where the land rose to meet the horizon ahead and ask my genie to carry me there. Slipping into the role of the genie, I would whisper to myself, “Your wish is my command.” Then I would close my eyes and, in no time, we were there.
I knew about directions and wondered how many of them there were. I counted the ones I knew, ticking them off on my fingers, trying to collect as many as I could. The part of Wichita where I lived was plotted out on a grid that followed the cardinal directions. Our house was at the corner of Roosevelt and Lewis. This intersection of north, south, east, and west gave me my first four directions right off the bat.
To talk about other places in America, people talked about “back East,” “out West, “up North,” and “down South.” This was a Wichita way of orienteering. It put a map in my mind in which Wichita was the Center of the World. Later, in school, our teacher read a story about native tribes that didn’t stay in one place for very long. When they arrived in a new place, the first thing they did was stick a sacred pole in the ground and declare it to be the “Center of the World.” Then they would pull up the pole and take it with them to the next place. That way, they always lived at the Center of the World. That story confused me for a while. It meant that Wichita both was and wasn’t the Center of the World.
My collection grew. Catty-corner houses showed the South- and Northeasts, as well as the South- and Northwests. That put me up to eight directions.
There seemed to be an unspoken agreement to stick with the flat world, but I knew there had to be more directions. For example, I could feel the pull of things down in the ground. Crabgrass and grubworms were underfoot. Arrowheads, too, and dinosaur bones. When I was nine years old, I saw the movie Journey to the Center of the Earth, and that clinched it. With other neighborhood kids, I set to work, digging under the garage, under the house, into the utterly black worlds beneath Wichita. If we dug down far enough, we thought, we could make a tunnel big enough to crawl through and not get squashed if it all collapsed under the enormous weight of our town. We never made it beyond the tangles of tree roots behind the garage.
The experience stuck with me. Down was a way to go to other worlds. In later forays into subterranean Wichita, two grade-school friends and I climbed into a large sewer pipe where it opened at the Arkansas River. The concrete tube, never quite tall enough to stand upright in, was drippy and pitch dark, except for periodic shafts of twilight shining through sewer openings. Gripping the belt of the boy in front of me, and gripped from behind by my other friend, we trotted, crouched over like a trio of early humans, straight east along Douglas Avenue. Sewer water soaked our tennis shoes and crept up the legs of our jeans to our knees. Rotten-egg smells made us queasy. For what felt like hours, we ran in lockstep until we came to a spacious opening. There, we hoisted ourselves up to look through a street-level drain opening. We saw cars whizzing by, amazed to find we had made it all the way from the river to East High School. Turning back to the under-street cavern, we continued on our way eastward, our eyes readjusting to the dark. In the distance, the reddish glow of lit cigarettes dotted the darkness like the eyes of wildcats, and a handful of tough-looking kids slowly came into view. They were sitting on damp ledges of sewer fittings, swinging their feet, and splashing each other with standing water. In this forbidden underground world, all of us were outlaws. Nobody spoke.
Down was Direction Number Nine.
Number Ten was Up. We had so much of it in Wichita that it almost didn’t occur to me to add it to my collection of directions. We had so much UP that Wichita was called the Air Capitol of the World. The air above us was huge and filled with flying things. We had airplanes, all kinds, in the air above. Experimental aircraft from Beechcraft looked like backward-flying cigars. Daily sonic booms pounded our ears from bombers that took off from McConnell Air Force Base.
A big part of Up was the wind. You couldn’t see it, but it was constant. If you got smacked by a gust of solid air barreling around a building, it could knock you down. The wind taught respect for things you couldn’t see.
My brother and I took the elevator to the screened-in open-air observation deck atop the Hillcrest Apartments where our grandmother lived. There, I got a panoramic view of the flat world below. On my first airplane ride, my dad took me to far off Kansas City to go see a Kansas City A’s baseball game. The Braniff propellers fanned the big plane into the mysterious sky. We bounced through pockets of empty air. People and cars turned into ants as the flat world dropped away and vanished under clouds.
Now I had ten: North, South, East, West, Four Catty-Corner Directions, Down, and Up. I was nine years old, impatient to achieve double-digits of age, and Ten Directions felt pretty heady.
Direction Eleven was different from all the others, and it took time to learn where to locate it. As it turned out, I had known about it all along. Here is how I found it.
In my early years at the University of Kansas, driving was still a novel act. It involved the art of getting lost. I didn’t want to pay Turnpike fees when I went home to Wichita, so I discovered a secret route: Highway 4 out of Topeka; 177 to Cottonwood Falls and El Dorado (pronounced with a long “a,” please); then Highway 54 to Pickrell Corner and Wichita.
There was something uncanny about the rills and rises on those secret roads. At the tops of certain rises, I could see fifty, sixty, sometimes seventy miles. The land was so fluctuating that I was either driving on the bottom of an ancient ocean or on the top of a worn-down prehistoric mountain. Which was it? My eyes saw both. This put me in a strange state of mind as I drove. I switched back and forth between the two realities—ocean bottom, mountain top, ocean bottom, mountain top. As I did this, for minutes at a time, it seemed to me that my car would stop moving, hanging suspended as the planet continued to turn under me. Or had I somehow momentarily stopped the world? I practiced this new “skill.”
The secret road taught me. I found, for example, that I needed to slow down, or, more precisely, find the right speed to feel what was under me. Certain curves between Dover and Eskridge, I found, were banked at such extreme angles that you had to find the right speed just to keep from falling off. Finding the right speed was a necessary skill for navigating the world that was opening to me, the world of the Eleventh Direction.
I learned to attune to small differences in speed. The mass and momentum of my car were one thing at forty miles an hour, another at sixty or seventy. Each “decade” of speed had its own feel, its own effect. It got so that coasting to shed a single mile per hour could ease me into a niche of stillness in an intimate dance with the contours of the road. My deep sensorium comprehended the car’s weight, able to reach down and down to where my tires met the road. Through the cracker-thin veneer of civilization laid out between me and the planet, I learned to let my senses plumb the unfathomably huge landmass below. In this way, driving in the Flint Hills, I glimpsed the True Shape of the World, including its Center.
The Eleventh Direction, my Imagination, was one I had known about since I was a boy riding the magical Kansas Turnpike. Now, when I drive my secret road in the open prairie and my car becomes stationary, the rises and falls of the Flint Hills come at me like waves in a deep, undulating ocean, rolling underneath, lifting me up out of time. The straightaways are rolling ribbons, wavy zippers across the prairie, where all the Eleven Directions intersect. Kansas is everywhere. I drive my secret roads, suspended between Heaven and Earth, and, at times, I fly off the top of one of those low mountains at the bottom of the ocean and just keep going.
Jim Gilkeson was born in Wichita, Kansas, and attended the University of Kansas until 1971. Gilkeson’s books are Three Lost Worlds: A Memoir of Life Among Mystics, Healers, and Life-Artists, A Pilgrim in Your Body, and Energy Healing: A Pathway to Inner Growth. His stories and articles have appeared in The Memoirist Quarterly, Invisible City, The Meadowlark 105 Reader, Massage and Bodywork Magazine, and The Heart of Healing, edited by Dawson Church. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Featured Artwork:
Dirty Blue
Jim Still-Pepper’s photography captures images that reveal the light of life. And how light is fleeting; it fades; it is easily taken for granted. He tries to shoot while there is still light. Some of his work features the big picture, and others contain just pieces of the puzzle. He urges his audience to catch the light and life in each of his photos. For his “real job,” he is a therapist who works with at-risk families. He is also a national public thinker, consultant, and workshop leader.