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THE INVISIBLE MOUNTAINS OF WICHITA KANSAS

I arrive in Wichita at night, driving an elderly black lab in an elderly white Jeep from New Mexico to Kansas. Belle is my girlfriend’s dog. She has arthritis and dementia. She would have been content to live out her life in the Oklahoma panhandle where we stopped to pee. I built her a dog ramp, which is a long parallelogram made of wood and carpeting, designed to wedge into a passenger side door that creaks and no longer opens all the way. It is an arthritic situation but she is a good girl and we manage. The great brown nothingness of the desert cross-fades into the greener nothingness of Kansas. I have started over so many times that any sense of wanderlust has been exhausted out of me. I’ve built lives in Missouri, Washington, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, New Mexico, and now Kansas. In each place I leave behind all of the components that could sustain a person indefinitely, only to do it all over again.

My approach to exploring a new home is always the same. I ride my bike everywhere. A bike ride gets me in close to the invisible borders and restitched seams of a city. I ride past factories that only run at night and piles of scrap metal, tall as apartment buildings. I ride the skatepark where fear is grown then eaten through pain and repetition, and you can bum a cigarette off a fourteen year old.

Wichita allows its ghosts to live in the broad daylight of its progress. An abandoned factory meditates in a field, a dented limo is for sale, a boarded up corner store is a few blocks away from a multimillion dollar library. An

new city folds into a older city, then unfolds back into tallgrass prairie, where the only commerce is between rodent, serpent, and hawk. It is sliced up by rivers that binge and purge on spring rains and old railroad lines that have beat out the same rhythm for 150 years.

The first train to arrive in Wichita came in the dead of night in 1872. Twenty seven miles north, Newton, Kansas celebrated their first railroad a year earlier. Frederick Harvey stationed one of his famous Harvey Houses there. Despite the runaway progress of the railroads, dining had been barbaric and out of step with the sleek new world. Harvey Houses offered young capon in hollandaise sauce, prairie chicken with currant jelly, and with each oyster mounted on a cracker, the world became a little more dignified.

Sunday mornings in the midwest are quiet before church lets out. I have the streets to myself. Paved paths run for miles along the river. Skunks eat cat food from porches and snow egrets pluck catfish from the water. Canadian geese have stopped migrating because the retired woman living on Back Bay Boulevard has slowly domesticated them, generation after generation, with a simple fistful of seeds and a Simon and Garfunkel song that she hums into the Wichita wind.

In the late 1800’s, members of the Wichita Bicycle Club would ride 50 to 100 miles on high wheeler bicycles. This was years before roads were smooth and the advent of the pneumatic tire. By the 1900’s, newspapers like “The Daily Free Press” out of Winfield, Kansas, and “The Topeka Daily Capitol” hired fleets of bicyclists to deliver their papers. These bikes were the classic paper boy cruiser with balloon tires and swept back handlebars —a simple, comfortable machine that turns kids into adults and adults back into kids. These bikes would eventually be hacked and modified to become the first mountain bikes, ridden down the fire roads of Marin County,

California by a mix of disenchanted road racers and athletic Dead Heads.

My bike is ugly. This is no accident. It is secretly expensive, but I let it wear its scars and scratches so it can be locked up unmolested. It is a simple bike from a simpler time. I can take it apart and put it back together while drunk. I originally built it with a friend in Portland’s oldest bike co-op while listening to Madonna’s greatest hits. It has been hit by a car and bent back into alignment. It has dodged rattlesnakes and chased road runners in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. It has done everything I have ever asked it to do. It is easy to fetishize a bicycle—a sleek, naked object with nearly all of its working parts exposed. Nothing is hidden except for the bearings, sealed away from the light and distractions of the world so they can fight their private war against friction. A bicycle is a kind, forgiving, perfect machine.

The cobblestone of Wichita’s arts district fades into the dirt and gravel paths that hug the Santa Fe line. The houses along the tracks are overgrown with weeds but the kettle grills are clean and well loved. Motorcycles are propped up on blocks with broken little headlights. Puncture resistant tires are necessary for this kind of urban industrial exploring. The ground is always churning a previous generation’s broken glass back to the surface along with ancient shards of limestone and tenpenny nails. The past is sharp, not smooth. Ugly riding is best done in ugly clothing on an ugly bike. Neon lycra will clash with the chainlink fences and barking dogs. Do not ride your thousands of dollars worth of carbon fiber through a world that still rests on the shoulders of steel. Blend in. Move like a feral cat from alley to alley—ears back, unnoticed. Feel the terrifying glory of being alone and riding where you are not supposed to be.

The old Beachner grain elevator on 21st street is a midwestern ruin. It crumbles and bleaches in the sun like the Colosseum in Rome or the

theatre at Epidarus. Its chalky silos make the blue Kansas sky seem Mediterranean. I ride into the abandoned truck lanes among piles of tires and broken concrete to reach the foot of the tower. The industrial graveyard sings a siren song to my bike, begging it to stay and rust and rot. Birds and small mammals repurpose the shadows to eat each other in the rubble. The food chain keeps eating until the last thing is chewed. Each time I ride to the grain elevator to touch the old monolith, I have the heavy feeling that I don’t belong there, that I should let the dead rest. The silence near the silo is absolute. Crows fly but do not caw. The wind does not rustle the weeds. I say something to hear the sound of my own voice, and it is swallowed quickly by something unseen. Maybe it’s the nature of decay. Even sound dies when it is no longer needed.

This is all part of an industrial corridor where old railroad lines divide the neighborhoods, creating a thoroughfare for trucks and bars and steakhouses that are forever “under new ownership”. Smoke billows from a nearby factory and it produces the most seductive smell, a bit like fried chicken mixed with pure cane sugar but with a forbidden chemical umami. I imagine it is what dogs experience when they are drawn to a pool of antifreeze dripping below the family car. I should ignore the smell and hold my breath but instead I think about lunch.

I’ve always loved the way factories look at night. From the right distance, they become small cities with lights beaming through steaming layers of metal. The piping moves like an improbable highway system, connecting one building to the next.

Train tracks ran through the west wing of the cosmetics factory where my parents worked. My first job was working at the same factory. It was difficult, repetitive work and I had to learn bizarre ways to occupy my mind, but it was one of the great lessons of my life. Everything I ever had as a

child; every meal, toy, bike, and pair of jeans was paid for by the raw hours my parents spent working the production lines. It’s a brutal equation, but my parents are masters at living within their means. While their coworkers were on the hamster wheel of debt with new Cameros, bass boats, and other status items of the midwestern 80’s, my parents were driving Japanese sedans into obscene mileage and paying off their modest house. I learned that work will build you a life, but after that you have to find a true way of living it. This is complicated because, as individuals, we are a mess of wants and needs and expectations. It’s hard for me because I like to write songs, toss noodles in a wok, tell jokes, and make friends with cats. Nobody is paying me for any of this, especially the cats, so work and self live separately.

My first instinct in Wichita is to fall back on what I know. I am hired to cook at a nice restaurant and I work there for exactly one day. The shift goes perfectly, but I have already lived this moment so many times. My heart is no longer in it. That type of high volume, high octane line cooking is best left to those who are still in love.

The city announces approval of a new central library to be built in a field on the west banks of the Arkansas River. Before ground is broken, I know I will work there. I ride by the site regularly, and for a year I watch dirt and grass become steel and glass. I interview my way in and land myself a challenging job that peels me like an onion skin, revealing my strengths and weaknesses. I find that I can process a lot of information and that I am a decent teacher, but I also learn that I can wreak holy havoc on an Excel spreadsheet. I can’t make the little boxes do what they are supposed to do so I click on them until they no longer do anything at all. The image of the quiet librarian sitting behind a desk and moving in a slow current of work does not apply to this job. Thousands of books and materials need to be

processed daily. I train clerks, negotiate large debts, and calm the nerves of unstable people. I track and perform forensics on a large print copy of The Grapes Of Wrath that has taken a mysterious joy ride though several library branches and has somehow put late fees on an elderly woman’s account. She is furious and swears up and down that she would never read Steinbeck. I make a joke about sour grapes and she laughs. The job fits me like a glove.

Great workers are everywhere. They are easy to spot in the service industry, where hustle is on display, but there are other forms of greatness. My car mechanic has the bedside manner of a pediatrician. I sit at diner counters if I can watch an experienced short order cook—someone who has spatulas for hands and can hear the inner thoughts of an egg. I note the economy of movement, the steady breathing, and the stillness in the face. Great workers will witness the full length of our species. They will build the first and last thing.

In the summer of 2017 I witness a perfect worker.

I break up with my laundromat. There have been too many lost quarters and blown out dryers. I am tired of the absentee owner—someone who comes in the dead of night to collect their fortune in change. Notes are posted on the bulletin board complaining of lost money, faulty washers, and dirty bathrooms. Most of them written in all caps.

To find a new laundromat, I look to the sky for smoke and follow the smell of chicken. A small jaunt north puts me in the Hispanic neighborhood, and there is a laundromat across the street from “The Chicken Man” who smokes whole birds in the parking lot of a used tire shop. On weekends, the empty lots fill with fruit vendors and people selling sweet corn, decorative blankets, and framed prints of the Santo Nino de Atocha. The

intersection is a Brigadoon. Most days the lots are empty, but on some days they turn into an impromptu market. Then it disappears again.

I walk into the new laundromat with a toppling pile of laundry. The double doors are awkward and an orange falls out of my open backpack. I don’t even eat oranges. It is caught before it hits the ground by a man in a starchy white shirt. He gives me a quick nod and places the orange gently back into my backpack before rushing off with a broom. All around there are houseplants, pinball machines, and a jukebox that plays Madonna’s Greatest Hits on a loop.

For the first time in my life I try a side load washer. I have always known the side loader is the superior machine, but laundry—like spaghetti and meatballs—is about memory and mothers. After a lifetime of watching my clean clothes come from the top of an off-white Maytag, it’s an emotional leap to trust the cold stainless steel washer with the porthole window. But you have to grow up sometime.

The floors are spotless. Every machine works. All of this is the work of one very industrious man—the man in the starchy white shirt, the orange catcher, the owner, operator, and lone employee. I usually read at the laundromat, but this time I watch the maestro at work. He does not cross the floor without picking something up or relining a garbage can. There is no wasted movement, and he works in a counter clockwise pattern— addressing washers, dryers, and folding stations systematically. Occasionally, he pops a few quarters in a pinball machine, lights it up, and leaves the extra plays for the chubby kid patiently waiting to take over. By the time the kid finishes the game, the man in the starchy white shirt has redistributed his fleet of wire push carts. All the while Madonna sings “La Isla Bonita”. Last night “she dreamt of San Pedro”. Today she turns this

laundromat into a dance floor.

The foundation of physical grace is good footwork. If the torso moves smoothly, know that the feet are skilled. I’ve seen one common move among many trades. I call it Plato’s Pivot, because I like to think that people have been doing this move since they were building the Parthenon in sandals. I learned it by working as a pizza cook, where I had to move quickly within a small space with another cook. The idea is simple. Turn one foot out in the direction you need to go, pivot the hips, take one long step, re-square the hips as the second foot drags into position, then reverse the motion exactly to return to your original position. The molecules of air should still be brushed aside to ease your return. This puts you in two balanced stances with the fewest amount of moves. I’ve seen cooks do this move, but I’ve also seen nurses, mechanics, and laundromat owners do it. Once I was watching an episode of Law and Order and saw a lawyer do Plato’s Pivot while revealing evidence. He pivoted to the judge, then re- squared himself to address the jury. I imagine the actor worked in a kitchen between auditions. Once Plato’s Pivot is in your feet, the Earth will forever glide beneath you.

I finish folding my shirts as Madonna explains to her Papa that he really shouldn’t preach. She’s made up her mind, she’s “keepin’ her baby”. She’s “in an awful mess and she don’t mean maybe”. I tuck my socks into one another and I agree with her. “What she needs right now is some good advice”. The owner and I exchange nods as I leave. Nice, efficient nods. No need to break his momentum.

By the summer of 2020 I am living alone in a large old house, two blocks from the Little Arkansas River and four blocks from the regular old Arkansas River. The rivers duck and weave until they meet in downtown Wichita. I have my own washer and dryer and no longer need the maestro,

but now I am in Covid lockdown and miss the small duties of life. I miss rummaging for quarters and waiting in lines. I miss the guilt of staying out too late at the bar. I miss playing music. I occasionally go to barbecues, baseball games, and street corners where I gossip with my neighbors, but these are stolen moments in a game of cat and mouse that we are playing with our health. Then I get into a hot summer fling with a drive-in theatre.

The Starlight Drive-In operates in a nostalgic dream. It is surrounded by mobile home parks, a roller rink, and a BMX track, where kids smoke in the berms. As the pandemic settles over us, drive-in theaters find themselves with a valuable asset: space. A bike ride to the Starlight Drive-In is an ambitious ride south along the riverbanks, and for a stretch, it becomes feral. People live in the woods and under bridges. I once saw a beautiful woman bathing nude under a bridge which was alarming in a thousand ways.

By bike, I can easily sneak into the Starlight through the tree line, but why would I do that? Why not give my money to help polish a rare gem? I strap a lawn chair to the rack of my bike and unfold it on one of the gravel mounds where you would park a car. I use a little transistor radio to pick up the audio and I brought a nice bottle of claret to pair with the chili cheese fries they sell at concessions. I’m a cheap date. I think about how simple and romantic this might be if I weren’t just one dude in a lawn chair, but whatever. Things converge and things fall apart. On the horizon a radio controlled plane does loop-de-loops in the last bit of light, and next to me an entire family snuggles under a single heavy blanket in the back of a Ford F150. Moments like these seem to contain everything, but I’m a world in a raindrop kind of guy. This is initially charming to women, that so much can be had with so little, but after a few years of this, the world must feel a bit small. Thus the one dude and one lawn chair.

Tonight’s feature is 1987’s “A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors”, a movie that features a young Patricia Arquette and a killer song by Dokken. The last surviving children of the parents who burned Freddy Krueger find themselves together in a psychiatric hospital. They try group hypnosis in an attempt to have a shared dream so they can finally put the old demon to rest. That’s kind of what it is to watch a movie with other people, a shared dream. The bike ride and the chili cheese fries and the wine make for a great first half of the movie. I’m having the time of my life, but by the second half I start nodding off in my chair. If there is one message the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise promotes, it is don’t fall asleep! That’s when the Freddy Krueger gets his sharp little hands a- cookin’. But there I am, shifting around in a lawn chair on a mound of gravel on a hot summer night, batteries dying in my dumb little radio, not sure if I’m still in the shared dream with everyone else or completely on my own.

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Oak Barrells

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Death To The Chorus, Long Live The Verse

I joined a December tour with the folk trio, Small Souls.  We loaded a mini van within an inch of it's life and pointed it east, over Mt. Hood and towards eight shows and a route that formed the shape of a soup ladle.  Oregon to California then straight up the handle into Washington.  We were unsure if there would be anything left at the end of 2014.  Would there be anything at the bottom of the pot, or just metal scraping metal.  Would there be anything left to say?   The pines form into great walls as we ascend the mountain pass.  I fell asleep and lost the last daylight.  When I woke, we were driving through Kah-Nee-Ta Indian Reservation.  I sleeved the fog from the rear window and there was a thick dandruff of snow on the high desert sage.  There was a small Catholic church perched on a hill with a single light above the door.  It overlooked the Indian Casino with its neon sins and its parking lot full of damp logging trucks, their backs bowed from dead trees and taking up six spaces apiece.  A soggy eagle's nest spilled like a cracked egg over the sign for the Black Bear Diner, where breakfast is served all day.  The money is damp here and there doesn't seem to be much of it.  

We arrived in Bend, Oregon to a lovely host for our house concert and a nice room with tall ceilings to play in.  As people arrived, it became clear we were in a different economy.  Spanish wines, puffy coats, and at least a dozen kinds of IPA poured through the door and a good crowd was gathering.  I couldn't hold down a conversation.  I was locked up.  A friendly black lab made regular visits to me on the quiet corner of the couch where I made last minute adjustments to new songs.  I'd be playing solo for this tour, opening all of the shows, and the goal was to dig as deep as I could to reach the hidden corners of new and old songs, adjusting them, applying unusual pressure, manipulating their bodies.  These are good songs, sturdy through the years, but they'd grown stiff in the neck.  I was also traveling with a brand new guitar and the two of us barely knew each other.  There were awkward pauses.  It played too tightly and was too honest about what the fingers were up to.  An old guitar will corroborate your lies.  This new guitar is a reproduction of an older design, extremely touch sensitive.  Like an early domesticated dog, it's safe enough to keep around the house but it still has a lot of wolf in it.

Small Souls played unplugged for this first show and sent their three part harmonies into the high ceilings.  They played perfectly.  When I started my set, the bottom fell out of my first song.  Second song, slightly less shitty.  On the third my voice opened up, my fingers were quick, and my jokes weren't too bad.  It was a rough start but I stirred the pot a little.  It was a great set and afterwards conversation came easily.  I sat in a comfortable chair with a pulled pork sandwich and a beer and procession of very nice and successful 40-year-olds chatted me up until it was time to go.  An engineer, a restauranteur, a rug importer, a pilot, each of them handing me their cards.  It's confusing to be around emerging wealth when it contrasts so starkly against the Indian Reservation where the casino keeps the money moving.  It's hard to resolve the two, but we accepted their money for our songs and were thankful for so much hospitality on a Monday.  The next morning I took a long walk around Bend, which has enjoyed a population explosion over the last decade.  You can feel the economy churning under your feet.  I came across three snowboarders building a new house.  I paused in the dirt alley and watched the ants build their hill.

We moved south, entering Salinas Valley.  Steinbeck country.  Green hills, citrus trees, grape pickers, and we needed to find a lunch that might have to carry us through the night.  The smartphone told us of a little deli on the side of the road that sold formidable sandwiches.  It was buried in counterintuitive highway exits and clusters of houses trying to form neighborhoods.  The deli was elusive enough to stump the smartphone.  I liked it already.  We got a hot look from the locals when we entered.  It was a corner store shack with beer, jerky, lotto, weed pipes, and counterfeit Dr. Dre headphones..  The store owner looked like Al Capone in an old baseball cap and he gave us a loud greeting.  "Hey Fellas! Did you find us on one of those smartphones?  I don't know anything about that.  I'm still in my flip flops!"  He brought up his flip flops two more times, then slammed four large paper cups on the counter.  "Here!  Try the broccoli soup.  It has meatballs in it."  He makes his soup in one old pot simmering on one old hot plate behind the counter.  We placed our orders and he bounced from one to another, adding onions here, mustard there, asking us who likes jalapeños then forgetting who wanted mustard.  I was having a great time.  "I had two Russians in here yesterday.  Smartphones!"  He threw in all kinds of extras with the sandwiches, which were unruly and had to be placed in a wrestling hold between four paper plates and a healthy dose of plastic wrap.  "If you don't like them, bring them back and I'll make them better.  I really hope you like them.  Have a great day Fellas.  I really hope you like those sandwiches!"   I finished mine many hours later, drunk and laughing in a cold RV, which was our digs for the night.  The sandwiches held up.  If this were a song, this would be the hook.

I grew up in the dead center of Missouri and California seemed like a foreign country.  As a kid, I always imagined I could someday move there and somehow my hair would turn blonde and curly and I'd surf out the rest of my life.  Then "The Karate Kid" came out and I bore a striking resemblance to Ralph Machio, and as he fought the violent blonde Californians at the All Valley Tournament, I realized that there might really be a place for me there, that there would be soccer on the beach and bonfires with Elizabeth Shue.  The sun does indeed shine more favorably there and it's citizens are loaded to the gills with Vitamin D.  With this comes great hair, loud shirts, and retained youth.  We played three California shows.  One in Sacramento, one is Pismo Beach, and ending with San Francisco.  Lots of white wine, lots of sandals in December, lots of fun.  It was in California that my untamed guitar finally let me feed it from my hand.

By the end of California, I had explored my set of songs.  I played them hard one night and crooned them the next.  Some of them were good songs that just weren't up for the task of being played without accompaniment.  They'd become accustomed to a backing band and their muscles had atrophied, unable to support their own weight.  Other songs felt free and enjoyed their full range of motion.  The cream rises to the top.  I often don't remember the actual writing of a song. I remember the work but not the revelations.  It's a waking dream.  I didn't set out to write anything on this tour, but I stared out of a car window for many hours, measuring miles by the length of California's curvy green hips, watching southern Oregon creeks flood and get violent with the trees lining their banks.  I pulled out my pen and tried to get a verse going, but the words got caught in the current and wouldn't root.                    

The Dairy Queen outside of Ashland Oregon seemed closed.  No lights inside.  Too many black birds nesting in the drive through and the prices seemed out of date.  But it was a beautiful gray morning, leaning over the railing of a Motel 6, drinking weak coffee from the lobby and sharing a moment with the Dairy Queen's wealthy crows.  We rolled in late the night before, after our show in Ashland.  The crowd consisted of roughly ten people, four salmon burgers, and a Christmas tree.  We were desperate for warmth and sleep and the Motel 6 was a friendly light on a dark highway. There were silhouettes partying hard on the hotel balcony.  In the morning they had bruised faces and knives in their belts.  Even in the daylight, they were shadows.  Places like this are rich with songs but hardly original.  Cheap motels, hard traveling, broken people, hangovers….it's been done.  I keep the guitar in it's case and continue to look elsewhere.  Sometimes I think this is a problem, looking too far into hidden corners for songs when people really just want something familiar.  A chorus they can hum, a feeling they already know.  Every morning my friend, Brian, disappears.  He's always the first one awake.  Then I disappear.  I walk to the hibernating baseball field next to the Motel.  The scoreboard still telling the story of the home team's loss on the last game of their season.  I walk to second base, let my shoes sink in the mud, and listen for a melody.  

When we reached our three night residency at The Adrift Hotel in Long Beach Washington, we were rewarded with luxury.  Here I would drink absinthe and eat dungeoness crab.  I would suck garlic butter from the fingers of a beautiful woman.  I would spend an afternoon watching a Kevin Costner baseball movie (there's more than one) and my lust for understanding grew fuzzy at the edges.  The songs remained strong, filled now with dexterity and familiarity.  I could play them for drunks, play them for kids, play them for hipsters, entertain a dinner crowd, and even satisfy myself.  Sometimes, I suppose, it's good to relax and enjoy a good chorus.

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photo by Erin Berzel

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