Purple Hays

The skies are indeed purple over Hays, Kansas, a city of 20,000 in western Kansas. The landscape is sort of purple, too, and my mood is purple to top it off.

Today's my birthday, and it got off to a great start with a gourmet breakfast prepared by Jacob, then a lunch of a ground beef popover and a chocolate "Matterhorn" (a mountain-shaped chocolate baked atop a cookie and served with sweet cream) at Andre's Patisserie. I reluctantly bid him goodbye in the afternoon, then drove four and a half hours to Hays without stopping except to refill Blackbird's tank and empty my own. (Rule of traveling I've discovered: never pass up the opportunity to take a leak.)

I took the interstate after all, having been assured by Jacob that there is equally little worthwhile to see on any route through Kansas. I don't agree with his assessment that it's boring, but it's certainly rural, and tourist attractions are few and far between. The land's green and brown spaces are amazing. The high point of the drive, however, was certainly the expedition past a massive wind farm. There must have been hundreds of individual mills gyrating in the breeze. The three polished, rotating blades of each turbine looked so sleek and modern, like something out of a TV commercial for either renewable energy or Mercedes-Benz. If they had no purpose at all, their beauty would make them a landmark and a tourist attraction. It's odd that they're not viewed as one, and there are no roads leading from I-70 to within the churn of the wind farm.

The four and a half hour drive felt longer than it was, and I arrived in Hays feeling drained. Here I made an unpleasant discovery: my cell phone does not have any reception here. Investigating online, I made an even more unpleasant discovery: AT&T does not cover western Kansas at all, and most of the western United States in general is covered only through AT&T's presumably less reliable "partners" or is completely uncovered. Virtually all of Nevada, for example, is an AT&T dead zone. This knowledge scares me. If I break down on the highway in a dead zone I won't be able to call AAA, and God knows I have no idea how to fix anything on my own. Fortunately, I've been able to make contact with Wiley, my host for tomorrow, through Gmail, and she's expecting me in the early evening. But I need to think about backup plans for communication, or else make sure I stick to paths that get reception.

Hays itself feels oddly tense. The people have a look on their faces like they're besieged. Maybe it's the weather, which NPR says may reach 100 degrees tomorrow, or maybe it's my imagination, me projecting my anxiety onto the strangers around me. I ate dinner at Montana Mike's Steakhouse, which served a passable ribeye. I've been trying to avoid soda this trip, but I couldn't pass up the most unique thing on the menu, Sierra Mist with pear flavoring. Sweet! The pear taste was overpowering and delicate at the same time. As usual, I almost didn't order it but then thought "what the hell." I'm learning to recognize the moments when I should say "what the hell" and live a little.

Happy birthday to me! With luck, the next post will come from Aurora, Colorado, outside Denver. In the meantime I'll try to figure out why Hays exists, out here in the boonies, as opposed to being a tiny interstate stopover like the other towns I passed.