Wanderung 3

Rocky Mountain Ramble

May - July 2003

May 27th - Topeka, Kansas

As we are trying to do a Volksmarch in all 50 states and 51 capitals, we decided to drive to Topeka, Kansas, and do the capital walk there. As we drove southwest the 60 miles or so from Atchison to Topeka, the rolling, wooded land that was more typical of Missouri was giving way gradually to more flat, open countryside with trees only along the riverbeds. Perhaps naively, I had expected a noticeable change when we crossed the Missouri River, but the ecology just gradually shifted the relative proportions of woodlands and open lands—no sudden jump, which makes sense once you think about it.

The Volksmarch in Topeka began at the Capital Center Inn, a nice hotel with clean, clearly marked bathrooms—some hotels try to hide bathrooms to prevent, I suppose, the riff-raff like us from sneaking in and using them. Monika liked the small trivets which were the “A” award, so we signed up for the walk plus the award. We did on many if not most of our walks, thus accumulating a lot of really nice patches, cane shields, trivets, refrigerator magnets and other memorabilia along the way. We could have reduced the strain on our budget by buying just one of each award instead of two, but then we’d get to squabbling over who it really belonged to, so that wasn’t feasible. In any case, we set out for the Topeka walk with our two trivets weighing down our pockets.

The Topeka walk was roughly in the shape of a big rectangle, which is only to be expected since this is the heart of the heartland and the streets are all laid out in a grid. The first side of the rectangle was down the main shopping street that ran north-south and was about two blocks away from the capital. The sidewalks were broad and there weren’t many folks out and about, so the walking was easy and we made good time. Perhaps connected to the paucity of people was the fact that the downtown area had a sizable proportion of the storefronts shuttered and empty. The city is clean and nice looking, so it was disappointing to see these signs of an economically depressed area.

The next leg of the rectangle led us to the fancy Ward-Meade house, which was part of a small park that included an open-air museum. The punch for the checkpoint was in a small white wooden box something like a birdhouse that was mounted at the back of the house. If you get this way and are at all interested in frontier history, make sure to check out the buildings in the open-air museum. It’s quite a diverse set for such a small area and includes a train station, a caboose, a general store, a soda-fountain lunch shop, and a one-room schoolhouse.

I was particularly interested in the 1-room schoolhouse because my mother taught in one for several years near Port Sanilac, Michigan, before she married my father (see Wanderung 4). She described the problems of teaching eight grades simultaneously when she told me stories about it many years later, and I enjoyed hearing about the joys and the difficulties of that job. But despite the obvious problems these schools offered some advantages such as a flexible assignment of students to working groups for each subject based on aptitude rather than age, and on the whole I expect that they were remarkably effective.

When I slipped in for a closer look, the docent was talking to a group of bored-looking grade school students about the experiences of children in those days, including such things as having outdoor privies for bathrooms. Those kids couldn’t really imagine those things, I think, but I could and I found it very interesting. For instance the school also had a lean-to used to stable the ponies some of the kids would ride to school, which was especially necessary in the winter. Well, my foster-mother described riding a pony to school in the mountains around Helena, Montana, after the turn of the century and she described the bitter winter weather very vividly—clearly a stable would be necessary to keep the horses from freezing to death.


 

Returning to the present we left the museum and continued to Greenwood Street where we turned and started the next leg of the walk. The old Victorians along Greenwood were all beautifully restored in original colors and looked simply magnificent. It was particularly impressive to have several blocks of them all restored so that you could experience what the area really looked like in the late 1800s. But once again I saw a house toward the end of the street that strongly suggest a Frank Lloyd Wright influence with wide, flat roof lines and beautiful custom-made stained glass windows with an austere pattern set close together. It was just so different than the Victorians surrounding it—I couldn’t decide if it was a rose between two thorns or a thorn between two roses—I suppose it depends on which style you like the best.

The final leg of the walk took us back past the State Capitol building, but that was not as much fun as it could have been. As we approached we were put off by a small number of “Christians” staging a protest on the adjacent street corner. They were bearing really offensive signs deriding homosexuals and stating “God Hates America” and “God Destroyed the Space Shuttle”. Seeing that sign and thinking about the families of the astronauts just nauseated me. How dare they speak for God! If I was related to one of those astronauts I would have had great difficulty in not jumping in and ripping the sign to shreds and even as it was I was twitching to start an argument with them.

The next thing was we had trouble finding the entrance to the capitol—they all seemed to be closed and locked, which is a sad and completely unjustified reaction to 9-11. What those fanatics couldn’t do to us we’ve done to ourselves by taking one giant step toward a police state, all in the name of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act. It’s complicated by the fact that the signs all directed us to use the East Entrance, but none of the entrances are marked for directions and I was completely turned around after zigzagging in a loop all over Topeka. We finally had to ask someone and they directed us to the entrance, which turned out to be a completely unmarked tunnel underneath the grand staircase entrance on the east side—so if you do this walk look around underneath the stairs for the entrance!

Of course, we had to sign in and submit to the usual folderol to even gain entrance to the building, and it was such an unfriendly experience that I would not have done it if we didn’t need to get inside for the walk’s final checkpoint. But we persevered and walked under the Capitol Dome to count the flags, which was the final question. From what we briefly saw the interior is not nearly so nice as the Illinois capitol in Springfield, and we certainly did not tarry any longer than necessary before retreating back thru the tunnel into the sunshine and freedom to finish our walk. We interrupted the walk by having a quick sandwich at “Grammy’s” a local shop at the end of the route, and then finished back at the Capital Center Inn. The folks at Grammy’s reassured us that the protesters where a local Baptist minister named Fred and some of his congregation, but that the majority of folks of Topeka considered him to be an embarrassment. I was relieved to hear he didn’t represent the opinion of the folks in the area, I must say, because otherwise I’d want to give the whole area a wide berth.

Driving back to Atchison we took the time to see two of the five museums that the city boasts before returning to the camp for the evening. The Atchison, Topeka, and Sante Fe museum was right there at the start/finish point, so we studied the artifacts inside and the examples of rolling stock they had displayed outside on some adjacent tracks. The inside collection was, according to Monika, a “typical collection of small-town miscellany”. Understandably there was heavy emphasis on Amelia Earhart and the history of the Atchison, Topeka, and Sante Fe Railroad. But we were at a loss to understand why there was a huge gun collection at the rear of the museum that ranged from Revolutionary War to WWII arms of all kinds. I was similarly puzzled by the license plate collection adorning one wall just above an odd assortment of farm implements.


 

Somewhat bemused, we completed our examination of artifacts on the tracks outside where we found a nice steam engine as well as several cabooses and a couple of Pullman cars. They had an unusual modern-looking caboose painted white, which I found quite interesting. Instead of having the observation tower on top, the sides bulged out for the train observation windows and the inside looked quite clean. With those nice bay windows I could just imagine sitting in it and rolling across the great American countryside with a panoramic view flowing by. What a way to see the country! The only better way I can imagine is to float across the countryside like thistledown in a blimp. That way you could drift as slowly as you wanted to over the landscape and easily touch down whenever you find something interesting enough to take a closer look. It would be something like a modern day version of Huck Finn’s rafting on the Mississippi except you could steer it wherever you wanted to go. But that’s a story for the future.

Since we are on a Lewis and Clark trek, we were happy to walk across a bridge over the “4th of July Creek” which runs right beside the museum down to the Missouri River. Clark had named it thus because the Corps of Discovery camped near it on the eve of the 4th of July and passed it on the 4th of July. In the evening they had the first 4th of July celebration west of the Mississippi River just upstream near a creek which they named Independence Creek. Both creeks maintain these names to the current day.

Then we hopped back into the truck to drive up the bluff to Amelia Earhart’s birthplace and childhood home. We found this to be a nice, upper-class home of the Victorian era with a very nice and complete set of period furnishings, including some that are the original pieces from Earhart’s childhood.

Altho I still don’t feel like I have all the pieces of the puzzle, Earhart’s childhood presaged some of her adult achievements. She was an athletic tomboy and always interested in masculine things, and in this she had encouragement from her mother, the first woman to climb Pike’s Peak, and her father, who indulged her by sending her footballs and even a 22 rifle to learn to shoot with! She had a private, college-preparatory education, but there was relatively little about her college years in the museum so that is one gap. She used part of her inheritance from her grandparents to buy her first airplane after taking flying lessons in 1921, but later sold it to buy a car. All in all, a very interesting and complex person, I think.


 

Having had a very interesting day, we finally got back to the campground in time to do laundry, which took forever, bring the journal up to date, and relax a bit before turning in for the night.

Copyright 2004 by Robert W. Holt and Elsbeth Monika Holt
Prolog Map Epilog

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