Long, quiet transit and stormy greetings

Staring out at Sunday morning, sedatives to come

Sunday morning switched between bright sun and light rain, the latter never sticking around long. Whether we would arrive on Sunday never seemed in doubt.

This time we gave Percy two pills to dope him up. I placed a $2 shark towel in the carrier, fulling expecting it would be ruined and thrown in the garbage by the time we hit Kansas City. After I loaded some wares into my car, I returned to see Crites looking somewhat grim.

“You’re not going to like what I found,” he said. He presented a pill that a certain cat spit into the corner, and the non-impact of the pill deliver on Saturday suddenly made sense. There would be a spit-out pill somewhere in the Crosswood house. We took the pill, restrained him again and forced him to swallow. There was no escape this time. He clawed us both, and fought us at every instance until the pills were swallowed and he was again in his carrier.

We breezed through the rest of Missouri in light Sunday traffic. I never looked away from the road as we passed Columbia and its hungover graduates. The mighty Missouri River was swollen from rain and snow melt delivered from Montana and other states upstream.

Kansas City arrived soon enough, and I remember even less about the metropolis. Crites would ask me later if I spotted the Kansas City Star building or Arrowhead Stadium, and I have no memory of either.

After a short stint on the Kansas Turnpike, we cruised through Topeka, the lone state capital on the move. The capitol dome rose above the rest of the skyline and aside from the grain silos and other farm structures, it would be the tallest spire we would see for the rest of the trip.

Kansas gets a bad rap – that’s the price of covering huge stretches of the Great Plains. Look at the a map – at some point, the Plains are unavoidable on any westward trip. The Flint Hills were a pleasant drive. Rocks speckled the rumpled, verdant hills past Topeka. The strangeness of the landscape felt like it was snatched from a dream. This was the third time I had driven this route (the second in daylight) and maybe it influenced my dreams about traveling unusual geographies.

When the hills petered out came the great farm, the massive stretch of flat agriculture that spanned the rest of the state. This was the country of The Big First, the Kansas nickname for the 1st Congressional District that covered the state’s rural western half. Bob Dole, Pat Roberts and Jerry Moran all held the conservative district before winning election to the U.S. Senate.

The cities that straddle the interstate – Manhattan, Salina and Hays – were blips on the journey west. None claimed more than a few exits before the farmland resumed. We crossed Fort Riley, a name I knew well. My father’s former best friend – long story - was stationed during Vietnam and my dad had driven to visit him.

For once, the cat up quietly. Not a noise for a few hundred miles.

Near Russell, hometown of Bob Dole, the need to refuel grew urgent. Within reach of a gas station, we found ourselves waiting for the parade of several hundred flag-bearing motorcyclists heading east. We loaded up with drinks and snacks for the last push across Kansas. The last 200 miles of Kansas could not pass fast enough. We were not racing daylight, just ourselves and a doped-up cat, a time-bomb of bodily functions. He roused irregularly to let me scratch his head before curling up again.

The only real separation between Kansas and Colorado is a change in signs, a switch to pines and a major drop in road quality. We decided to gas up once more before the turn for Colorado Springs. It was close, the skies turned cloudy but the loss of an hour in Mountain Time made a sunset arrival possible.

As we finished refueling, a woman with a child approached and said she was out of gas. If a person in Nashville approaches you at a gas pump, it is 100 percent probability that they will ask you for money.

In this case, the store manager had been called in on her off-day to bag up pumps with her son. Their gas delivery didn’t arrive, and we siphoned off the last drops before they shut down all pumps. Before we departed, I apologized to her, which she accepted, saying she got called in when she was doing yard work because of the missed gas delivery.

The road was rough through some sporadic rain and construction. At Limon, we left the interstate. Both Denver and Colorado Springs lie about 70 miles from Limon, so the interstate would just double our remaining travel time. So we hit the two-lane road and charged toward the finish line. From 50 miles away, we could spy Pikes Peak, its upper climes hidden by a knife of cloud.

This two-lane road felt like the path people took to Colorado Springs before the highway system erupted, when the little towns on the route could count on passersby. In 2019, the towns straddling the road were at best hanging on. There were bars, fewer restaurants and an occasional motor court.

Entering from the east, we didn't see much of Colorado Springs. The keys were under the mat, and I walked Percy into his second empty apartment in two days. Free of his cage, he stepped into the litter box 13 hours later, and stepped out to explore his new home. Somehow the shark towel survived the trip. I dropped Crites at his hotel. I spread some pillows and blankets on the living room floor. In minutes the cat curled as close to me as possible, then slept till deep morning.

Before dawn, I ran to Safeway for some basics – wet cat food – and drove around the city awaiting word from my friend. As I checked the truck, my duplex neighbor came out and introduced herself.

No sooner did I gather Crites and we finished breakfast than the rain started. We took breaks from unloading, reassembled the couches in the living room where they would hopefully stay for a few years. The rain came and went, but by early afternoon we emptied the truck. Lugging those last boxes out felt like a victory, even if nothing was settled in the new house.

We stepped out for a bite to eat at Oscar Blues Brewery, Later the pouring rain turned to graupel, tiny pellets of ice, then rain again, then giant, wet flakes of snow began to fall, a snow we never liked to see in northeast Ohio. Wet, heavy snow bent roof beams and crushed trees, even requiring my parents to get a new roof one year.

A good feeling

A knock on the door. There stood a man with dreadlocks who told me he lived next door. “I think a big branch just hit your car,” he said. I bolted outside and the branch sat across the hood. When Crites surveyed the car, he noticed the driver’s side mirror on the street, mostly covered by snow. The branched knocked it off so cleanly I missed its absence. I was taking no more chances with branches in this storm. I drove the car 100 feet down the street to a clear spot. In the morning, my car was fine.

If I had had left it in the same spot on the street, an even larger branched would have fallen on it, possibly causing deeper damage. My duplex neighbor’s car was blocked by a tree in her yard that split, the other half leaning on the roof of my new home. Tree branches everywhere leaned low under the snow weight.

Getting rid of a moving truck never felt so good. I craved it, even as I spotted items that would fit my décor in the antique gallery that also hosted the van rentals. The snow was already melting and I learned to drive without my mirror. Branches were down across the entire area.

Free of snow, the trees sprang back into position. We unpacked a few rooms, and I felt a little more back in position after five days of packing, transit and snow.

Front branch, where my car was the previous night