With rain and snow in the Saturday morning forecast, I decided to come out to central Kansas Friday night to avoid the possibility of hazardous driving conditions. Of course, that meant driving at night on an unseasonably warm - and awfully windy - night, which offers its own challenges....chief among them deer stirred by the warm weather and semi-trailer trucks wobbling in the howling winds.
I prayed a rosary as I started out, something I like to do for any trip of consequence. It calms me and helps clear my mind for the drive. The last red wisps of sunset were glazing the western horizon as I left Wichita, and before long I was reminded how dark it gets in the rural areas at night - especially, it seems, on winter nights.
There are no bright city lights to pierce the darkness, only pinholes offered by distant stars. My preferred route to the family farm steers me clear of Hutchinson so that I can save time. At night, Hutchinson glows like a dome in the distance, almost like a hovering spaceship of civilization in the cosmos.
I couldn't help but think of outer space as I drove. Wisps of fog clung to the ground in strands, and they'd rush past my car like swooping ghosts. With little but the nighttime sky in front of me I imagined being the captain of a federation starship penetrating the outer bands of a distant galaxy as I pushed west on Trail West Road in Reno County.
It was only a little after 7 p.m. when I reached Partridge, a speck on the map just south of U.S. 50, but already the town was bedding down for the night. Few lights flickered in the town, and I imagined its residents settling in on a quiet Friday night, still basking in the holiday spirit. I found myself reflecting on how every home in a small town seems more important to its neighbors than in a big city, if for no other reason than because there are so few of them.
I expected more traffic on U.S. 50 between Hutchinson and Stafford, but there wasn't much. Noting the signs reporting that Macksville and St. John were coming up, my thoughts turned to Tim Buckman, the law enforcement officer who was killed on this very road not too many miles west of where I was at the moment. He was driving to Macksville on the night of May 4, 2007, to warn them of an approaching tornado when he was blindsided by a second tornado and blown into a field on the north side of the highway.
Ever since then, I haven't been able to make the turn from U.S. 50 onto U.S. 281 without reflecting on how close tornadoes came to decimating the nearby towns of Belpre, Macksville and St. John on the same night an EF5 obliterated Greensburg. Those towns would have been hit late at night, when folks were bedding down for the night - a mood not unlike what I was sensing on my drive tonight.
My thoughts then turned to our family Christmas gathering on Saturday. Several - though not all, by any means - of us will be there...though it's still hard to believe Dad won't be part of it. This will be our third Christmas without him, but I'm still amazed at how fresh losing him feels at times. I grasp completely what those who have suffered similar losses told me for years: You never really get over it, you just figure out how to deal with it over time.
Holidays are natural milestone moments, when families and loved ones gather to celebrate. Inevitably, such times reveal how lives are changing: New additions through marriages and births, aching losses through such events as deaths, divorces or break-ups. It's easy - perhaps human nature - to focus more on the losses or what we don't have that we'd like to. But I know that's not what the child born in Bethlehem would want us to do.
The last few miles into Larned went quickly, perhaps because I found myself watching keenly for any deer that might dart in front of me. Thankfully, the hotel hadn't mangled my reservation, and now it's me who's settling in for the night.
Morning will be here soon enough.
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