Dodging Dodge City

If you ever have the opportunity to drive cross-country through Kansas, don’t. Really. When you do, you realize just why God decided to continuously attack it with tornadoes. He’s desperately trying to chase people away so he can finally install that scenic vacation lake he’s always wanted. It’s a flat wasteland of grass and… flatness, kind of like North Dakota, only without the interesting stuff. We decided to go though the endless state only because we wanted to see Dodge City, which was wholly not worth the drive to get there.

Dodge City is full of mythology of the West turned into poor, rundown, city with little charm and even less concern for historical preservation. The old part of town, half reconstructed half repaired, looks tired, and the historical re-enactors looked bored. It could be because it was the end of the season, summer winding down to close and kids going back to school. All those buried on the infamous Boot Hill have been moved elsewhere, and all that remains of the old cowboy tales is a statue to commemorate them. Stores on the main drag outside of the enclosed and touristy Old Town were all closed and dusty with neglect, and the only restaurants note were the chains that haunted the highway exits just on the outskirts of town. The rest of the town was covered in oil and food processing plants, coloring the once brilliantly devious and ill-reputed town a dull and Dustbowl-hew of industrial tan. I found it sad that a town with so much history and fairy-tale, so much adventure and trouble-making, a town whose name everybody in America knows, has fallen to such low levels. It has the potential to be so… cool. Gunfights and cowboys and Indians and murder and intrigue and poker and dust and prostitution and glory of the Old West. Left to rot.

We also plugged through until Colorado, the entire eastern half of which, quite honestly, should be called “Kansas.” When you think of Colorado, you just don’t think of miles upon miles of flat grass without even so much as a barn for company. You think of high mountains and snow and skiing. Blah. It doesn’t bode well for Ft. Collins.