Cassoday, KS

July 10, Cassoday, KS

As you can see Cassoday’s 131 citizens are proud of their place in the world. They have a lovely, well-groomed, tree-filled roadside park in which I am camping this evening. I’m here with John Harris who I met in the Hutchinson church hostel. He’s from CA and is going to Yorktown before riding to DC to catch a train home. We leap-frogged each other throughout the day before riding together the last 38 miles.

Not much here but the lady at the gas station/general store made a very good supreme pizza on order from us. While gobbling it down in came Chris, a stick-thin rider from CA who has been chasing John for weeks. “Oh, you’re the one I heard has been chasing me,” said John. While they chatted the two Ohio guys who stayed at the church with us rolled in. The trio decided to try for Eureka, 30+ miles away, before nightfall. John and I headed here to the park.

About 10 miles east of Hutchinson this morning I stopped to help a man untangle a barbed wire fence. Max Liebe said someone had hydroplaned in the recent rains, plowed through his fence and flipped over. The driver wasn’t seriously hurt but Liebe’s fence was destroyed. It fenced his airport. He has built a runway and a hanger for his three airplanes.

He recently retired as manager of production at Hutchinson Salt Company. Hutchinson, which calls itself Salt City, sits atop huge deposits of salt. The mine goes down more than 640 feet. More than 2,000 tons of salt are mined every day to be used for deicing roads, softening water, industrial applications and for cattle feed. According to Liebe putting salt into cattle feed keeps the animals from gorging themselves when they’re in the feed yards.

This is the land of geometry—lines, angles, points, surfaces. Razor-straight roads are intersected every mile at right angles by lesser roads demarcating “sections”, or 640 acres. The plain is flat, the surface uniformly even. To look down upon this land from above is to see a massive sheet of grid paper. Every line intersects at 90 degrees. Nature has no hold here; man has made his very un-natural mark. It is monotony.