"Who Goes Home?"
A journey south from Kansas City toward Wichita is not the sort of trip most
travelers circle on a map. It doesn’t boast dramatic peaks or ocean views. But
for someone who once called Wichita home—someone whose parents have already
stepped into the brighter country beyond—this drive becomes something far more
intimate. It’s a return to the land that shaped you, a quiet pilgrimage through
memory, belonging, and the kind of beauty that doesn’t shout for attention but
waits patiently to be noticed.
Not long after
leaving the city’s edges, the highway begins to slip into the Flint Hills— the
largest intact tallgrass-prairie ecosystems left on earth. These hills are
ancient, older than the Rockies, their limestone and flint layers formed when
this region was a shallow inland sea. Today they roll out in long, breathing
waves, covered in grasses so deep‑rooted they’ve resisted the plow for
centuries. Entering them feels like crossing a threshold into a gentler, older
world.
In the late afternoon, when the sun leans
low, the tallgrass catches fire—not with heat, but with a golden radiance that
seems to rise from within the land itself. Scattered across those glowing
slopes are the cattle: small black silhouettes, like ink‑dots brushed onto a
vast amber canvas. Some graze with slow, deliberate contentment; others stand
motionless, broad backs soaking in the last warmth of the day. Their presence
gives the hills a sense of scale and serenity, as if the land itself were at peace
and inviting you to share in its rest.
What you begin to notice—almost with surprise—is what isn’t
there. For nearly forty miles, there are no exits, no billboards, no fast‑food
signs clawing at your attention. Only the occasional enclosed service area
interrupts the long, uninterrupted ribbon of highway. The absence of commercial
clutter feels like a kind of mercy. The road becomes a place where the mind can
finally unclench, where the traveler is free to look outward and inward without
distraction.
Only a few human marks remain: a solitary cell tower rising like a thin
sentinel on a distant ridge; a line of high‑voltage wires striding across the
horizon, their steel frames stark against the softening sky. They don’t intrude
so much as remind you that civilization lies somewhere beyond these hills,
needing its lifelines. But here, in this moment, they seem almost shy—hesitant
to disturb the holiness of the evening.
As the sun sinks fully, the sky becomes a vast dome of rose, violet, and
fading gold. The cattle settle into darker shapes against the glowing earth.
The hills breathe in shadow. And the whole scene feels touched by something
otherworldly, the way C.S. Lewis described the green plains of the Real Country
- hinting that this world, too, is only a shadow of a truer beauty.
Driving south toward Wichita—toward the place
where your story began and where your parents stepped into eternity—the road
feels less like a route and more like a gentle invitation. A reminder that the
land you came from still whispers of home, and that every sunset over the Flint
Hills is a small echo of the greater dawn awaiting beyond this life.
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