A Brave Blog

WICHITA, Kan. – In my last post, I rather ridiculously admonished a 91-year-old woman for straying from her mother's story in her self-published biography. That might have been slightly tasteless. Today, perhaps as a form of redemption, I wanted to highlight a piece of a writing that's completely serious and incredibly brave.

Tamara is a local woman, probably in her 30s. She's been through some hard times. A decade ago, she was addicted to cocaine for a period. But she cleaned herself up, and married a by-all-accounts decent man. They live in Wichita.

A few months ago, Tamara started throwing up frequently. She couldn't keep anything down, including her anxiety and depression medications. She become jittery, nauseous. Her husband took her to a doctor, who referred her to a specialist. She saw doctor after doctor. Tamara wasn't getting any better. By July, she was having trouble breathing. She was admitted to the hospital.

Doctors continued to examine her. For a while, they thought it was a case of pneumonia. But she kept getting worse. She needed a breathing tube, and later a feeding tube. She wasn't responding well, so she had to be restrained and sedated. Then, the doctors came back with the final diagnosis: advanced cancer. Her doctors believe she has months to live.

I've never met Tamara. I know what I do about her because of her husband, Josh. He's transformed his blog, "I Got The Poison", (a line from a Jason Mraz song) into a log of Tamara's illness. He's been incredibly faithful in updating it. His entries have only gotten more frequent in the last couple weeks, as Tamara has been in and out of the hospital.

I don't want to say much more about it. The journal is online, and deserves to be read. My interpretations of it, what it means, why it might exist and how it helps are all beyond the point. What matters is that this journal exists and makes for sobering reading on the often-frivolous Information Superhighway.

Go here to read it.

Propelled

WICHITA, Kan. – Long before the Chunnel made it simple, Ken Paxton went to Europe daily.

His method of transport: the B-17 bomber, a medium range plane from World War II. He navigated, making sure the plane reached one of the 2,000 daily targets the Allies bombed in 1944.

The planes ran out of North Albion, which quite close to London. I made my way through there during a visit last winter, on the way up to Oxford.

Today it's uninteresting suburbs, but during the war it was a valuable airfield. Paxton was one of thousands of Americans who operated out of the site.

I met him at another air base, one that's much less strategically important. Jabara Municipal Airport isn't even Wichita's most important airport: that would be the wonderfully named Mid-Continent International Airport. There's also a major air force base here, McConnell. No, Jabara mostly is a place for rich corporate types to launch their private jets without having to deal with McConnell security.

This weekend, though, it's hosting the Wichita Flight Festival.

I interviewed young families, children, and people with lawn chairs. The Melting Pot of America was on display. I attempted talk with three Asian people who couldn't speak conversational English. (This is an anomaly. Most of the time Asian-Americans, and Latinos and other immigrants here have been excellent interview subjects.)

Mr. Paxton thought the festival was pretty damn good, he said as he watched three plane fly upside down in formations from the shadow of an airplane hangar. Did he ever do stunts like that in the B-17?

"No, no, no," he said, chuckling. He was in the business of straight-up flying.

The Sound of a Gun

WICHITA, Kan. -- Until 24 hours ago, I'd never heard the sound of bullets leaving a handgun.

I've lived a pretty sheltered life. The places I've lived, Boston, Albany and Hong Kong, primarily, are all pretty safe, especially in the areas of town that I was living in. Wichita, as I've written before, is different.

Yesterday I had a wonderful evening out in Wichita. There's a local bar that screens old movies outside in the summer, so some colleagues and I went over after work for a couple drinks and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. I returned slightly after midnight, and was typing a quick entry for this blog when I heard a loud bang. It came from the north, but sounded really close and echoed. Closely behind that first noise were four more.

I hit the deck - or at least jumped off the couch and onto the floor. My apartment's small, and there's precious few places to hide. I wished for a hidden annex and/or a root cellar. But I had none. I wasn't sure what the noises were, but it didn't sound terribly good.

I grabbed my handy book -- still reading Paul Theroux, by the way -- and spent 20 minutes on the floor, nervously reading about Welsh trains. Then I decided that since I was due at work before 7 the next day, it was time to go to bed. After all that excitement, I fell asleep quite easily, until ---

KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK

My first thought was that I'd overslept, and that my editors were banging on the door for me to come into work. (I'd just woken up, go with me.) I stumbled over to the door, my now rather long hair standing several inches into the air and squinting without my glasses. The man introduced himself as a Wichita police officer, I was far too tired to remember his name.

He wanted to know if I saw anything that evening.

"I heard some shots, just after midnight. But I didn't see anything.'

He didn't say anything.

"By the way officer, what happened?"

Turns out there was a drive-by right across the way, on a little street that runs past my side of the apartment complex. The home was literally across the street, not more than 60 feet from where I'm typing this now. There were flashing lights when I peered out the door. The officer said no one was hurt, took my name and phone number for possible follow up, and woke up Oscar next door.

One of the blessings and curses of being the sometime police reporter here at the Eagle is that I get to find out exactly what happened in incidents like these. The story as it stands now is that there were two shootings last night, both gang-related. The second shooting -- the one by my house -- was actually a walk-by shooting, and no one was hurt, thankfully. But teenagers are in the hospital for a related incident uptown.

I know this stuff happens in Albany and Boston and Hong Kong, but I managed to live 21 years without seeing it. Now I've been here two months and been involved with two violent crimes.

So, do I feel safe and sound in the Heartland? Not likely.

Dirty Reading

WICHITA, Kan. - A journalist does not eat well. The long hours, constant deadlines and high levels of stress mean that I subsist these days on high amounts of sugar and caffeine. It's not surprising that I spend a fair amount of time in the office bathroom.

For whatever reason, I'm usually in the bathroom mid-morning. I close the door to one of the two stalls, and take a seat. This is one of the few times during the day when I have five to seven minutes to kill without a chance of a phone ringing, an editor wanting a quick meeting or being called out to a chemical spill. I can just "be."

I'm a Type-A personality, though, so I need to do something. When I look around the stall most days, I see the same thing: a section of the newspaper. Invetiably, I pick up this folded piece of paper to see one thing: it's the sports section. I hate the sports section. Why does it always have to be in the bathroom? Do people really not have time in during the course of their day to check the box scores or see about the latest trades? Why is this considered necessary reading?

The sports section in the men's bathroom is such a cliché. It was the same at my last two papers. Sports is ever-present, although in Scranton at least the business section would pop up from time to time. Here it's 99 percent sports. Why are men enforcing gender stereotypes? If I could check the women's bathroom, would I find teh features section? Or perhaps most women secretly admire sports, but hide their interest by reading in the bathroom?

I've been fighting this trend by bringing my own reading material into the bathroom, the obituaries. Mid bowel movement is the only time I can remotely justify reading these things. They're not going to produce any article ideas, and I'm sure not going to get any interesting stories to tell my friends. But I find it nice to sit back and look at lives well lived and ponder my own mortality for a few minutes each day.

That's what I call taking care of business.

A Walk Around the Block

WICHITA, Kan. - I can't walk anywhere here in Kansas.

This evening, after a large meal of pasta, sausage and garlic bread, I felt like taking a stroll. "Helping digestion," is what my parents would call it. Many evenings they take a two or three mile jaunt after the dinner; I wanted to do the same tonight.

But where to go? To the north of my small apartment complex is a gold-plated car wash and a string of abandoned lots. Half a mile that way there's a train crossing, and this time of night there's a chance of a 20-minute train will be creeping by.

To the east is a Sonic, a drive-in-but-not-thru restaurant, and a number of homes with weeds coming through the driveway and scary teenaged men sitting in the driveways.

To the west is an industrial park. The business I'm most familiar with there is the gun range, where I went for an article a couple weeks ago. I'm not sure if I'd want to run into the clientèle there off-work.

The south of my apartment is the most strange, because it's the site of a large, mostly empty strip mall. The highlight there is Micol & Janets, a local bar where Micol leads the house band and six to eight pickup trucks are parked outside every night after 11 p.m. There's also a strip club.

You might gather from this last paragraph that I don't live in a particularly good part of Wichita. It's scruffy, working class and there's a fair amount of crime. People on the street next door were setting off fireworks well into August. There's been a shooting, a couple stabbings and robberies just in the time that I've been here. It's not necessarily the place where I want to be loafing around after dark.

Just the act of walking seems to be a slap in the face here in Wichita. The districts are spread out, with very little public transportation linking them. There isn't a bus on Sundays. The 11th Commandment here might as well be "Thou shalt own a car, so thou can drive thouself to church."

One incident confirms this city's love of cars more than anything else. A couple weeks ago, I was out with some friends on a Saturday night at a bar. I wasn't driving, so I had a few beers. We came home around 2 a.m., courtesy of a friend who volunteered to be the designated driver.

Safely inside my apartment, I decided that I couldn't sleep quite yet. I wanted a snack, so I headed across the street to QuikTrip. I went on foot, not only because the nearest location is across the street, but because I was a little tipsy. I bought a bag of Doritos, and was just finishing crossing the street back to my house when a couple of men in a large SUV came roaring down the other side of the road.

"Get a car, you faggot!" they screamed, and then headed on down the street.

Tonight I'm driving to the gym, where I'll walk on the treadmill.

Will You Buy Me a Drink, Carry Nation?

MEDICINE LODGE, Kan. -- From the top of the grassy mound, I could see no evidence of man. No power lines, no farms, no cities or even a cell phone tower. Just hundreds, maybe thousands of identical looking hills, rising a couple hundred feet off the prairie floor, a few low scrub trees and a threatening sky, sealing off Big Sky country.

I felt alone, more definitively in the wilderness than I thought possible in Kansas. It was like Wales, only more gloomy and more forlorn.

My two companions were Ryan, with a day off from his ambulance job, and Jean, in town from Quebec City. The first Quebecois to come to these hills? Maybe.

Why we climbed this hill, and not the dozens of others we passed since leaving Medicine Lodge, I'm not sure. But it wasn't until we abandoned my Toyota Corolla and hiked up the mound that I realized how far from civilization we had come. I wondered if we'd ventured too far. I suggested we head back to the car. We had no map, and it was already 5 p.m. On this gloomy day, that meant not more than two hours until nightfall.

Back at the car, I looked at the gas gauge. One-quarter full. I wondered if we'd be spending the night in these hills.

On a map, Medicine Lodge is about 75 miles from Wichita, an hour's drive. In practice it takes well over two, because of the paucity of roads in rural Kansas. We wound south, then west, then south and finally back to the east before reaching Medicine Lodge.

I wanted to see Indians. Medicine Lodge is where in 1867 20,000 Indians from five tribes signed a major peace treaty with the government, an important part of our nation's history of unequal agreements with these peoples. Coming into town, several large billboards advertised triannual campout where people would reenact the signing. Unfortunately it wasn't for a few more weeks.

The only pioneer relics in town were a few rusted out cart frames, parked next to the town's little league field.

We needed an activity for the day, so we decided to walk up and down the town's mostly vacant Main Street for ideas. At the grocery store - where the Wichita Eagle is sold, proudly displaying the lead article written by me - an older man suggested a drive in the hills. At a nearby gas station, a woman suggested the "Scenic Drive," a road that left the main highway just outside of town.

"People seem to like it," she said, and shrugged.

The road began by ascending a small hill, using wide curves to avoid steep inclines. The view slowly came into focus. We weren't terribly far from Wichita, but it seemed as if we'd crossed some invisible border that separated the High Plains from the West. The soil was now rust colored, and the grasses were spiky and short, not reaching three inches off the ground. I'd last seen this scenery in Colorado.

After six miles, the scenic road turned to dirt. On the way to Medicine Lodge we ran into a downpour so heavy that I had to pull over and wait for 15 minutes until it moderated. Water pools were scattered over the road. I have been on wet dirt roads before here in Kansas, with messy results. Egged on by my passengers, I turned on the road anyway.

The journey was wild. Wheels gripped the road one second and then slid off at a 45 degree angle the next. I had to keep the car in second gear, furiously pressing the gas petal and pulling the steering wheel to keep the car on the road.

The road went on and on and on. Ten miles became 20, then 30 and 40. We passed a couple cattle fences, but saw no one. There were no car tracks, and the route wasn't on the Kansas AAA map I had in the car.

We drove through the twilight. Right before I needed to turn on my lights, we reached the highway. I was thrilled. I wrote my name in Chinese on the inch-thick mud on the side of the car, took pictures and cleaned off my sandals. We had returned.

Note: This is the second of three entries on my recent travels outside of Wichita. They'll be posted between current musings on Kansas' largest city.

Little Harajuku

WICHITA, Kan. -- I scanned the crowd at the dimly-lit Best Western Wichita North auditorium. I saw one fat Mario, complete with an "M" hat, two Chun Lis from the Street Fighter series and three Soras from the Kingdom Hearts games. And there were 100 other people in costume, representing animes that I had never of.

I wanted to ask the attendees of the second annual Wichita Anime Festival one question: "What the fuck are you doing here?" But since that wouldn't be terribly tactful, I settled on this: "How did you make your costume?" The responses were the same.

"I've been waiting a long time for this," a 21-year-old man told me. He had on a costume that resembled the Disney representation of Robin Hood. He was actually Link, the hero of the Zelda games. He wore rubber boots covered with layers of white duct tape, a green cape made out of a sheet, held together with political buttons painted yellow.

How long had he been waiting? "Since January, when I got my ticket," he said.

To get to Wichita, he drove four hours with a friend from western Kansas. This event, attended by nearly 2,000 people, is the largest anime festival in the state.

"I've got about 60 hours in this costume," a 19-year-old art student from Kansas City said. She was a character from Kingdom Hearts II, a collaboration between anime video makers and Disney. Her costume was based on a character from Tron, the pioneering computer animation movie from 25 years ago. She used black car foam to make the curved costume, and took four coats of paint to put blue strips across the sides. Her keyblade -- a six-foot key that is used in the game like a sword -- apparently was wood, PVC piping and a lot of time with a saw.

This was her fourth festival, making her a veteran. At the festival people kept interrupting our interview so they could take snapshots. I've loved this line -- also in my story -- most of all:

"Sorry -- I'm popular."

Most of the attendees were in high school, dropped off by their parents and wearing costumes that their parents probably made.

What struck me most about the festival was that it wasn't about Japan at all. Or even about Japanese animation. What really drew these children together was a chance to dress up in crazy costumes and act out for a couple days. High school, I'm sure I don't need to remind anyone, can be a tough time, where being cute, popular and armed with the J. Crew spring collection is mandatory. Here, mostly smart and talented children get to be the ones on display for a change, rather than having to do the bidding of the cool kids.

"Anime conventions are the sci-fi conventions of this millennium," the organizer told me. I have to agree. If the art in display was noh theater or Amazonian rainmakers, I doubt the kids would have come out. But this is a group with fans all around the country, fans that want to meet each other and know they're not alone. I see this at indie concerts I attend. (You like Prefuse 73? No way! I do too!) Anime's the subgroup for this generation.

Lesson learned, I left the Anime Festival before the odor from many rounds of Dance, Dance Revolution and poorly ventilated plastic costumes became too much to bear.

On Police

WICHITA, Kan. - A policeman is one of those professions, like being an astronaut or a race car driver, that fascinates children of a certain age. Ask a few 6-year-olds what she or he wants to be when he grows up, and an assortment of professions that deal with high-tech gadgets, frequent danger or swashbuckling will come up.

I don't know any astronauts or race car drivers. But I do know cops. I spent the better part of 40 hours this week with them, stumbling my way through a week on the police beat.I covered a runaway truck, a domestic violence beating, pickle juice damaging a car and a shooting. It was a pretty normal week.

Police talk to media more than any other profession, even politicians. Therefore police departments need to have specific protocols for handling the media. Here in Wichita, that means a daily briefing, held in the monolithic police headquarters downtown. From a dull conference room, a captain reads the most important items off of a dispatch known as the Interwatch. He takes questions and then repeats the most important cases for radio and television cameras. As he's talking, sheets are passed around with arrests and reported incidents in the past 24 hours. Reporters furiously scribble down cases that they believe are interesting, the vast majority of which will prove irrelevant later in the day.

The briefings are generally light. One captain makes self-deprecating jokes about his lack of hair, another allows himself to be taunted for not wearing a bulletproof vest.

One heavily pregnant reporter gives daily updates on her hopefully-soon-to-be born child. A few minutes before a 3 p.m. briefing today, she cracked this joke:

"The date is the 31st, but my husband thinks it's coming today," she said. "At three o'clock."

The chief of police smiled, and then read from a statement about how one of his officers beat up his own mother while trying to destroy his apartment.

That's the thing that bugs me. No matter how many awkward jokes they make or times they allow me to peek a couple feet over the line, I can't be convinced that I should let my guard down around cops. These are people who control one of the really "cool" gadgets that children like: the law.

Wednesday I was interviewing a witness to that runaway truck. The poor man watched as a 15-foot rig slammed into the side of his sister-in-law's shiny red Mustang. I left, but forgot to ask him the rather obvious question of whether the back of the cab was attached. I stopped the car across from the Mustang on the narrow street.

Then an officer came up from a nearby van.

"What do you think you're doing?" he said to me. "You stay like that and I'm going to have to write you a ticket."

My wheels were facing the wrong direction, he said. This offense carries a $120 fine -- three days pay to a minimum wage worker.

He didn't write me a ticket, but he could have. There are enough laws that cops can almost always find a reason to charge people. I have to wonder what someone did to get a charge of "disturbing the peace" or "asking for money." Surely dozens of people do these things each day without getting arrested. Who does is solely up to the man in the uniform. He may come armed with a few jokes these days, and make cameos in elementary school classrooms, but he can still put me away for a long, long time.

The Price of Gas

WICHITA, Kansas - Nothing gets my mother going like a change at the gas pump.

"Did you see what the price is today?" she says, beginning a typical rant. "Every time I turn around they knocked it up again. Third time this week. $2.14. It's ridiculous."

I find this strange coming from someone who lived through the great gas shocks of 1973 and 1979 (when gas was more expensive than now and cars much less efficient), but she's not the only one. We dutifully write stories as the prices creeps up here in Wichita, interviewing outraged customers and unapologetic gas station attendants ("we're barely getting by," they all say). In the past I would just let these conversations roll on, waiting until they inevitably shifted to the weather before saying anything. A couple things have caused me to shift my track.

*Wichita's Strange Prices Gas doesn't jump here three times a week, but when it does the rises are quite large. They usually happen late in the week, too. Last Friday it jumped from $2.75 to $2.99. This Friday the jump was from $2.91 to $3.09. After the jumps, inevitably it begins to float down again. It might be a week or two, but than it shoots up again. It's hard to predict. Like Russian Roulette, you never know if spinning another round will mean you get stuck with the gas bill. Graph the price at wichitagasprices.com over three months if you want to see what I mean.

*Driving More I have to go places for work, to chemical spills, county fairs and everywhere in between. So the pump is on my mind more than when I lived in Boston. For three years, I didn't have a car. This year I did, although I spent around $7 a week on gas, even when it was over $2 a gallon. It's a large portion of my income now, so it's obvious that I think about it more.

*Sweeps I love a guessing game. And talking with people about how the Israel-Lebanon Crisis, refineries in Texas and falling demand for cereal products will affect the gas prices is great fun. The truth is, no one really knows why the price jumps from week to week as it does. This micro plus macro analysis is almost impossible to figure out, especially from someone who slept through the only economics course he took in his life. But who cares? I love to bullshit.

So now, during my weekly phone call home, I often find myself looking forward to the time when gas comes up in the conversation. I guess I truly am turning into my parents.