The Great Texas Road Trip Thank-You Tour: 12. Garden City, Kansas--Riots in the Trees and Pink Styrofoam Pool Noodle Fungus

Travel Date:  September 9, 2018

Perhaps the reason I struggle so much with writing fiction is that I'm not that much into people.  Don't get me wrong, like most everyone, I'm a social creature.  I lived alone for a few years and it sucked.  My family means everything to me as well as do a few good friends I've made over the years.  However, the moments I fully live are the moments I'm alone with no one around except my creator.  Silent places.  Still places.  Very unsocial places.  Right now, writing this, I know it's probably 18 degrees outside the black window, a gritty, granular low-moisture snow spread across the field.  It's silent.  There may be a few stars poking through breaks in the clouds.  If there are, they are piercingly clear.  Knowing the moon-like landscape is outside my window comforts me.  A party, on the other hand, leaves me feeling like the last fall leaf of a cottonwood tree dangling over a turbulent river.  I cling desperately to anything not human--Oh look at the plaid on that tablecloth.  Lovely, Oh so lovely!  It's not that I don't like people; it's just that I don't like how they make me feel.  They always want to converse.  It would be so much easier if we could just stand and stare into each others eyes with kindness.  Now, that I can do.  I get along great with my dogs, and even the deer out in the field.  That is all they expect--to look into your eyes and see you mean them no harm.  I mean no harm, and nature knows it.  I'm not so sure about people.  I'm awkward, and I make them feel awkward, which just makes me feel even more awkward.  But people are always part of the narrative.  So, here we go, a night with Marci's sister and her family, wonderful people, who, none-the-less make me aware that I'm shy.

The sun was getting somewhat low when we approached Garden City.  We were suppose to arrive around 4:00, but it was more like 7:00.  We kept that up the rest of the trip--always 2-3 hours behind schedule.  When we got out the car on a tree-lined suburban street, I was greeted with the familiar riot of cicadas that I know well from living in Dallas, but Marci, on the other hand, stepped out onto another planet.

"What's that noise!" she demanded.  She did not like it.

We walked up to the door and knocked, hoping we had the right house.  The porch had a Mexican-styled tile that I liked--shiny blue, yellow and white if I remember right.  About to greet people, I was seeking security in the visual details.  Charlsea answered and followed us out to the car to help us bring stuff in.  Along the way she showed us a weird pink Styrofoam looking thing that appeared to be growing out of her lawn. She said it was a weird mushroom, but of course, we didn't believe that.  It was spongy and pink and had the consistency of one of those Styrofoam pool noodles you use to keep afloat.  However, she insisted that it was indeed an organic thing.

When we got inside, we consulted Jeff.  He agreed that you cannot grow Styrofoam.  I liked this.  It kept the focus off the normal conversations that give me the heebie-geebies, things like, "How was your day?" "How was the trip?" or worst of all, "How are you?"  Things that you can either answer with "good" or actually describe in detail in a meaningful way.  If you go with "good," the conversation quickly plummets into an awkward silence.   If you actually describe things well, the way any good writer would, people become terribly bored.  They want something in between--something that has a flow back and forth between speaker and listener.  I just don't do that well.  However, a debate on whether a pink erectile jutting out of your lawn is organic or manufactured, well, I can jump on that train.  For one thing, it doesn't involve me.  It's like discussing Ezra Pound's "In the Station of the Metro."  You just go with it, add your two cents, even if you don't know what you're talking about.  "How are you?" on the other hand--what a loaded question?:

Well, see I once thought life was completely meaningless, and I drank a lot so that I wouldn't have to think about it.  I fervently believed there was no God and swore at him just the same.  Now, after a slow, tortuous but glorious conversion, I believe we are sent here for a specific purpose and that the fact you and I are standing here in front of each other probably has eternal significance.  Now, don't let that put any pressure on you though.  We just have something to learn from each other that will continue on into the eternities.

See how terribly damn cruel the question "How are you?" is.  Just don't use it.  For people like me, if there are others like me, it's a minefield.  But discussing pink pool noodle mushrooms--that's a grand thing!  Perhaps that's why I have always liked Charlesea.  She never has a normal conversation.

In fact, frequently she doesn't even put her sentences into standard grammatical order.  It creates a lot of entertainment and a certain amount of poetry.  For instance, she once meant to tell her mother, "Your laugh cracks me up."  Instead, she said, "Your crack laughs me up."

See.  Wonderful!

If everyone could talk this way, I'd be laughing so hard, I wouldn't have a moment to be ill at ease.  Instead, they ask things like, "How was your trip?"

But at Jeff and Charlesea's we discussed mushrooms, which is what I will also do here:

It turned out Charlesea was right.  I bet that is often the case.  She makes a lot of self-depreciating comments about her intelligence, but she seems like a deep thinker to me, who cares deeply about others.

Anyway, either Charles or Jeff--I can't remember which one--Googled the pink Styrofoam erectile sticking out of the lawn, and it is indeed a mushroom.  I'm not sure of a genteel way of putting this, but the name refers to a dog's genitalia, or at least part of it.  A post on Michigan State University's Extension blog words it this way:  "It looks like a certain doggy part protruding from the soil"  (Voyle).  Although not necessarily genteel, Grandma would probably be alright with that wording, so I'll go with that here.

The common name for this uncommon fungus is dog stinkhorn mushroom.  Its scientific name is Mutinus caninus and according to the article, "the fetid odor of the mature mushroom has been described as being associated with the contents of a cat litter box"  (Voyle).

Clearly not an adored plant.  However, unlike the cicadas, I don't think they are regular inhabitants of Garden City, Oklahoma.  I don't think you can quite say, "Don't go to Garden City; they grow stinky dog genitalia in their lawns."  That would be unfair.  Much of the plains were experiencing a very wet summer and autumn, and it probably was due to that, rather than just a regular state of living in Garden City.

As exciting as mushrooms are, they can only carry a conversation so far.  There were moments of awkward silence.  Charlesea did make a comment about how quiet I was.  I said something like, "Yep, that's me."  I had the clicker to open my car to fiddle with though.  It is broken, but we thought the battery was dead, so I spent a good amount of time trying to open it, put the battery in, close it up, then open it again, to see if I put it in wrong.  That took up some time.

Eventually Jeff turned things to politics.  Jeff and Charles are Democrats, as are we--the only ones in Marci's very Republican family.  So, it a was time to talk about how crazy and misled the rest of the family is.  I'm sure the rest of the family has the same sort of discussion when we're not around.  Such is life living in a divided America.  It was nice though, not having to stifle my desire to say what I really think for the sake of family continuity.

Jeff then made an amazing dinner.  He is king of the grill, even when using an oven.  The meat master.  We had pork, but it might as well have been steak.  It was that good.

Then Marci and Charles talked into the early morning, Jeff coming in and out of the conversation, now and then.  Me too--very occasionally.  Their kids, Cameron, Maddison, and Tristan, now all but grown up, popped in now and then to ask questions unrelated to the "adult" talk or to join in with some interesting detail.  Maddison has a lot of Hispanic friends, and apparently there is a lot of racism in Kansas, so she has become quite political at an early age.

Much of that racism I'm sure is rooted in shifting demographics.  According to Wikipedia, "In 2017, Albert Kyaw, a translator of the Garden City Public Schools, stated Garden City was the most ethnically diverse community in the state of Kansas" (Wikipedia).  I've always thought of the plains as white, rural America until you get at least as far south as Amarillo.  This trip taught me otherwise.  It makes sense with so many Mexican Americans employed in agriculture that the opposite would be true for all of the plains, but perception and reality seldom align.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau Quick Facts (which, accessed on 1.12.19 came with the warning, "Due to a lapse in federal funding this website is not being updated"), it is currently (or almost currently) estimated that Hispanics comprise 49.9% of the population of Garden City (U.S. Census Bureau).  I never would have expected that.

Finally, conversation died out, not out of awkwardness, but just because we were so tired.  Jeff peeled off first.  Then Marci and I headed over to the motel Jeff had reserved for us.  Being a pilot, he racks up a lot of travel rewards, so he was able to use those to put us up in a very nice room.  We didn't expect that, but it sure was nice after two nights of camping.

References

U.S. Census Bureau. Quick Facts: Garden City. n.d. 12 January 2019. <https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/gardencitycitykansas>.

Voyle, Gretchen. Stinky Dog Stinkhorn Mushrooms. 19 November 2014. 10 January 2019. <https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/stinky_dog_stinkhorn_mushrooms>.

Wikipedia. Garden City, Kansas. 5 January 2019. January 14 2019. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_City,_Kansas>.