Because of a boy, I tried being a vegetarian once. Driving through cattle country of the Sunflower State, I contemplated it again. This land is blood soaked no matter how you try to package it in grocery store cellophane and cowboy lore. The highway takes us past barren land, forlorn towns and dumbstruck cattle crowded into sorting pens. Every day I see the fishing boats head out to sea off the coast of Virginia, but the fishermen don’t seem like butchers to me. This Kansas land feels gripped by a strange brutality that I sense when we drive past the captured cattle. Some of that feeling comes from unfamiliarity, but it also comes from the business of slaughter on display by the side of the road.
The boy I liked was a vegetarian long before you could Google gruesome video footage of frightened cattle and flayed carcasses. He seemed somehow to taste the violence in the meat even without seeing it, and he rejected it. He believed when you ate meat, you ate the aggression and were changed by it. So, I did what you do when you are young. I tried on his vegetarian beliefs like a new dress testing the fit, the look and the feel. I watched him sell his brand new 1989 truck and buy a VW bus as he started to align his lifestyle with his values. I remember we ate a lot of pasta at Italian restaurants and listened to cassette tape after cassette tape of Grateful Dead music. For me, he was a meadow, a starlit sky, and a lake: all beautiful things I appreciate in this world but things that don’t always keep my attention for long. When we ended up at different colleges, we tried to stay together but when left to my own appetites, I ate hamburgers and chicken nuggets and listened to Madonna.
I wonder where conviction comes from because it is only conviction that can keep a person from eating meat in this world saturated with images of juicy steaks and the backyard barbecue, the all-American hot dog and hamburger. I feel like a Neanderthal moved only by my survival instincts when I know the fate of these Kansas cattle, and still, I look online for Guy Fieri’s best burger recommendation in the next town over.
This land with its allegiance to red meat reminds us all of another land we lived in for a year: Buenos Aires, Argentina. Every week, we would eat at a restaurant called Kansas on Avenue Libertador which specialized in beef and American-style sides like a loaded baked potato. We would order “cuatro Cocas por favor” practicing our just below survival level Spanish. Four glass coke bottles sweating lightly would arrive at the table and the server would pop off the four caps in one swift motion and pour them into iceless glasses. Home to me seemed to be somewhere in that fizz and we were all soothed by carbonation and sugar and the taste of America. We drank our lukewarm soda and ate Spinach dip or Nachos as an appetizer, oily salads longing for Ranch dressing, and a Hawaiian-style ribeye marinated in pineapple.
We frequented our share of Argentine restaurants too where every eatery catered to carnivores, and the cow seemed a sacred animal celebrated and revered, albeit sacrificed. Often, the grill was in full view as we waited for our meal. The men keeping watch over the meat were sweaty and greasy, stained with black soot and ash from the embers of the fiery grill. Everything seemed aflame in the kitchens of Argentine restaurants. Many times, a blackened grate would arrive at the table with chorizo and blood sausage still sizzling and popping.
My husband who was raised on his Mom’s Sunday Roast Beef Dinner, almost lost his taste for red meat in Argentina. He craved American-style salads drenched in creamy dressings, butter sliding over the kernels of corn on the cob, green beans steamed and salted, and lima beans made mushy with buttered water. Meat on the grill began to look like carcasses because of the excess on display and the smell of something always burning or smoldering.
We broke our two year teaching contract at an American School in Buenos Aires after six months of longing for America and most specifically longing for American food. In Argentina, I loved eating medialunas con dulce de leche from Delicity, but I loved Krispy Kreme more. For a long time upon our return, I thought it was truly the food that mattered so much until I finally realized I loved Krispy Kreme more because my grandmother would take us there on summer mornings when my sister and I were out of school. She would sit at the counter smoking a cigarette and staining a coffee cup with lipstick and taking occasional bites from a plain cake doughnut. She would talk to her neighbors who sat with her at the counter, teasing sweet old men and gossiping with stiff haired women. My sister and I would clamber to the window with a view to the Rube Goldberg-like doughnut making machine built for mass dunking, frying and glazing. Then we would choose our sweet delight, mine always with white cream and sprinkles. My sister and I would sit at the counter, spinning our lithe bodies around in the swivel stools licking icing from our mouths and giggling in sugary bliss.
So, we didn’t leave Argentina because of food. We left because we wanted to live in a place full of memory, full of familiarity, full of family.
Some people like us don’t mind looking back even while moving forward. We left Argentina because we had too much respect for our past and where we come from, but we never want to feel stuck in ancient days so we move ourselves forward with new experiences best found on the road. Some places are like that too, rooted in their history but looking to the future with innovation.
Driving through Kansas, we passed through Greensburg, a town devastated by a tornado in 2007. They rebuilt, as seemingly all American towns do when struck by nature’s ferocity, with an eye on the future using LED streetlights, constructing sustainable buildings, and conserving water. Yet, Greensburg remains a small town whose biggest attraction besides the modern green buildings is The Big Well built in 1888.
Then there are Don Quixote’s giants on the horizon harnessing the infinite, unhindered wind that blows across these Great Plains. It is as constant as my ocean’s waves and currents and tides. These windmills with robotic petals invoke Argentina again, for Floralis Generica found in Buenos Aires is an aluminum and steel flower sculpture whose petals close each night and bloom every morning; a cycle of hope and rebirth. The Kansas windmills look like steel flowers to me and harnessing wind feels like hope.
After Greensburg, we arrived in Dodge City like pioneers looking for a night’s rest. If Greensburg is the balance we seek in our own lives between the past and the future, then Dodge City sets no example for us to follow. They tried to reclaim the famous phrase, “Get the Heck out of Dodge” by simply striking through the “out of” and replacing it with “into.” But, it takes more than words to capitalize on the past. Boot Hill Museum recreated the historical cow town with the façades of Old West buildings. Visitors can buy tickets to an Old West Show with dancing girls and a gun battle; but, overall, the place had a fog of listlessness that couldn’t motivate us to pay to see what was behind the façade. They should have made this a tourist town and turned the whole place into Gunsmoke instead of creating just an Old West Strip Mall.
So, we did the only thing we could, we got the heck out of Dodge.