INDEPENDENCE, KS — When I told Rob I was going to stay in a cabin at Elk City Lake, he told me the trail was beautiful and the surrounding hills were a little haunted. It didn’t take me long to see what he was talking about.
Maybe it was the freedom of driving with the car windows open, the White Album playing, the sun breaking through the clouds and beaming over the fields of Montgomery County after a rainy work week in the city, but the hills seemed to be laughing, to have a more lively and mischievous character than the stoic bluffs and flint hills I’m used to at my latitude.
As I turned onto Peter Pan Road, I saw the brick spire of a smokestack rising above the trees, a remnant from the cement factory ghost town of Le Hunt, with woodland ruins that look like the setting of the forest raves outside Berlin my friends used to talk about. I doubt they have any raves in Le Hunt, but you never know. It looked like a lake that time forgot, but also felt like a party I’d arrived to right on time.
The lake itself was super flooded. The disc golf baskets appeared as if out to sea, and trees and bathhouse shelters popping up a ways from the makeshift shore. They’d had 9 inches of rain overnight in Iola the night before. The trail I’d planned to stroll at sunset was closed, according to a sign dated that day, due to trail erosion, flooding, and the crumbling cliffs overlooking the lake. I decided to hike as much as I could before dark.
From the start, there were some strange things along the way. A doll resting on a fallen tree branch. Artwork of spaceships and rainbows that looked like a mix of modern graffiti and ancient cave paintings. Stones that looked like the rock-biter from Neverending Story. I didn’t ingest any psychedelics, but it felt like I had.
The warning sign at Table Mound Trail had been posted for good reason, as the water crossings required leaping across logs and boulders, or else taking lengthy detours above the lagoons. The terrain was swampy and Floridian in places, steep, piney, and Pacific Northwestern in others, surprising in a subtle and unmistakably Kansas fashion.
Unfortunately I didn’t catch that it was a 3 mile out and back and not a loop, so I was only at the halfway mark when it got dark. I made it back across the water crossings, but the trail was hilly, rocky, and impossible to see. Yet somehow I didn’t have any trouble walking it. I realized I had been basically using the light as a guide, following the gap between the tree canopy, as if projecting its shape onto the ground before me, an obvious method that I’d somehow never paid attention to. I walked this way until the lapping sounds of the lake made me wary and I turned on my phone light for the last hundred meters.
I walked back to the car with a keen sense of having observed a richness of textures and patterns along the trail, even the terrain that had apparently altered in terrain in the past few days. My observational senses were primed by the manuscript I’d spent the week editing, a new edition of “The Artist’s Guide to Sketching” by James Gurney and Thomas Kinkade. Though both of them went on to become famous artists, at the time they were art school dropouts riding the rails across the country, meeting people, camping out, and trying to paint 1,000 pictures in one year.
In a chapter dedicated to nature, they wrote: “no one can deny that something special still happens when you stand before nature with nothing but a fountain pen and a sketchbook. Your senses sharpen as a brisk breeze sweeps over your face. Your breathing relaxes; your mind clears. You realize that with little more than a few brief motions of your wrist you will record forever the beauty that you see before you. Yet you will have done more than document what you see. You will have learned something about the way the natural world is constructed. You will have paused, perhaps for the first time, to really observe the twisting of a tree trunk or the growth patterns of a rosebush.
My observing continued that night as I watched a lightning storm from my lawn chair on the patio of my cabin. At 10:30, I drove to Walmart for water and supplies while listening to Revolution #9, a White Album track I always skip past and haven’t listened to in maybe 30 years. When I got back, I listened to the laughter of nearby RV campers, which died down and went silent as their campfires faded.
The next morning I enjoyed my coffee at a half-submerged picnic table, my aesthetic happy place and my idyll writing spot. It was scenic but unsettling. The shoreline was haphazard, more like a flooded backyard than some harmonious coastline. I felt bad watching the park employees drive the bobcat into the flooded zones to retrieve park equipment. Against the forces of climate, do reservoirs like this one even stand a chance?
The next day I met Rob in Humboldt, Kansas at the Octagon City Coffeeshop. With Messenger Coffee and herbal teas, the coffeeshop is (to me), a welcome metropolitan oasis in the middle of small-town Kansas. It also features a mural by Peter Mann of the history of the ill-fated utopian vegetarian colony that attempted to put down roots in the area. I told Rob about the flooded lake, and he mentioned that it’s odd that all of our state parks are designed around human-made reservoirs instead of the fields, rivers, and riparian woodlands that are so much more representative of the state.
Rob pointed out how these dams were built by the Army Corps of Engineers at the peak of our postwar zeal to extend manifest destiny through engineering, imposing our will onto the landscape as we saw fit. But all the dams built in the middle of the last century will fail in the middle of the next. Depending on what collective and political will we summon and what decisions we make, we may wind up with more rivers than reservoirs after all.
It will be something for your children’s generation to deal with, Rob said, as they go through the process of deciding what worked and what we should keep, and what we should definitely not do again. “Decide what you wish to keep, you better grab it fast,” as Bob Dylan sings. Or to quote a friend of mine who left his church and changed his life at the exact age I am now, “What got me to this half of my life won’t get me through the next.” So what now?
For the last twenty years I’ve had this character in mind, someone who went rogue from the Army Corps of Engineers, a man who was almost too good at flooding and whose talents for such were necessarily restrained, who now lives underground and who has big radical plans that the Corps does not in any way condone or support. This character read about Osceola at a young age and never forgot it. At this very moment he’s out in the wilderness or some rural hideout conducting poetic research and plotting entirely new systems. He’s one of the main characters I’d like to profile for “Lake Times,” my semi-updated newspaper composed at half-flooded picnic grounds along the cosmic shorelines of Kansas. Eventually, I hope our chronicles intersect.
So to quote yet another poet, the great James Taylor, this springtime I’ve seen fire, and I’ve seen rain. I’ve seen rain accumulate till there was no end. And I’m not sure I’ll see Elk City Lake again.
lucas wetzel 
Ideal idyll.