Rural Kingman County

Murdock, Kansas

By Taylor Krueger

During Sarah Smarsh’s childhood, driven by poverty and necessity, she moved frequently between the Kansas prairie and nearby metropolitan Wichita. Born on the precipice of the 1980s Farm Crisis, Smarsh received an inheritance of generational poverty and a nomadic lifestyle. During her youth, she would move between Kingman and Sedgwick counties 21 times before she turned 18. Her experience of the Kansas landscape and the people who call it home deeply influence her work as a writer and journalist, highlighting economic inequality and culture in rural America and bridging the cultural divide between urban and rural spaces.

“The countryside is no more our nation’s heart than are its cities, and rural people aren’t more noble and dignified for their dirty work in fields. But to devalue, in our social investments, the people who tend crops and livestock, or to refer to their place as ‘flyover country,’ is to forget not just a country’s foundation but its connection to the earth, to cycles of life scarcely witnessed and ill understood in concrete landscapes.”

Like Smarsh, my roots run deep through the soil of the Kansas prairie. One side of my family has grown and harvested wheat in northwest Kansas for five generations. On the other, my grandfather was raised on a farm and began his career driving a Wonder Bread truck through southeast Kansas, delivering the final product to consumer’s grocery shelves. Intergenerational values of self-reliance, moderation, and grit are narratives that shaped my upbringing.

My first encounter with Smarsh’s writing was Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (2018), which highlights the tension between rural values and the systemic issues that undermine them.

“I was raised to put all responsibility on the individual, on the bootstraps with which she ought pull herself up. But it’s the way of things that environment changes outcomes. Or, to put it in my first language: The crop depends on the weather, dudnit? A good seed’ll do ’er job ’n’ sprout, but come hail ’n’ yer plumb outta luck regardless.”

As a licensed marriage and family therapist, I’ve learned the context that shapes us is not evenhanded, contrary to the myth of meritocracy. The principles of self-reliance that have helped rural people endure harsh conditions for centuries are the same values that create barriers to mental health care. In a place where your value as a human being is dependent on being useful, shame becomes common. Many of my psychotherapy clients believe they are the source of the problem. My training in systems theory, however, leads me to highlight reciprocal relationships, emphasizing instead that individual problems are systemic, created by larger forces in the family, community, and society.

Smarsh describes her early years observing the doctrine of self-reliance in a trailer next door to a farmhouse owned by her Grandma Betty and her husband, Arnie. The farm was located west of Wichita in the lowlands of south-central Kansas, straddling the High Plains and the Red Hills, with distinct red-brown soil stretching across the horizon. To the north is Cheney Reservoir, a man-made lake used to provide a water supply to the people of Wichita, with boats bobbing on the surface and campgrounds lining the shore. The reservoir borrows water from the nearby Ninnescah River, which means “sweet water” to the Osage Nation, who would be driven off their land nearly a century before the reservoir was constructed.

On a winter afternoon, I drive slowly around unmarked roads near Cheney Reservoir towards Kingman County, witnessing the expanse of prairie earth, water, and sky. I park my car north of the unincorporated community of Murdock, population approximately 37, near a boundary of barbed wire. The sound of stillness familiarly greets my ears as I reorient myself to the “isolation of rural life,” that Smarsh describes in Heartland. In early February, the fields are hushed and hibernating. On an unseasonably warm day, the colors glare under the winter sun. The enormous sky is a bright, clear blue with sweeps of watercolor wispy white clouds low on the horizon. Red dirt sticks to the tires of my car. Green rows line wheat fields stretching forward to tree lines ahead, limbs barren until spring comes around again. I watch the roots resting quietly, pausing as the cold air sits still in anticipation. My father taught me that wheat knows intuitively in its cells the exact right moment to spring forth from the earth, green stalks transforming into waving gold strands for harvest. Undeterred by hailstorms, fire, and drought, the crop continues to grow and change. In this Kingman County wheat, I see the great mystery of knowing your roots are deeply planted, and still not knowing what will become.

There is a mystical relationship that ties Kansans to this land. Smarsh reminds us in Heartland that even in leaving, “no matter where you ended up, like every immigrant you’d still feel the invisible dirt of your motherland on the soles of your feet.” In the same way Kansans are connected to the land, she writes, we are also connected to each other:

“Of all the gifts and challenges of rural life, one of its most wonderful paradoxes is that closeness born of our biggest spaces: a deep intimacy forced not by the proximity of rows of apartments but by having only one neighbor within three miles to help when you’re sick, when your tractor’s down and you need a ride, when the snow starts drifting so you check on the old woman with the mean dog, regardless of whether you like her.”

Standing on the side of the road in Kingman County, with only the wind for company, I feel small in my skin. In this sea of grass and red dirt, I am engulfed by the beautiful, terrible, and uncontrollable earth. Yet, in my aloneness, I am comforted by the sight of farmhouses rising quietly ahead. Looking out at this wild, expansive ecosystem of the prairie, the generosity and gregariousness of small, isolated communities provide me with a sense of hope in the face of systemic ambiguity. Despite the great spaces between rural people, a unique camaraderie binds us together. I’m reminded of a principle in systems theory indicating how change in any one part of the system evokes change on a larger scale. Through her wisdom and writing, Sarah Smarsh calls for collective change in our communities by providing clear testimony about the people of rural America, the landscape, and the reality of systemic issues that affect us every day.

Taylor Krueger is a licensed marriage and family therapist providing psychotherapy to women and children in her rural community. She studied literature and psychology at Kansas State University, and received her Master of Science in family therapy from Friends University. She was raised in Rooks County, Kansas, and her writing is influenced by the places she has called home. She lives in Newton, Kansas, with her husband and two young sons.

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Rock Springs Ranch

Junction City, Kansas

By Macy Davis

Niki Smith never names Kansas in The Golden Hour. She doesn’t need to. Every page of the 2021 graphic novel shows Kansas. It starts with the cover, which looks through wheat in the foreground to kids on a hay bale, the county fair in the background, a golden sunset lighting the scene. A few pages into the book, a Kansas state highway sign brings the reader directly into northeast Kansas. Many chapters end with landscapes dotted with cattle. A girl from Eudora wins the bucket calf event at the county fair. The main character, Manuel Soto, even fills out a form which clearly names “Douglas County” at the top. But the linchpin in this Kansas story is when Manuel and his friends go to agriculture club camp at White Springs Ranch.

The real-life White Springs Ranch is called Rock Springs Ranch, and it’s the Kansas State 4-H Camp, owned and operated by the Kansas 4-H Foundation. As a 12-year Kansas 4-H member, that last 15 miles of the drive, after you turn south from Junction City, was always the most exciting for me. My county extension agents hauled vans full of kids across the state, and even with a stop in Junction City, we were ready to be out of the car for good as we drove that last stretch, leaving behind the relative flat-land of U.S. Highway 77 to dip down into the creek bottoms. This small change made Rock Springs feel just different enough that you could forget you weren’t that far from home. When I read The Golden Hour for the first time, I gasped when Manuel and his friends got off the bus at camp. Then I immediately recommended this book to many of my 4-H friends, because Smith’s White Springs Ranch is clearly Rock Springs.  The name White Springs alone convinced me, but my favorite detail is the illustrations of the rings of cabins surrounding picnic tables and a bathhouse sheltered by trees. I felt like I should be unrolling my sleeping bag, tossing on a swimsuit, and getting ready to chow down on s’mores.

Manuel and his friends don’t spend long at White Springs, just a few pages really. Manuel ends up leaving camp early after the sounds of gunfire from the rifle range trigger his PTSD from witnessing a school shooting. Throughout the book, Manuel uses photography to ground himself in moments of anxiety. Often, he photographs the Kansas landscape, but the photos he captures of camp primarily focus on his friends and the fun they’re having.

The camp photos are on a two-page spread, highlighting the joy of the experience without a trace of the black and white shading or fractured yellow line work through which Smith indicates Manuel’s panic. For Manuel, camp represents freedom and friendship, which are both big steps after the trauma he experienced. To go away to camp for four days, Manuel worked with his therapist and his mom to determine he was ready. Even with its less-than-ideal ending, Smith captures just how meaningful a few days at 4-H camp can be.

Summer camp offers kids a space of freedom. It’s a place rife with new experiences and activities, and one full of new people who don’t know you. At camp, you can test boundaries and try out new elements of identity without the oversight of your family. That makes any camp special, but 4-H camps are unique, not least because their typically shorter sessions mean they serve far larger quantities of campers than the average overnight camp. It’s estimated that 1.5 million Kansans have camped at Rock Springs since the 1940s.

Graphic novels have a unique burden of proof in depictions of setting, particularly when representing real places, because they can show the whole picture, rather than just relying on the reader to supplement written descriptions with their own imagination or prior knowledge. It’s either right, or it misses the mark. Smith’s White Springs Ranch captures not just the look of Rock Springs but the feeling of being a camper there.

As a children’s librarian, I’m well aware of the underrepresentation of nuanced experiences of rural life in children’s literature. Urban and suburban kids are oversaturated with depictions of their lives, while rural kids may only see historical fiction or books that tell them the places they’re from are places to escape. I don’t feel like I ever saw Kansas or my lifestyle represented in contemporary fiction when I was a kid reading everything I could get my hands on. As much as I love historical fiction, it’s not the same.

The scholarship of children’s literature often relies on Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop’s argument that children should be able to find mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors in literature. Bishop explains, “When children cannot find themselves reflected in the books they read, or when images they see are distorted, negative, or laughable, they learn a powerful lesson about how they are devalued in the society of which they are a part.” The growing rural-urban divide makes it essential that representation of rural areas be presented with depth and compassion. Smith’s graphic novel counteracts outdated, negative images and depicts rurality as it is.

My favorite Rock Springs memory is when one of my friends from a different county and I made up goofy choreography to the song “Pour Some Sugar on Me” at the Kansas Youth Leadership Forum when we were in high school — choreography we continued to utilize through college when we both ended up living in Alpha of Clovia 4-H Cooperative Leadership House at K-State. Manuel’s friendships and experiences in agriculture club remind me of my own experiences as a 4-H member embracing spontaneity and forming relationships that continued beyond the boundaries of Rock Springs.

Smith is a former 4-Her herself (even naming Manuel’s hometown after her 4-H club), and her use of Rock Springs as part of Manuel’s story offers rural youth positive representation that speaks to a specific experience while nonetheless representing a broad audience. After all, there are approximately 15,000 4-H members in Kansas. If this is a story that I, an adult almost 10 years removed from my 4-H experience, felt seen by, I can only imagine how young readers will feel. Even with the trauma Manuel experiences, he finds stability in the landscape, making The Golden Hour a love letter to a Kansas childhood.

Macy Davis is a proud Kansas 4-H alumna, Boston-based children’s librarian, and poet. She holds both a Masters in Library and Information Science and a Masters in Children’s Literature from Simmons University. Her work has been published in the I-70 Review and Wizards in Space. She spends her time reading, writing, planning storytime, and starting too many craft projects.

 Photo courtesy of the Kansas 4-H Foundation.

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Mixed Coniferous Forest
Osceola County, Michigan

By Camden Burd

“What we think of our hometown is our first substantial map of the world,” Jim Harrison wrote in his 2002 memoir, Off to the Side. A hometown takes the mishappen clay of a person and molds them, stands them up, and positions them in some vague direction. For Harrison (1937-2016), that was Reed City, Michigan — a rural town in Osceola County, situated in the northern portion of the State’s lower peninsula — where his family lived for much of his childhood. It was there, in a region defined by poor soil, long winters, and geographic isolation, where Harrison would cultivate the literary perspective that informed his essays, poetry, and novels.

There was nothing romantic about rural life in mid-twentieth-century Michigan. It was rural, not wild, definitely not idyllic. Hardship abounded. Harrison remembered ever-present poverty, in his family and others. “Fate has never ladled out hardship very evenly,” he wrote. “Symmetry, balance, ultimate fairness seem to be abstractions remote to our occasionally naked sense of reality, as startling as walking out of a crisp and idealized civics class at a country school and into a lavish party of congressman and lobbyists.” He recalled eating at friends’ homes — minimal meals that included catsup sandwiches or a plate of beans. It is no wonder that his boyhood heroes included Eugene V. Debs and Walter Reuther.

But Harrison did not conflate sympathy with sentimentalism. He never waxed nostalgically about the inherent values of his neighbors. Poor residents of rural Michigan — like their wealthy counterparts — could steal, lust, and lie too. Reed City also exposed a young Harrison to the tragic throughline of humanity. After a childhood accident involving a feuding neighbor and a glass bottle, he lost vision in his left eye. The accident, and a subsequent failed surgery, left him in a severe state of depression which would come and go throughout his life. Years later, his father and sister were killed in a car accident while driving on a Michigan highway. For Harrison, the human experience was defined by hardship — which was not shared equally.

The environments of northern Michigan provided temporary respite from his own depression and the realities of rural life. Amid the scattered forests and fields surrounding Reed City, Harrison found a landscape that absorbed him.  “The natural world would always be there to save me from suffocating in my human problems.” He believed that wandering the woods, studying birds, fishing, and a general curiosity for the natural world could “lift you out of your self-sunken mudbath, the violent mixture of hormones, injuries, melancholy, and dreams of a future you not only couldn’t touch but could scarcely see.” It is important to note that Harrison rarely framed such excursions as an antidote to the modern world. His conception of nature did not fit the simplistic framework of “civilization vs. wilderness” — a dichotomy he believed mostly spoke to upper- and middle-class men who invented the concept to bolster their own ideas of masculinity. “There is nothing quite so fatuous as a man self-consciously trying to act manly,” he writes in Off to the Side. Harrison did these things for one simple reason: “Because that’s how I grew up.”

After several fits and starts Harrison received undergraduate and graduate degrees from Michigan State University. He worked in publishing for a short time in Boston and later received an offer to teach at SUNY Stony Brook. But he couldn’t shake the landscapes of his youth and, after two years of teaching, moved back to Michigan, first to Kingsley and then to a farm in Leelanau County. He took regular visits to a small, remote cabin near Grand Marais. In Off to the Side, he notes that these places “would appear nondescript and scrubby to those who favor the cordillera of the Rockies but to me it was homeground, similar to the terrain around Reed City where I had grown up.” Grand mountain ranges seemed almost vain to the writer, who preferred a bedraggled forest on sandy soil. The excursion into the natural world was not about summits or vistas. It was about losing oneself in the commonplace environments he knew near Reed City.

Settled in northern Michigan and connected to the landscapes of his youth, Harrison found literary momentum. He wrote his first novel, Wolf: A False Memoir, in 1971 and quickly followed with A Good Day to Die (1973), Farmer (1976), and Warlock (1981). The author preferred to focus on characters of unassuming backgrounds: bad farmers, lazy detectives, floundering professionals — nearly all of them who suffered from a life crisis or deep depression. All his characters were flawed. Most were unlikeable.

Harrison’s protagonists were poor, and those who weren’t carried traits that signaled to readers the politics he carried since childhood. The protagonist in True North (2004), David, spends his life rebuking his family’s legacy — lumber barons who clear-cut the forest of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula during the region’s mining boom. He despises his inherited wealth, disowns his father (a sexual predator), and commits his entire life to researching his family’s environmental destruction. It is mostly a solo project, a type of penance for inheriting the family name. Over the course of several decades, David stews, guilty and ashamed. He only finds temporary relief by staying in an austere cabin in the dense northern woods where he can take regular walks and escape his own “self-sunken mudbath.” In True North, like many of his other works, these woods are the landscapes where Harrison’s characters find brief sanctum. 

The author’s own relationship to Michigan’s rural landscapes can be seen through his characters. In short, they wander in the woods to cope with their own traumas. The forests and fields, like those near Harrison’s boyhood home, helped to lift the cognitive baggage of life. As he noted in Off to the Side, the landscape could “draw away your poisons to the point that your curiosity takes over and ‘you,’ the accumulation of wounds and concomitant despair, no longer exist.”

The place consumes you so that your mind can’t. Exploring Harrison’s boyhood landscapes, I couldn’t help but feel the scenic humility. Osceola County’s forests and prairies never stuck me as particularly iconic or overwhelmingly picturesque. However, while meandering through the brush, tall grasses, and stilted pine I found that time had been distorted, my consciousness muted. And in my own navigation of these landscapes, I also came to understand how they had been foundational in shaping Harrison’s “map of the world.”

Camden Burd is an Assistant Professor of History at Eastern Illinois University, where he researches and writes on topics related to the environmental history of the Midwest. His work has appeared in The Michigan Historical Review, IA: The Journal for the Society of Industrial Archaeology, and several edited collections. He is also co-host of Heartland History, the podcast of the Midwestern History Association.

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H House

Comstock, Michigan

By Lisa DuRose

The Kalamazoo River flows right through the center of Comstock, Michigan, behind the library and township hall and the 24-hour gas station. Past Merrill Park where people feed bread to ducks. It floods every spring, drowning the playground equipment. Comstock was never on my “must see” list, but Bonnie Jo Campbell convinced me otherwise.

As Bonnie and I trudged through the late spring mud, twisting through tall oaks and cherry trees, we arrived at the site of Bonnie’s childhood home, where her mother, Susanna Campbell, greeted us. Built in the shape of an H (to represent the first letter of Bonnie’s maternal grandfather’s last name, Herlihy), the house appeared like a spacious cabin, set in the deep woods. Once inside, we sat on an enormous worn couch, an occasional leaf poking out behind cushions, the artificial boundary between the outside and inside blurring in the springtime afternoon sun. The high ceilings and huge wooden beams accented the 4-by-10 picture windows, one of which overlooked a creek. Susanna entertained us with stories about her house (the expansive ranch-style cottage was built by her father in 1947), her animals (milk cows, horses, donkeys, pigs, goats, and chickens), and raising her five kids as a single mother. Stacks of magazines, books, and newspapers occupied a large portion of the room, which was warmed by tongue-and-groove wood paneling, a limestone brick chimney, and a wood-burning stove. Susanna seemed to know everyone in Comstock — store owners, local contractors, township officials, the postmaster — her connections stretching as far as the creek beside her house.

While the rural aspects of Comstock felt unfamiliar to me, having grown up in a working-class urban neighborhood in Saint Paul, Susanna’s stories rang true. That walking tour and Bonnie’s deep connections to the place evoked a sense of home in me during a time of pervasive homesickness. I was attending graduate school at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, just a few miles west of Comstock, and, when I arrived in August 1993, I couldn’t have been more disappointed.  Everything felt lackluster and limited — the restaurant choices, the bookstores, the queer community.  I was a 22-year-old snob from the Twin Cities who disguised my homesickness in the veil of cultural arrogance. And so, it was easy for me to dismiss the appeal of a place like Comstock. I suppose I just needed the right tour guide. 

One day in 1995, in the hallway outside my office, Bonnie appeared — a six-foot tower of cheerfulness and good humor. She struck a deep contrast to the rest of our graduate student flock, panicking over workshops and papers and commiserating about difficult students.  Bonnie had just abandoned her sensible plan to complete a Ph.D. in mathematics and — with the encouragement of her mathematics professor — decided to pursue her life-long passion to write.  She had already shed her doubt and misery, crying over mathematical proofs. Now here she was, confidently landing back on the familiar soil of southwest Michigan. Bonnie would spend the next three years in Western’s MFA program, transforming family stories, town legends, and her razor-sharp observations on Comstock into her first major publication: Women and Other Animals (1999), a collection praised by Publishers Weekly, for its portrayal of “misfits in middle America’s economic and social fringe with subtle irony, rich imagery and loving familiarity, describing domestic worlds where Martha Stewart would fear to tread.”

Getting a glimpse into Comstock — its modest, sometimes dilapidated homes, occasional dirt roads, ponds, woodlands, and railroad tracks — and meeting the formidable Susanna, any observer could see that the spark and material for Bonnie’s writing lay right in front of her, ready for her to harness.  A passage from her 2011 novel Once Upon a River demonstrates how carefully she depicts the impact of local industry upon the rural beauty of southwest Michigan: “They all fished the snags at the edge of the river for bluegills, sunfish and rock bass, though they avoided the area just downstream of the Murray Metal Fabricating plant, where a drainpipe released a mixture of wastewater, machine oil, and solvents into the river — some of the fish there had strange tumors, bubbled flesh around their lips, a fraying at their gills. On certain windy days, the clay-colored smoke from the shop wafted along the river, reached them on their screen porches, and even when they closed their windows, the smoke entered their houses through the floorboards and the gaps around their doors.”

Decades since her first publication, Bonnie has remained steadfast in her devotion to write accurately and lovingly about places like Comstock and the people who occupy these rural spaces. Her novels and short story collections, including the National Book Award finalist American Salvage (2009), are inspired by Comstock’s landscape and industry. And nearly every character she has crafted, including those from her forthcoming novel The Waters (W.W.Norton, October 2023), emerges from a rural Michigan terrain.

On a recent trip to Comstock, I would have astonished my 22-year-old self: nostalgia washed over me. I arrived in late spring, into the lush green Michigan landscape, lodging at the Campbell homestead, guarded by donkeys Jack and Don Quixote. The presence of Susanna Campbell, who died of cancer in September 2020, still presides. H House, as Bonnie now calls it, has undergone some major cleaning and restoration. She hopes to transform the house, and its eight-acre lot, into a retreat for writers, musicians, and artists. A few yards from the house, just under a patch of pawpaw trees, Bonnie has set two memorial stones, one for Susanna and one for Susanna’s sister Joanna, who died in 2019. “She loved & was loved & she read a lot of books” is inscribed on Susanna’s stone — so fitting for a mother who inspired a writer who sings the songs of Comstock and its people.

Lisa DuRose is the co-editor of Michigan Salvage: The Fiction of Bonnie Jo Campbell (MSU Press, 2023) and a faculty member at Inver Hills Community College where she teaches in the English department. Despite earnest efforts to become a New Yorker in her twenties, she resides in Saint Paul, just two miles from where she was born. She now visits Comstock annually and is writing a biography of Campbell.

Photo by Christopher Magson, a Boston native who moved to Michigan for the parking and wildlife and stayed for his wife, Bonnie.

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