No, not the genetic pool. The pull.
Some of the few who read these profound thoughts will understand when I ask if you’ve ever felt drawn to a place or to an event because its in your genes—-because something was planted in your DNA early in your life and your life isn’t complete if you can’t see or do something? Because there are instinctual longings that drive you to do, to be, or to go—-just as instinct drives the gees south in the fall and north in the spring, as the Wildebeest is driven in constant migration following the good grass from north to south to north to south, despite the lions, leopards, jaguars, and cheetahs, or big crocs in the streams.
A few years ago we were in the middle of it, on the Masai Mara in Kenya (in a balloon over it, in fact, one morning), and in the Serengetti National Park and the Ngorongoro Conservation area of Tanzania. In the lower right corner is the Ngoroongoro Crater, where even an elephant is overpowered by the magnificence of the surroundings.
Go there if you ever get the chance. We’ve been. And right now our next big trip will be across Kansas, where there used to be gigantic fish-things whose bones have turned to rock—and you can stop in Hays and see them.
Many folks hate to drive across Kansas. Not us. In fact we feel it whenever we go to something in Kansas City. There is a faint whisper in our genes that says, “Don’t stop here.”
We think it’s because her mother’s family was from the Larned area and my ancestors, on both sides, moved to north-central Kansas’ Mitchell County not long after the last Indian raid. We have a Kansas Gene.
The Flint Hills and the Tall Grass Prairie, the rolling prairies that stretch before us as the sky grows larger as we head beyond Salina. Not until Hays, the home of the Sternberg Museum’s fish things and the remains of other fascinating beings, is the rising flatness something we notice. But the sky is all around us (as are big trucks) and the sky is open and uplifting.
The Garden of Eden is out there, you know. We’ll let you look it up. But it’s worth a jaunt a little to the north to break up the trip.
As we cross the Colorado line, we confess, we have to remind ourselves we’re still at least two hours from seeing the first faint outlines of mountains. But we’re done with the quiet stateliness of Kansas. Let’s get to the dramatic stuff now.
The problem is—there’s too much Kansas in Colorado.
The other problem is that it’s I-70. We understand why people get bored crossing Kansas on I-70 but we wish they appreciated the fact that it’s the road, not the landscape or the places along the way, that is boring. It’s I-70 on the land beyond the windmills and before the sighting of the mountains that becomes tedious, even for us.
We are going to answer the call of our genes in a few days. Time to visit the granddaughters at the foot of the Rockies in Longmont. That means a day and a half on the road, most of it enjoying Kansas in warm weather.
But before than I have a personal gene pull that has to be satisfied. I’m off later this week to the east, to the City of Indianapolis—a prototype for a big city that wants to reclaim itself—and to the Greatest Spectacle in Racing.
There are those who are surprised that an educated and literate person can also like to watch noisy very fast cars going so fast that it’s impossible to read a sponsor’s message on the side of the car. This corrupted gene was planted almost (Oh, Lord! Just saying this give me chills) seventy years ago. Something about the unique climate of the event, as well as the event itself, is a magnet.
In my working days, the trip to Indianapolis was a step toward freedom after being cooped up for four and a half months inside the pressure cooker that is the Missouri Capitol in the closing days of the legislative session.
And I’m going to watch 33 people hurl themselves around a 2.5-mile squared oval at 230 mph-plus, turns included. I have tried to think of something else that is so frightening yet so remarkable and the closest I can come is Olympic downhill skiing.
Why go? Because it’s the Indianapolis 500. It is part of my genetic programming. My parents took me there for the first two or three times. I have taken my self there for as long as I have had a driver’s license.
I do not know if the those I will watch ever think about Theodore Roosevelt’s famous remarks about “the man in the arena,” those who “strive valiantly; who know the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spend themselves in a worthy cause; who at best know the triumph of high achievement and who, at worst, if they fail, fail while daring greatly, so that their place shall never been with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.”
Some people like to watch birds. Some like to chase little white balls around well-manicured courses. Let me admire the courage and the remarkable precision of 33 cars going 230 mph and turning left, perfectly putting wheels where they must, running within inches of one another. In my genetic makeup, that beats the tar out of watching a little white ball slowly curl its way into a hole.
So, pick the adventure your genes call on you to take. If it’s genetic, it can’t be wrong. And don’t pay attention to those who think you are odd.
Greatness is not achieved by those who think those who push the envelope are odd.
-0-