by Chris Price
The destination was Wichita, the route simple. We had entered rectangular Kansas in her north-eastern corner, cruising calmly and smoothly east along I70. Calmly and smoothly that is, until the perfectionist co-pilot growled a hesitant 'errmm' whilst moving a finger from one point on the map to another quite different point on the map.
'What is it?' I asked.
'Well, the thing is...'
'Yes?'
'We're heading to the city of Wichita.'
'Yes,' I said as forcefully as possible, fearing where this was going.
'Well the lyrics of the song go, "I am a lineman for the county".'
'Nothing contradictory in that. He's from the city of Wichita and now he's a lineman – whatever that is – for the county. Hence "Wichita Lineman".'
'And you'd be right, only there's also a Wichita county
'Which is how far from Wichita city exactly?'
'About 200 miles due south of where we are now.'
Jesus. 'What should we do?'
A slip road approached on our right. Chris slammed the map on the dashboard. 'Exit here!'
With a squeal of brakes and the squeak of rubber on tarmac, we pulled off I70 and darted south through Sharon Springs towards Leoti, the county seat of Kansas. Time, miles and beef jerky disappeared. As the late afternoon sun scrolled from yellow to ember-red, we reached the edge of Wichita County. Chris finished a mouthful of jerky. 'Shit.'
'What now?'
'There's another Wichita County.'
'What? Where?'
'Texas.'
'Well that's all right then.'
'Sorry?'
'If it were within two hundred miles of here you'd want us go there too. As it isn't, we won't be going anywhere.'
Jimmy Webb, who wrote 'Wichita Lineman', never lived in either of the Wichita Counties, nor indeed in the city of the same name, so we'll never know which of them, if any, was the real inspiration for the song. For all we know he wrote it in High Wycombe and just liked the sound of the name. But by now it didn't really matter. For approaching on our right under a row of sagging telephone lines was a rusty, faded metal sign which said 'Welcome to Wichita'.
I can remember the first time I heard 'Wichita Lineman' as clearly as if it were yesterday. It was in the front room of a very dear university friend by the name of Mauro, whose London flat for a period in the mid-nineties became a playground of discovery for four pals bonded by a passion for two things: music and gin.
Dan, Steve, Mauro and I would retreat to that front room every weekend after club or gig to share music with one another. Taking turns to choose the next tune from Mauro's expansive CD collection covering one entire wall from Abba to ZZ Top and all points in between, a series of random, gin-soaked playlists would emerge from the near infinity of possibilities like an old-world iPod on shuffle. Every now and then we would allow guest selectors from outside the group, and occasionally even girls, to join us for the evening and spice things up a bit.
Some time in the early hours of the morning, after eighties hair metal but before ambient, surfaced a period of quiet, country-tinged reflection where Gram Parsons, the Burritos, Nesmith et al – for we were all fans of one sort of another – would get a run out. And it was here that one night Steve suggested it was high time Glen Campbell got an airing.
'Glen Campbell?' I snorted, 'as in "Rhinestone Cowboy"?'
'Yep, that Glen Campbell'.
'Isn't he sort of… rubbish?'
Glen Campbell was an artist who occupied – typified – the 'crooner' end of the country spectrum. He was establishment – a singer whom, by denying everything that he and his contemporaries stood for, I used as a means of asserting my love for all things outlaw.
'Have you heard "Wichita Lineman"?' asked Steve.
I admitted that I hadn't.
'You've never heard "Wichita Lineman"?!' squeaked Dan, sensing the thrill of two lifelong pals about to meet for the first time.
'Well you're in for a treat,' said Steve. 'Check this out.'
He slid Twenty Golden Greats into the CD player, selected track six and hit play. A brief silence, then a five-note hopscotch of bass guitar – doo-do do-be-doo – and a string section which turned my blood to wine before even the first line had been sung.
I am a lineman for the county
And I drive the main road,
Searchin' in the sun for another overload.
I had no idea what a lineman was. Probably some kind of railwayman out repairing damaged track, or – more likely – a phone maintenance guy up a telegraph pole fixing lines. Either way he was out in the middle of nowhere with nothing but his thoughts for company.
I hear you singin' in the wire
I can hear you through the whine
And the Wichita Lineman
Is still on the line.
Must be the phone guy. Strings again, pizzicato this time, like the glint of scorching sun on telephone wires like tiny, repeated stabs to a lonesome, lonely heart.
And I need you more than want you
And I want you for all time
And the Wichita Lineman
Is still on the line.
'Wichita Lineman' is one of the greatest songs ever written. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise doesn't like music. My guess is that when Jimmy Webb was inspired to write it, he was driving through Wichita County late in the afternoon in early autumn, the sun just reaching the end of its slow arc west and close to dipping below the telegraph lines that run the length of Highway 96. He sees a man working alone in the sun under a vast expanse of sky and imagines him pining for a distant love.
Even knowing the power of Webb's songwriting, Wichita County line – the Kansas version – still knocked me for six when we arrived. No matter that there was some other line by the same name several hundred miles away. This one matched exactly the image I'd had in my head since first hearing the song in Maz's front room. But this was no approximation, it was a carbon copy. A sense of déjà vu stronger than any I had ever experienced.
We pulled the car off the road onto a dusty track behind the rusting metal sign. Behind it a row of telegraph poles
stretched off to a vanishing point just beneath a sun which bleached the colour out of everything in view. A string section blew in on the breeze and caused the telephone lines to hum. The rays of the sun pounded out a rhythm on the road. This was a more visceral experience of music than we ever imagined possible. We were there.
We never found a lineman. We'd had an idea we would look one up in the phone book and talk to him. Find out what it was like out there working the lines all on your lonesome. But that was when we thought we were going to Wichita City. The chances of finding anyone – anything – out here were somewhere shy of zero. And in a way I'm glad we didn't – it might have spoiled the tranquillity of what turned out to be as perfect a moment as any we experienced on the trip; a quiet intermezzo in the symphony, if you will. I thought about the boys back in London – Dan, Steve, Maz – and considered texting them. But in the end I thought I'd keep this one for me and Joe.
A few days earlier, as we were walking along the rim of the Grand Canyon, Joe had asked me to describe my favourite place in the world. I told him about Lake Tekapo on the South Island of New Zealand, where I had witnessed a sunset and moonrise more perfect than I had thought possible. Next time I'm asked that question I'll have a tough time answering it. To arrive somewhere for the first time and know that you've been there a hundred times before must make it a pretty good contender.
Beauty, we are told, is in the eye of the beholder. But let me tell you – that ageing sign, that setting sun and those telephone lines vanishing into the distance were one of the most beautiful sights we had encountered by a country mile. Roof down, we put 'Wichita Lineman' on the stereo. And for a moment we were Jimmy Webb. We were linemen. And we were happy.
Reluctantly we re-boarded and headed for Dodge City, the most notorious point in the cowboy world, home to the aptly named Boot
Hill Cemetery and a ginuwine high-noon history of buffalo-slaughtering and Injun-burying.
The glow of the Kansas sunset gave way to a clear-skied chill. We hummed 'Wichita Lineman' while the car tyres hummed on Wichita lines, man. On the open plains of America, darkness descends like a blackout. There are no road lights, and the only illumination other than your own headlamps are gas stations that bob in the blackness and cars that wobble towards you like a close encounter of the road kind. It's an experience akin to driving through an early nineties screensaver.
I wasn't tired, but the headlights hovering across the pancake landscape became hypnotic. Twenty minutes of total darkness swallowed up with just yards of road in front and a few feet of red glow in the rear-view mirror. Then a distant white flicker like a dying torch would appear over the horizon and for a full ten minutes seem to hang in space. Suddenly the glimmer would grow, the car would whip past – its rear lights briefly dancing in the wing mirrors – and it was gone. I've been in photographic darkrooms brighter than the Kansas night sky.
'How come we can't see any stars?' I wondered out loud.
Splat.
'Clouds probably,' said Chris. Splatsplatsplat. 'Rainclouds.'
Splatsplatsplatsplatsplat. I turned on the windscreen wipers.
The crisp aura of the mid-western emptiness swiftly disappeared under a smeared re-imagining of the Kansas night. The gas stations became smudges of neon and the hovering headlights took on the menace of a joust. Instead of the slo-mo anticipation of passing fireflies, my muscles tightened as the lights got brighter and the rain threatened to send them aquaplaning into our path. Somewhere up ahead, Dodge City awaited.
Dodge was very, very famous in the forties, fifties and sixties. The radio serial Gunsmoke (later turned into a TV series) was set there, turning Dodge into a kind of colloquial shorthand for 'Wild West town'. Even today people in quite other parts of the world, probably without knowing why, are heard to say 'Let's get the hell out of Dodge' when they mean 'We should leave now, it's getting a little rowdy and I'd rather not get caught up in a kerfuffle.'
Westerns are usually simple affairs: small on plot, big on hats. The iconography is simple too; there are the hats, the guns and the spurs of course, but the other essential item is coffins. Just as a love story must have a kiss and a wedding, so a western must have a death and a burial. In Gunsmoke – and in nineteenth-century Dodge City – that meant a trip to the place where gunslingers were buried with their boots on: Boot Hill.
Boot Hill is also where one of the greatest sequences in cinema – a key early scene in The Magnificent Seven – was shot. Yul Brynner plays Chris, a man determined to outsmart a trigger-happy racist mob wh oare trying to prevent an Indian being buried on the hill. He needs someone to sit upfront with him on the wagon – to literally ride shotgun. Enter Vin, played by Steve McQueen. The scene is acclaimed not for the setting, or the cinematography or the script. It is wheeled out on clip shows and in film-school lectures because of the silence. By barely speaking – four sentences at most – McQueen stole the scene, made his name and became a star. Ever since I was a kid I have wanted to be Steve McQueen and take a trip to Boot Hill.
It came as something of a disappointing inevitability then to find that Dodge City was about as dangerous as a pillow fight and as edgy as in-flight cutlery. The only discernible connection to the town's gunslinging past was that, like the residents of its most famous landmark, it was completely dead.
We cruised into town along Wyatt Earp Boulevard. A green sign said: 'Welcome to Dodge City.'
Chris looked pensively out of the passenger-side window. 'You know, some place names make total sense straight away, don't they?'
'Such as?'
'I don't know, Oxford for instance. Presumably it was where you took your cattle across a river.'
'Makes sense.'
'Then there are the weird American ones like Wichita, which probably have some Native American dialect meaning like "place where the buffalo sit under the trees".'
'Where are you going with this?'
'Well, I'm just wondering, under what extraordinary circumstances would you want to call a town "Dodge"?'
'Maybe "Avoid" was already taken.'
Yellow and blue neon announced a vacancy at the Firebird Motel on our left. We pulled onto the forecourt, wandered into reception and checked in.
I picked up the keys. 'Can you recommend somewhere to eat?'
' There's a Mexican further along Wyatt Earp,' said a weary, elderly landlady. 'But you better hurry, most places close around nine.'
We went to our room to drop off the bags. The guide book had recommended the Firebird Motel as being 'clean and run by friendly people', but neglected to mention it's the kind of place you book by the hour where truckers relieve the loneliness of the open road by strangling each other in French maids' outfits. Stacey, wife of Punk Rock Mike in LA, who had stayed in her fair share of motels during her time as a touring musician, had given us a piece of advice for the trip: never stay in any hotel, motel or other lodgings whose reception smells (the rationale being that if they can't keep that clean then the rooms are very likely even worse). Sage counsel.
What she didn't tell us – but which we could, and probably should, have worked out for ourselves – is that the same should apply to any motel whose rooms featured metal hooks hanging from the ceiling above beds already occupied by crawling, non-paying residents. We were in no mood to hang around.
First we tried the Mexican. 'Sorry sir, we're closing.' Perhaps we could grab a beer next door. Just locking up. Could they recommend somewhere to go bowling? It was a drive away on Kliesen, but yes, we could go bowling.
We drove through the deserted streets, past the darkened restaurants, across the carless junctions of downtown Dodge to the bowling alley which was, yes, completely rammed. Seems the entire population of Dodge had gone bowling. We asked for a lane and were told that there should be one available some time after nine.
Now, here's the odd thing. The lady at the Firebird had told us that most restaurants shut down around nine. What she hadn't said, but which became abundantly clear as everyone filed out of Spare Tyme Bowl on cue as if the fire alarm had sounded, was that everyone in Dodge goes home at nine. We didn't know why, and couldn't work it out. This meant that Chris and I, self-conscious bowlers not blessed with a winning grip, were the only people on the lanes, watched intently by a small crowd of a barman, two security men and the owner.
We bowled briefly and badly and then departed to find the car alone in a car park which an hour earlier we had circled several times in order to find a space. Perhaps American Idol was on at 9 p.m. and a Dodge City hopeful had made it to the final. Or maybe there was a still a curfew on from the hell-raisin' days. Whatever the reason, if you ever find yourself in Dodge City after 9 p.m., you shall find yourself very much alone.
26 OCTOBER
DODGE KANSAS, AVOID OKLAHOMA
For the first time I woke up before Chris and resolved to give Dodge a second chance by daylight. Chris declined my offer of a little early morning tourism, preferring to get up and post a blog to the website. While he tapped and huffed (it was not going well for him), I took the car out to a legendary spot.
Dodge City's reputation is built on buffalo hunting. Its notoriety is built on Boot Hill. Humming Iron Maiden's 'Die With Your Boots On (Live Version)' I parked up, strolled past the wrought-iron fence in front of Boot Hill Museum and went straight to the Dodge City Laundry to get some washing done whilst I touristed. I immediately noticed – and perhaps this shouldn't have surprised me, but it did – that the staff and clientele were exclusively middle-aged and male. I was taken aback, I suppose, as these were the Dodge citizens I had imagined would be hard at work in the fields and farms on a Thursday morning in Kansas. Instead they were meekly showing idiot tourists how to put four quarters into a tumble dryer.
The penny dropped along with the quarters. The bowling. The laundry. The sweet but down-at-hee
l motel. Dodge City may have witnessed its fair share of death over the years, but these days it was the town itself doing the dying. Two hundred years earlier Dodge City had not existed and it seemed to be heading back that way pretty fast. With my pants left to get a whole dollar cleaner, I went back to Boot Hill Museum. Nine dollars to get in and I had the whole place to myself.
It didn't look like it had in The Magnificent Seven. The long carriage ride up to the graves was little more than a brisk skip up some concrete steps. Instead of being on the dust-blown edge of town it was smack dab next to some recently-built brick houses on the main road. Damp grasslands instead of beige badlands. The cemetery was all of five metres square with a sprinkling of fake headstones marking graves whose original occupants were disinterred at the turn of the century and taken to a range of less touristy but more appropriate plots.
I closed my eyes and thought of Vin. It was no good; this was as much the Boot Hill of the movie as I was Steve McQueen. I slunk back to the museum. A smiling, round-faced girl sat behind a counter, wearing a name badge which said 'Ellie'.