Robert Rebein - Headlights on the Prairie: Essays on Home
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At the long-term care facility where Robert Rebeins father lands after a horrific car crash, a shadow box hangs next to each room, its contents suggesting something of the occupants life. In Headlights on the Prairie, Rebein has created a literary shadow box of sorts, a book in which moments of singular grace and grit encapsulate a life and a world.
In the tradition of memoirs such as Tobias Wolffs This Boys Life and Ivan Doigs This House of Sky, these essays bring a storytellers gifts to lifes dramas, large and small. Following his award-winning turn on his hometown of Dodge City, Rebein takes us back to the high plains world where his family has farmed and ranched since the 1920s. It is a world populated by feedlot cowboys, stock-car drivers, and farm kids dreaming of basketball glory. Here too we find the darker tales of damaged young men returning from war, long-haul truckers addicted to crystal meth, and the sadly heroic residents of a small-town nursing home grandiloquently named Manor of the Plains.
Whether contemplating a fiery crash at a race track, coming to terms with an aging parent, or navigating the last days of a beloved family dog, Rebein offers a subtle, unsparing, often moving look at the moments that go into making a writer and a man. Seen in sharp detail, and recalled from a distance, his is a story of how a man can leave his home on the prairie--and yet never really get out of Dodge.
In the tradition of memoirs such as Tobias Wolffs This Boys Life and Ivan Doigs This House of Sky, these essays bring a storytellers gifts to lifes dramas, large and small. Following his award-winning turn on his hometown of Dodge City, Rebein takes us back to the high plains world where his family has farmed and ranched since the 1920s. It is a world populated by feedlot cowboys, stock-car drivers, and farm kids dreaming of basketball glory. Here too we find the darker tales of damaged young men returning from war, long-haul truckers addicted to crystal meth, and the sadly heroic residents of a small-town nursing home grandiloquently named Manor of the Plains.
Whether contemplating a fiery crash at a race track, coming to terms with an aging parent, or navigating the last days of a beloved family dog, Rebein offers a subtle, unsparing, often moving look at the moments that go into making a writer and a man. Seen in sharp detail, and recalled from a distance, his is a story of how a man can leave his home on the prairie--and yet never really get out of Dodge.
Robert Rebein: author's other books
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Robert Rebein
Robert Collins
Melissa Gilbert
Ivan D. Illich
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Headlights on the Prairie
HEADLIGHTS
ON THE
PRAIRIE
Robert Rebein
University Press of Kansas
2017 by the University Press of Kansas
All rights reserved
All rights reserved
Published by the University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, Kansas 66045), which was organized by the Kansas Board of Regents and is operated and funded by Emporia State University, Fort Hays State University, Kansas State University, Pittsburg State University, the University of Kansas, and Wichita State University.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rebein, Robert, 1964 author.
Title: Headlights on the prairie : essays on home / Robert Rebein.
Description: Lawrence : University Press of Kansas, [2017]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017020139 | ISBN 9780700624720 (paperback) | ISBN 9780700624720 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Rebein, Robert, 1964Homes and hauntsKansas. | KansasSocial life and customs. | Rebein, Robert, 1964Childhood and youth. | Country lifeKansasAnecdotes. | BISAC: HISTORY / United States / State & Local / Midwest (IA, IL, IN, KS, MI, MN, MO, ND, NE, OH, SD, WI).
Classification: LCC F686.2 .R43 2017 | DDC 978.1/76dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017020139.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is available.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper used in this publication is recycled and contains 30 percent postconsumer waste. It is acid free and meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992.
To Alyssa,
forever and always
forever and always
Contents
Imagine having the land of your birth, a place about which you have complex and wildly ambivalent feelings, reduced to a black-and-white cartoon. Someone asks you where youre from, and when you reply Kansas, this well-meaning stranger grins and blurts out, Wheres Toto? Oh, thats right. Were not in Kansas anymore!
You get this in New York, Indiana, California. Even as far afield as Paris, you get it. Kansoz! Ah, oui. Les munchkins!
How to say you hail from a place uninhabited by tinmen and sweet little girls in pinafores, a demanding, starkly beautiful place with twenty-mile views, sunflowers as big as your head, and night skies so clear that you might believe yourself to have been born among stars? Where the wind blows without cease and flies bite like vampires and the stink of the slaughterhouse overhangs everything like a toxic cloud. Where its not unusual for a kid like you to receive his first shotgun at ten, drive a wheat truck at twelve, and solo in a Beechcraft Debonair at fourteen or fifteen.
Does that sound like Oz? you want to ask.
But you dont. Why bother?
When the tornado came and swept you away, as you knew all along it would, it was not to drop you into some Technicolor fantasy, but rather into the same world of Applebees and Best Buy the jokesters inhabit. Thats the context here; thats the reason you refuse to join Dorothys fan club.
One of my fourth-grade teachers, an ancient nun named Sister Urban, expressed concern about a tendency I had to blank out during class. One minute Id be paying attention, but the next Id be staring off into space, completely unresponsive. Twenty or thirty seconds might go by before the episode ended and Id return to consciousness, seemingly unaware that any of it had happened. Needless to say, it wasnt long before my mother dragged me off to see our family doctor, who examined me briefly before suggesting that I be seen by a specialist in Wichita, three hours away.
Do you really think thats necessary? my mother asked.
Who knows? Dr. Baum said, shrugging. But in these kinds of cases, Id say its better to be safe than sorry.
In the days to come, the phrases these kinds of cases and better safe than sorry became a kind of mantra my mother repeated whenever she felt pressed to justify the tripeither to herself, to one of her neighborhood friends, or, most important, to my father, whose standard response to reports of illness or injury was some variation of Hell, just look at him. Theres nothing wrong with that kid.
As it happened, I agreed with my fathers assessment. Deep in my bones, I knew I was okay. However, that didnt mean I was going to let an opportunity as sweet as this pass me by. The way I saw it, a trip with my mother to the big city of Wichita was bound to yield all manner of riches. At the very least, wed get to eat lunch at McDonalds or Burger King (neither of which existed in Dodge City circa 1974), and should we happen to venture into a sporting goods store or, better yet, a mall, well, who could say what merchandise I might not talk her into buying me?
Although she spent many happy summers in the Flint Hills town of Maple Hill, my mother was born and raised in Wichita, where she moved after her mother married for the second time. In a way, you could say my mother had two diametrically opposed childhoods. In the first, she was the beloved only child of a single mother, with two sets of grandparents and various aunts and uncles playing a part in raising her. In the second, she was the much-older sister of four younger siblings, the youngest of whom, Scott, was born after she had left home to attend St. Mary of the Plains College in Dodge City. When my mother was still in her teens, her mothers health began to decline rapidly (dropsy and womens troubles were a couple of the terms doctors bandied about), and the result was that the younger kids in the family didnt have the same experiences or opportunities that she had while growing up. And the younger they were, the worse it had been. My mother felt guilty about this, but what could she do? She had her own life to live, and live it she must. In a way, thats what the town of Wichita came to mean to her. It was the scene of an escape, a necessary but bittersweet breaking away.
Our appointment was set for midmorning, so we had to leave the house at around 5 a.m. My father must have carried me to the car, because I remember nothing before I woke up in the back seat of our 1964 Impala wagon.
How much longer? I asked, rubbing my eyes.
Not long now, my mother answered. A little over an hour.
Are we going to stop to eat?
I packed a breakfast for you, she said, smiling at me in the cars rearview mirror. Its in that paper sack at your feet.
I pulled the bag onto the seat beside me and was disappointed to find it filled with apples, bananas, and other healthy things.
What about after the appointment? I asked. Are we going to stop then?
Well see, my mother answered, finishing a cigarette and tossing the butt out the cars window. It irked me how easily she evaded my attempts to get a promise on the books.
At the hospital, we had to wait an hour before it was my appointment time, and then another hour before the doctor was able to see me. My mother spent the time flipping through magazines while I ransacked the pay phones looking for change for the vending machines. I was conscious of everythinghow big and sophisticated the hospital was, how the old and seriously ill were wheeled around on aluminum gurneys (beds on wheels!), how many of the patients and hospital workers were of a sort Id never encountered before (I remember in particular a Hindu woman with a red dot on her forehead).
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