Dodge City Days Finale: Homeward
Not farewell, but fare forward
Dodge City Days: a Photo Essay
Dodge City Days III: Ft. Dodge and the Coronado Cross
Dodge City Days III: Immaculate Heart of Mary
Dodge City Days III: Boot Hill (I)
Dodge City Days III: Boot Hill (II)
Dodge City Days III: Boot Hill Cemetery
Dodge City Days III—Finale: Wasted in Dodge
Dodge City Days IV: Little Jerusalem
My return from Little Jerusalem was not the end of my journey that last full day in the Dodge City area. On the way into Dodge, just outside of the city limits on Highway 50, there is a small historical site dedicated to the Santa Fe Trail, which brought settlers west in the early 1800s. There are markers commemorating this trail all over the state, and I had seen it from the roadside several times on my way in and out of town. Catching sight of it on my way back to my hotel, I decided to stop and take a look.
If it doesn’t look like there is much to see here, you would be correct. The site contained a small memorial and noted the dates when the surveyors for the Santa Fe Trail showed up here (1825), but it didn’t look like it was even finished. There were stone posts lying about the covered area in the first picture which had not been put into the ground for some reason.
The area you see in the following photographs was traversed by settlers heading west from the 1820 through to the 1880s. According to one of the signs placed at the site, you can still see where settler’s wagons made ruts in the landscape. I took several photos and I think I saw those ruts, but it was difficult to tell. But you can judge for yourself.
According to the other sign at the site, Kansas attempted to build a canal connecting with the Arkansas river in this area in the 1880s, only to be abandoned in 1890, though later attempts to revive the project were made as late as 1921.
With the sun sinking gradually below the horizon, I spent a while looking out at the horizon, letting Gus wander about the prairie. I often wonder about the people who made the journey west on these types of trails, who they were, what they were thinking when they came out here. Sometimes I am seized with the Romantic notion that I would love to speak with all of the people in history—all the unknown players whose actions drawn together make up, without their ever intending it or even being aware of it, the story of our past that we do know—and ask them their private thoughts about what they did, what they thought of it, how they felt as they struggled to build homes, feed families, prayed, sang, ate, loved, and made it through this paradise-inferno on earth. I am as unknown as they are, and will likely be ever so as long as this world lasts. I was all too aware of the “meta” nature of my journey now, traveling where earlier pioneers traveled, seeking their shadows in the contours of the land and hoping our spirits touched somehow.
Sadness mingled with hope in my soul, yet again. But what a day it was, and what a fitting end. I let Gus wander about a bit longer, and after loading him up, made my way back to the hotel, grateful to finally rest.
Beginnings and endings. The next morning, a Monday, on the first day of August, I rose early, hoping to get out of town by 8:30 or so. Packing my suitcase, I turned in my key to the Dodge City Hotel, a suitable and useable rathole if there ever was one, but clean and staffed with friendly people. After loading Gus into my Honda CR-V, I made one last stop before bidding farewell to the homley, mythic, somewhat illusory but welcoming town of Dodge City.
Before going to bed the night before, I made a resolution that I would sample a local coffee shop before I left, if ever so briefly. I don’t recall whether I spotted in on one of my earlier walks downtown or not, but I stopped for a coffee at the Redbeard Coffee House, sometime around eight or so. I took Gus in with me, and sipped on my coffee a while, taking in the last of Dodge City I might ever see.
Red Beard looks a bit like one of the coffee houses you might find in the Kansas City area, housed in what looks like a former department store or something similar. It turns out Red Beard was the final crown of serendipity on my journey. The owner, Clint Conant (he of the eponymous red beard), though hailing from Dodge City, learned his trade in Kansas City, at a coffee shop whose owner I actually knew (he was the son of a priest I know, amazingly enough). He decided to return home to open his own place in Downtown Dodge City. After lingering for a little while, I took Gus with me to my vehicle and commenced my way back to Prairie Village.
That is why we journey. After all our seeking, we find that we were at home all the time. I started out for Dodge City with the intention of exploring the world I actually lived in more fully, to take part more deeply in my own life and place. What I hoped and expected to discover of the history of Dodge City I did find, but each new surprise, every small twist and turn, from Windhorst to Little Jerusalem imprinted those places into my memory ever more completely. As with all things, I hope my travels impelled me to love more perfectly my fellow men, and to appreciate the goodness of this world, however much tinged with the shadow of evil and loss.
It has been nearly a year and nine months since I returned from Dodge City, and much has changed since then. At the time, I already knew this would be my last summer living in the state of Kansas, and the fall would be my last semester of teaching at the community college where I worked. In Februrary of 2023, I moved back home to Florida, where I write these words, finally finishing what I began all those months ago. Shortly after moving back, my grandfather Robert died in Tampa at the age of ninety-seven. In early July, my mother unexpectedly passed away, after a contracting a urinary tract infection at the age of seventy-two. And this past Feburary, almost a year to the day that I moved into my home in Florida, I had to put my beloved little Gus to sleep, due to the ravages of late stage kidney disease.
The pain of loss and change and death is always with me. But through all my travels and doings in this life, God has gifted to me this consolation: that of gratitude for all the love I have known, and hope that all the unfulfilled promises of life will find their answer in His light, when the last of our journey is completed. It is too much to ask that any travels we make in this world, even one as marvelous as my time in Dodge City, can satisfy all of our longings. What they can do is bring us to believe more firmly that they are a beginning and a foretaste, a small partaking of that final journey that will lead us all Homeward, where all is prayer and praise.
