Route 54 runs kitty-corner into Kansas– “smooth open highway” (says my long-ago diary) “through fields that got greener and lusher, wheat giving way to corn, as the day went by,” said day being June 18, 1987.
Greensburg, Kansas, now so sadly in the news has two local sights of great local pride. One is The World’s Second-Largest Stony-Iron Meteorite. The other is The World’s Largest Hand-Dug Well, 109 feet deep and very cool at the bottom, which is why it made an excellent trip-interruption stop for two little girls, then 12 and 5, in those long-ago not-very-air-conditioned days.
These two magnificent sights were housed right next to each other, so after lunch “at Burke’s coffee shop, enjoying their display of vintage beer ads inside and their little replica western town out back”, we admired the meteorite and then climbed doowwwwn the well before setting off again, “past Wichita, Emporia, and El Dorado…dinner in Ottowa, all you can eat smorgasbord for $3.99.”
Later, my 39 year-old self recorded with disappointment “a very chaste sunset, preppy shades of cream and fading denim.” But the people of Kansas–they were something special– “uniformly friendly, from Tom who swept the hall outside our motel room and brought me a free cup of coffee to every cheerful, pleasant waitress everywhere we stopped.”
And Greensburg itself–its warmth, its civic pride–Greensburg was memorable–so much so that I got email today from my then 12-year-old, “sad news from the home of the hand dug well.”
The Kansas town just tornado-smashed into kindling was little Greensburg. On Friday an F5 class storm leveled the town–this is the strongest and very rare kind of tornado, not seen in the US since 1999.
Greensburg is best known for having the world’s largest hand-dug well and being home to a 1,000-pound pallasite, or stony-iron, meteorite. After the storm, the structure around the well was gone, and there were reports the meteorite was missing.
So, if you are one of the people who thought, “A tornado in Kansas? No big deal” — the goal of this blogpost is to ask you to think again. And I hope that Tom, and all like him, will be OK.