Our theme for the month of October is “states.”
As my plane landed in Spain, I thought of Kansas.
At the time, I brushed it off as lack of sleep, or maybe some early homesickness, and almost forgot it in my frantic race to get through passport control and to my next flight.
However, a few weeks later, better rested and with the apparently infinite time of a long bus trip, I was traveling through Castilla-La Mancha. The grey-brown hills, which somehow gave the impression of being both round and angular, stretched outside my window, their crests marked with short, tan tufts of grass and broken bits of rock. Every now and there, we’d pass windmills—sometimes of the early modern, quixotic kind, but more often of the modern turbine variety—or signs featuring the outline of a black bull.
It did look like Kansas, I decided. Specifically, the Flint Hills.
Thanks to various family vacations and visits to out-of-state relatives, I’ve spent a respectable amount of time staring out a car window at the Great Plains. As an angsty, sometimes bratty teen, I thought the Great Plains were the worst place imaginable.
Some states—namely, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana—got a pass for having mountains. I had just enough common sense as a high school student to realize that the mountains were more astounding because they butted up to a treeless plain.
Others I deemed interesting enough to have their faults described—in my diary, to my friends, at my unfortunate parents—with some degree of specificity.
Oklahoma was, for instance, a vast wasteland. To my young eyes, accustomed to the green hills and cornfields of Michigan, the state, especially the Red Bed Plains in the north-central part of the state, looked like the set of a grimly futuristic sci-fi novel: the red highway winded through brown fields, interrupted only by the alien forms of grain elevators and oil refineries, and tiny, half-abandoned towns.
The prairies of the Dakotas, on the other hand, were terrifyingly flat and green. They stretched out like some primordial planet where woolly mammoths might graze alongside the buffalo (another point in their favor) and the cattle.
Kansas was not one of these states. It was just grey-brown and incredibly windy.
Thus, it was surprising to find myself thinking of it as I travelled through a country I was almost tirelessly willing to find interesting. This wasn’t the last time a place in Spain reminded me of somewhere in the U.S. A couple months later, in April, I would visit Galicia and realize I really did want to go home to Michigan.
However, I hadn’t expected to think of Kansas at all. Especially not with something like nostalgia, well over a month before I would feel homesickness for any other American landscape.
I don’t know whether my younger self would have appreciated Kansas more if I had known I would be reminded of it in Spain. In fact, I rather suspect that they wouldn’t have believed me; I was an obstinate and contrarian teenager.
Nevertheless, the memory of that bus ride comes back to me whenever I find myself inclined to dismiss somewhere or something as mere filler. When will I find myself thinking of it with wistfulness?
After graduating from Calvin in May 2025 with a degree in writing and Spanish, G. E. Buller decided to stay in Grand Rapids. Currently, she is working as a special education aide. Her non-writing hobbies include fussing over her aquarium and reading about medieval/early modern nuns.
