Coniferous breezes infused with earthly smells of moss and fermenting high bush cranberry with a tint of turned loam, the smell of smoke from the birch logs in our wood stove. Oh the scents of my northern home.
The first night I was back on the farm, the dogs were doing their job keeping the howling wolves at bay from the lambs that in a few days would end up in some of the finest restaurants Prince George has to offer.
Though I have only been living in the north (including Alaska) for 10 years, the north has now been so engrained in my flesh, my trip home to Kansas seemed as foreign as being across seas, though there were fleeting memories often returning with scent and taste.
They say that the olfactory senses can illicit some of the strongest memories and I can hold this to be true from my wonderings in the edge where the hardwood forest meets prairie.
When I got out of my rental car in Kansas and first had the scent of the farmland and the many species of the Juglans genus (walnut, pecan, butternut etc.) coupled with the sound of crickets to which I had not had the pleasure of hearing or smelling for almost eleven years, it was bittersweet. The only thing missing in those oddly warm temperatures was the droning sound of the cicada, the world's loudest insect that can be heard from over two miles away.
The question my wife had asked me many years ago when I had taken her to Kansas has finally had time to sink in. "How did you come from here?" my wife asked after a visit to Kansas around Thanksgiving time several years ago.
While most Kansans and I don't share much in common politically seeing how the election went, my roots or bonds of the Midwestern breadbasket reach deeply as the native prairie grasses reach into the rich loam for sustenance.
As I dug into my plate of fried chicken and okra, eyeing the sides of chicken gizzards, I knew in my veins that Kansas was home and my blood was forged from these soils and the ever calorie rich sustenance that is biscuits and gravy known as breakfast in Kansas.
As soon as discussion took hold of politics, which are inevitable for such a controversial election, it was clear that I have assumed (or always had) the masses of Canadian values and beliefs from what I observe and discuss living in the Prince George region.
Though I may be biased at the fact my wife is a teacher and I have traveled outside my comfort zone, it is very apparent that the Midwest could do well with outside influence of new ideas and higher wages for teachers as well as overall funding in the education system.
The political discourse that took place while home was that of pure propaganda from social media. The facts were always absent in political conversation, facts which can be easily researched with the newfangled thing called the internet (though this takes practice in sifting through the information for truth and peer-reviewed unbiased information). I mean hey, or hay, Google Earth's centre is in my hometown of Chanute, Kansas, due to its software developer Dan Webb growing up there on a farm.
The common fear rhetoric of the Democrats taking the rural man's guns was so overwhelmingly absurd it was almost comical. I actually heard from a conservative discourse "don't you remember when Obama tried taking everyone's guns away?" This obviously never happened even despite all the mass shootings during Obama's presidency.
I digress, back to the question of how did I come from the centre of the U.S.
While sitting at the Free State Brewery in Lawrence, Kansas, (the liberal dot in Kansas), admiring the conversations of individuals close to my friend and me, we saw the heart of Kansas's ever deep resistance to the masses such as that of John Brown's convictions of the oppression of African Americans, which were ever so neatly forged into a plaque at the brewery.
To the stars through difficulties or Ad astera per aspera is Kansas's motto and it still reins so in the conversations in Lawrence, the birthplace of the Civil War. It is in these difficulties that I have found my way. Coming from an economically oppressed town where most are living at or below poverty line, I found strength and resistance to follow my dreams.
Kansans work hard for a living and make meager wages supporting the nation's insatiable appetite for wheat and soy, knowing that what they do is for the greater good of the republic. It is a shame that the ideals of the populist party (down with the big businessman taking all the profits from the farmers who feed them all) was suppressed due to their anti-conscription beliefs or the common Midwestern family may be doing much better off financially and educationally in an egalitarianesque way.
It was in my travels recently back home that I realized I am not different from the people of Kansas. I just merely chose a direction that for now is not often traveled any more, not unlike Robert Frost's fork.
There is much to be said of the trailblazers of Kansas from Dwight D. Eisenhower, James Naismith (though he was actually Canadian) or even Wyatt Earp.
Hell, if it wasn't for Dodge City, Kansas, people wouldn't be able to say let's get the hell out of Dodge.
So here I am now on a farm east of Prince George, only hoping that I can live up to some of the more notable characters of my home state and create a better place for all who reside in the province and country that I now call my own.
