[pct-l] RE: Kansas

[jcoyle at sanjuan.edu (John Coyle)]

Here's how Mark Twain described Kansas in his 1850s book "Roughing It."
(Chapter two)



By eight o'clock everything was ready, and we were on the other side of the
river.  We jumped into the stage, the driver cracked his whip, and we bowled
away and left "the States" behind us.  It was a superb summer morning, and
all the landscape was brilliant with sunshine.  There was a freshness and
breeziness, too, and an exhilarating sense of emancipation from all sorts of
cares and responsibilities, that almost made us feel that the years we had
spent in the close, hot city, toiling and slaving, had been wasted and
thrown away.  We were spinning along through Kansas and in the course of an
hour and a half we were fairly abroad on the great Plains.  Just here the
land was rolling--a grand sweep of regular elevations and depressions as far
as the eye could reach--like the stately heave and swell of the ocean's
bosom after a storm.  And everywhere were cornfields, accenting with squares
of deeper green, this limitless expanse of grassy land.  But presently this
sea upon dry ground was to lose its "rolling" character and stretch away for
seven hundred miles as level as a floor!



Interesting how he compares the plains to the ocean.  What does this have to
do with the PCT?  Well, it would be a good book to take along to read on a
PCT hike as some of it takes place in PCT Territory.



John Coyle
Slainte agus saol chugat!