Kansas Lightning

 We drove into Kansas during a thunderstorm, but it isn’t the thunder that I remember. It’s the lightning, almost purple, and the wind.

“In the days of the Frontier,” my host mom told me, “people were driven mad by these winds. They could already see the Rockies in the distance, but it took days until they reached them – if they ever did. And all the while, the winds were howling.”

The storm rocked the car. I thought of tornados and the Wizard of Oz. It didn’t seem unlikely at all that these winds could simply pick us up and drop us into an entirely new world. Actually, I felt as though that had happened already. I was a foreign exchange student and only sixteen years old, and I had never experienced anything like this at home in Germany.

The next morning, the air was perfectly still and clear. There was no trace left of the nightly weather; not even a few leaves on the long brown grass. It was winter, and there simply were no leaves left anywhere. The trees looked dead and the small pond in the farmhouse’s backyard was black beneath the low-hanging clouds.

I wandered through the empty, silent farmhouse while my host parents were still asleep. Both of them had grown up in the Midwest, even though they were living in Colorado when I came to stay with them. Up until this day, the spectacular scenery of the Rocky Mountains had been my only impression of the Unites States. I had written excited e-mails describing the steepness of the slopes and the colorful wild flowers and the river fittingly named Roaring Fork for the thundering noise of its water and the way it forked and twisted around bends and little islands. In one of those mails to my friends and family, I might even have said something like “I’m so glad I didn’t end up on the Great Plains!”.

Yet as I stood by the window on that day after the lilac-lightning almost-tornado and looked out at the winter landscape, it dawned on me how much I’d underestimated this part of the country.

At some point in the meantime, the wind had picked up again; as a whisper this time instead of a howl. I could hear it from behind the window. It sounded like endlessness and opportunity and half-lost dreams. If I had been sent to Kansas for my year abroad, I realized then, I would have loved this place just as much as any other. Places become important because of the experiences we gain there, and as long as we keep our eyes and minds open, there are beauty and experiences to be found anywhere – even in Kansas in the midst of winter, for these are the other things I remember from that short holiday: the stars of Orion glittering undisturbed by any artificial light, puzzles and laughter with my host parents, and the Christmas decorations all over Kansas City, which turned out to be part of the same world after all.

About the author: Marie H. Mittmann loves writing, travelling, and occasionally writing about her travels. She is a student of Media and Communication Studies and the author of several short stories, both in English and in German.

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