Garden City and Spearville, Kansas

We took a few field trips outside Dodge, the first heading east about seventeen miles to the town of Spearville, population eight hundred, deep in corn and wheat country. Prosperity has come to Spearville (sounds like spur-vul), recently, with the growth of wind-produced electricity, which has more than doubled in the last five years in the United States. “Out here,” Mayor Kevin Heeke told us, “anything under a twenty-mile-an-hour wind…is a breeze.”

Capitalizing on that natural asset, farmers have let energy companies plant rows of giant space-age-like turbine towers in their fields. With a two-hundred-plus-foot tower, topped by a one-hundred-plus-foot blade, and sweeping nearly an acre of airspace, the windmills have changed the landscape of the town.

Mayor Heeke described the farmers’ and town’s reaction. “People could see a way of generating income. The towers don’t take up that much space. They farm right around them. It just goes with the city of Spearville.” Farmers’ incomes have as much as doubled. The city has benefited as well. We drove past new playgrounds, a new school, and other signs of economic health that the wind energy has brought to Spearville.

Another day, we drove west from Dodge City toward its neighbor Garden City. Dodge City, Garden City, and Liberal compose the so-called beef triangle of Kansas. Dodge envies Garden its big-box stores; Garden envies Dodge its impressive development and buildings, like the arena, the Boot Hill Casino, the Long Branch Lagoon water park, the raceway, and the classy athletic fields. Neither seems to envy Liberal.

As we headed to Garden City, about fifty miles west of Dodge, we passed farms, feedlots, and a wind-turbine blade distribution center. On U.S. 50, we routinely slowed behind trucks hauling cattle or harvested wheat. Also, small convoys trailed the transporter of a single 120-foot wind turbine blade like a presidential motorcade. When one of those trucks gets to an intersection, traffic stops in all directions as it navigates the turn.

We were meeting up with Sister Roserita Weber and Sister Janice Thome, nuns of the Dominican Order of Peace, who serve the poor in Garden City, to accompany them on their delivery rounds from the town’s food pantry. The two sisters were sympathetic but no-nonsense. They dealt with tough cases daily, as they taught folks to drive, or helped them negotiate medical bills, or drove families the seven-hour round-trip to Wichita for services found only in the big city. They lived modestly in a midcentury split-level in the center of town, a place comfortable yet basic. A large statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary presided from a pedestal in a corner of the dining room.

The food pantry was set up in a small warehouse. We waited our turn to sign in and assemble our shares to distribute. A line of others waited behind us, showing the documentation entitling them to the free food.

I was expecting fresh foods similar to those in Ajo’s food bank, which included at least some potatoes, broccoli, and citrus. But in the absence of a thriving local garden-to-table food movement like Ajo’s, Garden City’s donated goods came from some of their big-box stores or chains. A typical delivery that day included a few frozen entrées, bags of rolls, a pizza, a pair or two of brightly colored socks, a pack of cookies, and maybe a roll of frozen venison (although Sister Janice worried that none of her recipients—all Hispanic—would be familiar with venison or how to cook it). One lucky family would receive a frozen chicken.

Garden City, like Dodge and Liberal, is now a majority-minority city. Its population is already mostly Hispanic (estimates range from 50 to 60 percent), and trending upward as new employees find better-than-minimum-wage yet very difficult jobs at the meatpacking plants.

Sister Roserita and Jim went in one direction, and Sister Janice and I started in the other. Sister Janice asked me if I needed the air conditioner on in the car. It was clear to me that the right answer would be no, since the AC would consume more fuel. If Sister Janice could take it, so could I. We each delivered to five or six families, those whose plans for a new life built around the meatpacking plants had slipped off the rails. Sister Janice and I started at the bungalow of a woman named Hilda. Her house was meticulously kept, with heavy wooden furniture, photos, and decor clearly from Mexico. In 1989, she had been badly injured in a car accident, which killed her only son and left her able to take care of herself and her housekeeping, but little more. Her husband had recently taken up with another woman, leaving debts on his way out. Hilda fell between the financial cracks, receiving a monthly settlement from her accident that was too little to allow her to do more than scrape by and too much to let her qualify for other benefits or move forward in her life. I asked if I could take a few photos, and she asked me back, immediately and rhetorically, if I would like to see her bedroom. She posed proudly next to the bed, her pièce de résistance, with its ornately carved heavy wooden headboard and an opulent red-and-gold damask medallion bedspread.

Sister Janice and I drove on to another Hispanic family with a single mother. At the door of the small, dark house—the kind where you feel the floorboards give a little beneath you from the lack of a solid foundation, the dim interior not quite cool against the summer heat—we met the teenage daughter, who cared for her epileptic brother while her mom was at work, and she chatted with us about her summer. She said she wasn’t doing much, except reading. Right now, she said, she was reading a book called Bad Boy Next Door. I later saw online that there are two books with that title, and a third more emphatically named So Bad: Bad Boy Next Door. She declined the venison we offered, as she didn’t know how to cook it.

As we raced through the next stops, which were all trailers, everything began to blur. Here are two families’ stories in short:

A woman from Guatemala fled with her husband from the guerrillas; they gained temporary political asylum in the United States; the husband lost his status and was repatriated; the woman moved quickly with the children when neighbors told her the INS was also looking for her. She has a number of kids (five or six; I wasn’t sure), and for a while, she raised some chickens and earned $100 a week by babysitting. Then she became sick; she started bleeding, the source of which turned out to be a tumor. No one was home when we stopped by, so we left the box on the steps to the trailer door, piling the frozen items together and hoping some family member would arrive home soon before everything thawed.

Another Hispanic woman lived in a small, neat trailer, with flowers and a carefully groomed bit of outdoor landscaping. She said she had been serially beaten by her husband, who then started in on their eight-year-old daughter. One day, after the husband inadvertently left the family’s only cell phone behind, the woman managed to call the police. They arrived, but so did the husband, who persuaded his wife not to press charges. He has since left her alone, but without a chance for winning a non-immigrant U visa (for those who have suffered substantial physical or mental abuse), since she disqualified herself by not pressing charges. Catch-22. With hopes of a path to moving on, she is working on a U visa for her daughter, also abused, but who, as a minor, can apply for the visa. If that works, the daughter might be able to piggyback her mother along as sole guardian of a minor. There were many complicated stories in Garden City.

Sister Janice’s cell phone continued to ring during our rounds. People were asking her for all manner of help, like gas money to get to Dodge City or answers for questions on a job application. Sister Janice says she gets twenty or thirty calls a week, and considerably more at the point in the month when utilities get disconnected.

We went to another trailer park; this one was more dismal since it had been abandoned by many occupants who numbered among the twenty-three hundred workers who lost their jobs after a fire in the ConAgra Beef Company on Christmas night of 2000. Some vacant trailers were covered with graffiti, their windows shattered. Sister Janice told me that initiation rites from gangs included this kind of derring-do that ruined the property. The stories from the families who remained in this park were entwined and twisted, more and less hopeful.

As I tried to absorb the plights and probable destinies for families like these, the indefatigable Sister Janice dropped me off at her house while she pressed on to transport a family from a school’s summer free-lunch program to their trailer. By then, I had only one recurring, clichéd thought: They are all one accident or illness away from total disaster.