Wheatfields, cornfields, more wheatfields, more cornfields - aha! There's a field of some sort of fodder crop. Now that's variety. Hmmm, is that combine harvester a John Deere or a Massey Ferguson? (I actually know that because JDs are always green.) How many yellow caterpillars have I run over in the last ten miles? Is the wind blowing from the South West or the South South West? These are the existential ruminations of the long-distance cyclist as he meanders across the endless prairie, vainly attempting to keep his brain from dissolving into mush.
The music inside the head is another thing. It just won't bloody well go away, and it's never anything pleasant or interesting - always some neurone-dissolving John Denver song, or a fragment of some 70s pop tune that would insult the intelligence of a gnat. How did this stuff get in there anyhow, and why is it retained? Surely there's limited enough room in a normal human brain for all the important and interesting stuff, without storing up all this mindless crap for some future time when you just might be cycling across an endless plain in mind-numbing heat and need some sub-intelligent twaddle to keep yourself occupied. Why can't my brain retain important stuff, like how to tie really clever fishing knots, or how long you actually boil an egg to get it just right.
The wheat harvest is under way in Western Kansas, and we're dodging convoys of trucks hauling giant combine harvesters and other outsize machines. Motels and campgrounds are full of contract harvesting teams, and it's often difficult to find a place to stay. The wind blows hard most of the day, usually from the south, so it's on our left shoulders as we head west, but it regularly swings to the south-west and becomes almost a headwind. The few stretches of the route (rowt) on which we swing to the north are bliss - the brisk tailwind pushing us along.
A common sight in the Kansas wheatlands is a nodding oil well amongst the grain. In some areas there are hundreds of them, rocking and grinding away, sucking up the sludge left hundreds of feet below by decaying carboniferous forests that covered this region 200 million years ago. An interesting irony occurs to me as I ride by. This being the bible belt, the proportion of Kansans who believe the Earth was created by God in six days a mere 6,000 years ago is probably considerably higher than the America-wide figure of 65%. This means that a sizeable proportion of the folk who profit from the remains of those forests, don't actually believe they ever existed.
On one memorable day, the mercury hits 105 Fahrenheit, and we settle in at an airconditioned cafe near Toronto, Kansas, to wait out the heat of the day. It's impossible to ride. With the blustery wind, the extreme dryness and the searing heat, I know what Black Saturday in Victoria must have felt like. The owner of the cafe is a tall, impressive woman of Cherokee descent, with traditional tattoos on every exposed bit of skin. She's friendly and hospitable and keeps refilling my "bottomless" coffee cup.
I've taken to getting up at dawn and putting 40 or 50 miles behind me before the wind gets up and the temperature hits the 90s. I can't prevail upon Ryan and Joe to do likewise. They sleep in, and catch me by lunchtime. Cycling through the bible belt at dawn sometimes produces interesting sights.
Finally, after seven days of slogging across Kansas, the Colorado state line appears. The prairie doesn't end there of course: the terrain stays fairly flat, although wilder and more like outback Australian cattle country, for another 150 miles or so, until, west of Pueblo, the Rocky Mountains begin. Much more of that later.
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