We go there year-round, and there is always something cool to see.  There are crazy rock formations, like the table rocks on the Alum Creek trail or the red sandstone spires of Red Rock Canyon or the bluffs and caves of Horsethief Canyon.  We routinely see a lot of wildlife, ranging from herons and turkeys and barn owls, to deer and coyotes and beavers.  On Thanksgiving weekend a few years ago, we saw a mountain lion bounding out of Red Rock Canyon (though most people don't believe it).

Prairie wildflowers blanket the canyons in spring.  In summer, purple thistles bloom, and lizards skitter along the sandy trails.  In September, the sumac starts to turn red, and the river delta fills with gulls and pelicans and all sorts of shore birds.  In winter, the prairie grass turns gold, and the natural springs in the canyons freeze up, turning crystalline and treacherous.

It is truly beautiful -- and it's the one place on earth where I have a real connection to the land, a real sense of belonging.

East of the town of Kanopolis at Faris Caves, you can still find "petroglyphs" I stupidly carved into the sandstone 30 years ago while camping as a Boy Scout.  I hunted the public land and fished the Smoky Hill with my dad and uncles when I was a young boy, back when I still had something to prove by hunting and fishing. In high school, I drank beer and Boone's Farm wine with friends, on sandbars at river bends with names like "the tubes," "trestle," and "eagle's nest."

Even today, history confronts me there everywhere I turn.  My grandpa Ostrom lost his life maintaining the gravel roads I now drive on my way to hike and bike in the Smoky Hill Wildlife Area.  The muddy headwaters I now paddle with Trish in a yellow tandem kayak, my maternal grandpa used to paddle in an aluminum canoe he painted with eagle feathers and christened the "Satanta."

(Satanta was a Kiowa chief who, as legend has it, escaped the Fort Harker brig in what is now Kanopolis, by bending the bars of his cell window, squeezing through, and jumping from the second story. The bars of the guardhouse are still bent to this day.)

My mom's dad -- the skipper of the Satanta -- like me, dreamed of getting out of Kansas.  As a young man at war in Europe, he was a decorated 155mm Howitzer Battery Chief for Patton's 45th Infantry Division.  In his wartime letters to my future grandma (his high school sweetheart), he mapped out his master plan to head west after the war, to Washington or Oregon or California.  And he did it too.  He returned from Europe late in 1945, married my grandma, bought a black Buick, and went west…. But they weren't gone long.  Within a few years, they were back in Kanopolis, fishing the Smoky Hill and building a house (a "girls' dormitory," as grandpa liked to say) for their four daughters.

The realist philosopher, Manuel de Landa, says that we, and everything around us, are just complex "accumulations of materials shaped and hardened by history."  If he's right, there's no escaping our past or the places that occupy it, because we are our past.  The older I get, for better or for worse, the more right I think he might be.

Many of my forebears, on both sides of my family, lived lives here that were hardworking yet fulfilling, difficult but uncomplicated, and now they rest in small plots within a few miles of the Smoky Hill River.  When it's my time to go, with any luck, there will be someone around to do me the favor of scattering my ashes there as well.

Anyway, having just spent a much-needed weekend at the cabin, I felt compelled to post a few photos.  Enjoy…

My favorite bike route is a 26.5-mile loop around western Dickinson County, between Solomon and Abilene.  I like it for many reasons -- bucolic scenery, good roads, rolling hills, sparse traffic (except for a brief treacherous stretch on K-15).  There's even a strong sense of history; the Chisholm Trail crosses my route in two places.  

But without question, my favorite part is the greyhounds.

Abilene, Kansas is the self-proclaimed Greyhound Capital of the World and is home to the Greyhound Hall of Fame and the National Greyhound Association, which is the sole registry for racing greyhounds in North America.  Consequently, greyhound breeding farms are littered throughout Dickinson County, and there are three along my bike route.

In order to let the dogs stretch their legs, these farms typically have several 100-yard-long dog runs.  Now, I don't really care all that much about dog racing (and I care even less about dog breeding), but I do like greyhounds.  And there is absolutely nothing cooler than riding your bike along Country Club Road and having 50 greyhounds sprint from one end of their runs to the other to greet you at the road.  Granted, they probably just view me as a gigantic rabbit, but what the hell…. I still enjoy the attention.

I have tried to take up running time and again in the past decade or so, and my efforts have always been rewarded not just with failure, but also with overuse injuries, achy knees, and stress fractures.  A normal person would probably give up, but I am blessed and cursed with this Pollyanna sense of optimism about my physical abilities.  I'm sort of the opposite of a hypochondriac, possessed by the notion that every ache and ailment is no big deal and can be fixed by hard work and better living. (It's a sickness really... just ask my friends and family and co-workers.)  So, in my most recent bid to overcome gravity, inertia, and my obvious physical limitations and transform myself into a runner, I decided to start totally from scratch, by walking barefoot-ish a couple days a week in my Vibram FiveFingers.  Forgive me if this starts to sound a bit like an infomercial, but I think I'm onto something.  My knees, hips, ankles and feet feel better than they have in years.

FiveFingers, incidentally, are minimalistic foot-glove-shoe-type-things that allow you to enjoy all the benefits of barefoot walking or running -- such as stronger arches and ankles -- while reducing the possibility that you'll end up in the emergency room getting beer bottle shards and rusty nails removed from your foot (a definite concern where I live).  They are also good for making people in your local rural grocery store squirm. Folks REALLY want to ask what in the hell you have on your feet, but they also don't want to be seen socializing with some goofball walking around in funky gray and lime green, rubberized socks.

So, why did I decide to fork out $90 for these things?  About a year ago, I read Born to Run by Christopher McDougal, an excellent book that Trish was lucky enough to get for her birthday from my mom. (Thanks mom!) This book was an eye-opener for me.  When I started reading it, I was still about 245 lbs, had a vicious hammer toe on my right foot, and had been wearing arch supports for about two years because my ankles felt as if they would snap like twigs.... I was in a sad state of affairs.

Anyway, one of the big themes explored in the book is this: despite the fact that we are a nation full of folks walking around with hammer toes and bunions, our messed up feet are not some sort of unhappy accident of evolution.  According to McDougal, we actually evolved to run ridiculously long distances in order to "persistence hunt." That is, we thrived as a species because of our stubborn ability to outlast larger and quicker prey in marathon-like chases that ended with the animals keeling over dead from exhaustion. By McDougal's reasoning, endurance running isn't an unnatural activity for us (hence the title of the book), and our feet don't need a whole lot of prosthetic help.  Not only are fancy, heavily cushioned running shoes and orthotics unnecessary, but they make our foot problems worse by minimizing the feedback we get every time our feet strike the ground.  In essence, modern shoes cushion our feet too much, encouraging us to pound harder to find a firm footing.  According to McDougal, problems such as plantar fasciitis, hammer toes, and IT band syndrome were barely even on the radar until Nike came along and invented the running shoe.

When I read this, my mind as totally blown.  I immediately got off the couch and started running barefoot from one end of the house to the other, and then up and down the street in front of our house like some sort of overgrown cross between Sasquatch and Forrest Gump.  McDougal was right!  For me, it was easier to run barefoot than it was to walk in cushioned shoes! My feet haven't touched an arch support since.

I stripped all the insoles out of my shoes.  I considered fashioning them into a Nike swoosh and burning them in effigy in my backyard, but pagan rituals don't go over well in Solomon, KS.  My main criteria now for any new pair of shoes is that they have (1) as little arch support as possible and (2) no cushioning. Hence my wacky FiveFingers.  (By the way, I learned about FiveFingers in Born to Run as well.... Read it.  It's a great book.)  

I'm not going to kid you or blow smoke about miracle cures.  When you're overweight and have been babying your feet for years and years, recovery takes a long time.   For almost a year, the only barefoot walking I did was in the house and around the block, because my hammer toe made it painful to walk barefoot very far on hard surfaces.  It also took a long time for my arches, ankles,  shins, and knees to get used to supporting all my bulk.  But my progress is unmistakable.

I'm now walking two miles in my FiveFingers, a couple days a week. And once I can comfortably walk three miles, I will start to run some short, barefoot intervals as well.  And my feet?  Well, they are just getting Herculean!  They have, strangely enough, gotten wider.  And as my arches have gotten stronger and higher, I have gotten about a half inch taller (no joke). There are also never-before-seen muscles bulging out between my metatarsals.  It's freaky.

Anyway, I'm not much for proselytizing or even giving advice for that matter.  All I can say is that going minimal is working for me.  And if I someday end up running a marathon (a long shot, but again, I'm an optimist), I may just be sporting a funky looking pair of Vibram FiveFingers.

If there is one thing I've realized since I started my quixotic fitness journey, it's that there is something about seeing others successfully lose weight and get in shape that makes a lot of people deeply uncomfortable. Perhaps it has something to do with the level of commitment required.  (Or it's possible I'm enough of a jerk that people would rather see me fall on my face.) I'm not exactly sure, but I think it has something to do with the single-mindedness it takes to exercise your freedoms.  

I'll be the first to admit it; I've become a zealot.  I want to be able to pedal a bike, paddle a kayak, and climb mountains until the day I die, no matter whether that day comes tomorrow or 60 years from now.  For me, these   things make life worthwhile, and I'm willing to do what it takes to keep at them, including getting down to a manageable weight.  (I estimate I've got about 25 pounds to go.)

I've just seen too many of my friends and family and loved ones endure crippling ailments and give up on the things they love doing, because they are unwilling to exercise and drop some weight.  I have vowed I will not suffer the same fate.

However, living the life you want to live is hard work--because all our default options are typically bad ones.  Free will tends to take a beating when it comes up against the ease and conveniences of an open-market society -- especially one where bad habits sell like hot cakes (and more specifically, a tall stack of IHOP hot cakes covered with high-fructose-corn-syrup, strawberries, chocolate sauce, caramel, and Reddiwip).  

There's a Wendy's and a McDonald's on every corner.  Well-funded marketing efforts tease us with clever campaigns and dress up unhealthy food in pretty packaging.  Workplaces have snack machines filled with all sorts of garbage. Grocery stores and convenience stores are stocked full of food so heavily processed that even the cockroaches won't eat it. Fresh meat at the supermarket is filled with hormones and antibiotics; fresh vegetables are drenched in pesticides.  

In short, food production in the western world is quite simply broken.  But it is what it is because it's cheap, efficient and convenient.  

So, let's say you want to exercise one of your many liberties, and you choose to eat good food. That's fine, but you've got to work harder for it and pay more for it.  Not to mention the fact that, given the scarcity of healthy already-prepared food, you have to seek out the ingredients and cook for yourself--which requires a lot of time and effort.  Freedom is indeed not free.

But the problem goes beyond simple access to good food and speaks to something bigger, something more fundamental.  In a relatively free market such as ours, self-reinforcing systems of exchange pop up like mushrooms, fertilized by collective need, want and desire (not necessarily in that order).  And ironically enough, these systems thrive by making us all a little more dependent, a little less free.

For example, participation in the system of food production becomes less a matter of choice than of degree. Unless you are a subsistence farmer, growing everything you eat in your backyard, there is no escaping it. After all, (1) people gotta eat, and (2) people gotta pay their outrageous mortgages, so therefore (3) people gotta work like dogs and have no time to cook. Consequently, (4) people eat whatever processed food-like substance they can find at their local grocery store or convenience store or fast-food-in-sheep's-clothing eatery, such as Chili's.

It is possible to minimize one's exposure to such systems by, for example, living below one's pay grade.  But who wants that?  After all, it's patriotic to blow money we don't have and keep the economy strong, right?   

Maybe this is the libertarian in me speaking -- and this may sound strange, given that we live in the most free, open and prosperous country in the world -- but we as a people are perfectly happy trading our freedoms for convenience and status.  And perhaps that is why people get so uncomfortable when a member of the herd starts bucking these powerful systems.  When someone shows the tenacity to overcome not just the intrinsic physiological and mental challenges -- but also the extrinsic social, cultural and economic difficulties -- of maintaining good health and losing weight, it confronts the people around him or her with how locked in they really are.

Granted, it's rather self-serving and arrogant to suggest that I'm somehow freer than many people who have the same range of choices I do (and perhaps more choices than I do).  But I certainly feel freer, especially when I go to Wal-Mart and see obese, but otherwise able-bodied people wheeling themselves around in courtesy wheelchairs.  When it comes down to it, every time I make a tofu salad or head out the door for a 27-mile bike ride, in my own little way, I feel like I'm sticking it to the Man.  To paraphrase a line from Food, Inc., in an open market, we vote with our pocketbooks every time we make a purchase and every time we choose what type of  food to put down our gullets.

I, for one, plan to make my vote count, no matter how uncomfortable it makes people.

It's not fair, but cyclists get held to a higher standard.  When I call people on their disparaging comments about bikers, the standard reasoning they offer is that we get away with breaking traffic laws.  In Kansas, bicyclists must obey all the rules of the road that motorists do.  When bikers break those laws, it makes us all look bad.  

Never mind that the typical motorist on any given day breaks at least one traffic law, most commonly speed.  Sometimes it's illegal turns and u-turns.  In some places, it's talking on cell phones.  And generally, other motorists who have to share the road do not give a rat's ass--UNLESS the behavior of the offending party directly affects them.  Which is exactly why a lot of over-caffeinated, red-faced motorists (and worse yet truck drivers) hate cyclists.  

The fact that I'm out catching some breeze in my face on a hilly, Dickinson county road means that several poor saps are going to be five seconds later to their destination because they had to slow down before passing me.  Rational or not, this really torques people off.  Couple that with the fact that I'm all decked out in spandex shorts, a dayglo green jersey, and funky helmet that makes me look like some sort of overgrown, gay martian, and people are more likely brand me as "one of them bikers" and feel no compunction whatsoever toward running me in the ditch.  

This "otherness" of bicyclists wouldn't be a big deal, if the stakes weren't so high for us.  A motorist encounters a biker, and the worst that will happen is that he or she will end up getting home a few seconds later.  On the other hand, a biker encounters a motorist, and the worst that can happen is she or he ends up roadkill.  

Again, most people are reasonable enough that they will give you your four feet when passing, even though they may not like it.  But that fraction of a percent who are angrily willing to pass you at 65 MPH and miss clipping you with their rearview mirror by inches -- those are the ones that give me pause.  Especially the truck drivers.  I'm convinced that if I die an untimely death, it will be at the hands of some toothless, angry moron who had to bring a cheat sheet to pass his CDL exam.  (Sorry.... near-death experiences have made me a little bitter.)

With all that said, the burden is on the cyclists to be good stewards for our sport/pastime.  We have to obey the law and set a good example.  We have to stop at stop signs, even when there are no cars for miles and the prospect of overcoming gravity and friction to get moving again makes us just want to gun it.  We have to resist flipping motorists the bird when they pass too close (I say that as much for myself as anyone).  And probably most importantly, we need to calmly and coolly stand up for ourselves when people are talking trash -- because if we keep quiet, people will never realize that we aren't just weirdos in strange clothes who impede traffic.  We're also neighbors, friends, and associates who every now and again, wear normal clothing (albeit with our gay bike shorts underneath ;-).