Burnett's Mound

If you go through Topeka Kansas on the I-470 southern bypass, you will pass by this distinct hill. It's called Burnett's Mound, I recently learned.

A tornado hit Topeka on June 8, 1966. It was rated as an F5 and said to be the 5th most costliest tornado in U.S. history.

I would have been 3½ at the time. My father liked to go back to K-State, his alma mater, in Manhattan Kansas, so we were always driving down this stretch of road. His mother was a housemother at the Tri-Delt house at K-State, and we went back for football games and the spring Open House. We had just been down this stretch in April or May when Open House was scheduled, so we saw the route just before the tornado. I don't remember when we went down the road after the tornado, but it could have been in October, when football started back. I still remember what the hill looked like, it was decimated. This is one of my earliest memories, and some of the worst destruction you will ever see from a tornado. Each year, I remembered the spot where the tornado had struck, long after they rebuilt apartments on the hill.

I looked into the site and visited it, and found an interesting story. The hill was called Burnett's Mound by the white men, but the Indians had a legend about the mound. They said that the mound protected the area from tornados. Ironically, the tornado entered Topeka by coming in right across the mound. Maybe the old Indian Medicine Man foresaw the event, but just had it backwards. Or maybe they were suckering the White Man into a kill box.

The site used to have a big cross on the top. I looked on a map and saw that there was a road called Skyline Drive that went right up to it. The article said that the cross was moved to a nearby cemetery when people going up the hill to party repeatedly vandalized it. I wanted to go see for myself, so I drove up there on the way home from a trip.

Skyline Drive was paved at one time, you can still see sections of craked asphalt in some places. Now it is all gravel with huge limestone boulders ringing its perimeter, probably to prevent cars from dropping off the sides. When you get about 3/4 the way out to the point, there is a big metal swing gate across the road. The road continues up to a large circular parking lot, which you can tell used to be the destination for people to come up, it still has a ring of protective boulders around it. The day I visited, there was a large spent fireworks pack in the middle of the old parking lot, so you can tell that someone celebrated the 4th up there in style. I'll bet the fireworks from the top were visible a long way off.

At the end of the lot is a stairway, an old stone one flanked by a crumbling concrete one with a bent hand rail. Graffiti is on every surface. The little stair leads up to a distinct mount on the point of the ridge, very small compared to the entire hill, but a perfect little dome at the end of the ridge. I found a surveyors bench mark by the remnant of the trail, but nothing else to mark the significance of the site. Wildflowers and a stunted little tree were all that remained. I was expecting a monument or a historical plaque, but the vandals surely destroyed that long ago.

The view from the mound is fantastic. I've always thought of Topeka as an uninteresting looking town, but from the mound, the downtown skyline with the capitol is actually very pretty. There is a huge water tank (the reservoir kind, not the tower kind) on the front side of the mound, it's visible from the highway. There is a road leading back to it and a tall chain link fence with barbed wire on top surrounding it. The trees have littered down debris on top of the tank, and it looks like something that nature is trying to reclaim, despite the highway-sign yellow it's painted in.

The place has a eerie feel, even without knowing the tornadic history. I kept wondering if it was an Indian mound in the classical sense, a place where they buried and honored their dead. Even with all the neglect and vandalism, I guess it still is.

Wiped Out

I knew Greensburg Kansas.

I traveled through it many times and a few years back I stayed in a bed & breakfast across the street from the world's deepest hand dug well. In the picture, it was next to the red truck in the center.

I was asked to go pheasant hunting with some business acquaintances. They were excited about the hunting in western Kansas and came from all over, Minnesota, Georgia, Oklahoma. My sales manager was a real birding enthusiast. He scheduled a sales trip with me a few months before season, just to scout out the area.

Kansas has a program where farmers can submit their land for public hunting. These "walk in hunting areas" are shown in hunting maps that you can get at your local Walmart when you get your license, and are further identified by little signs on the side of the road. While I am not a big hunting enthusiast, I don't really like to eat wild game and therefore see no purpose in killing it myself, I'm not really opposed to it, as long as it's not overdone. The best part about hunting is getting out and walking around in nature. It's really nice to see the wide open spaces, smell all the crisp outdoor smells, and get some good exercise. I don't mind weapons, I like to shoot a gun, I just don't really want to hurt any animals. I've never understood how that is considered fun. I like watching the animals do their natural thing.

We went out and scouted all these locations, driving down little country roads and marking all the good spots with my GPS. I didn't take a camera - I'm not sure why. Now I wish I had. So we found all these great spots north and west of Greensburg and decided it was Prime Pheasant Country. We went into town to get a hotel reservation and found out that 2 months out, you've waited too long. Everything is taken. Somehow, we found a bed & breakfast across the street from the World's Largest Hand Dug Well, and we were set.

I arrived in the dark and remember the street light over near the well and the strange light of the neighborhood. I never hung out during the day, so I don't have sunny memories of what the area looked like.

We ended up having to double up in various rooms. I stayed in a Queen sized bed with my manager. Guys don't like to sleep in the same bed as other guys, it's pretty much taboo. I remember just thinking, the heck with it, I'm just sleeping. I was able to ignore it, but my manager was highly disturbed by it and got very little sleep. I never even groped him once. I guess we did not re-enact that Steve Martin John Candy scene from Planes, Trains, & Automobiles, either.

Everybody brought dogs. It's funny, if you've never hunted with dogs, you wouldn't expect the way it really works. The dogs are only loosely under the control of the people that are "commanding" them. I think that the dogs just naturally want to scoot around in the high grass and find these birds, it's like doggy cocaine for them. The people think they are going to go into a field and sweep it in a methodical way, but the dogs don't care about property lines or fences, they just follow their nose. The people, when it comes right down to it, figure that the dogs have much better noses and surely know better than the person where the birds are, so they don't really interfere.

The men from Minnesota treated their dogs like family members. They rode in the cab of the truck, often in their laps as they happily stuck there noses out the windows into the wind. The guys from Georgia treated their dogs like equipment. I remember wondering how a dog could stand being in a little box in the back of the pickup for so many hours during the day. The Minnesota dogs were better birders. That didn't stop the Georgia guy from making all kinds of snide remarks about how silly the Minnesota guys were in the way they treated their dogs.

The strange part of the trip was sitting around in the house in the evening. It was cold out and this was these people's house. It wasn't altered or modified so the family or guest have any kind of privacy or separation with each other. Imagine what it's like to have really bad alzheimer's and visit your family, only you don't really remember or know any of them. That's what it felt like. We're sitting around, not in our underwear, but we watched TV and ate and talked and lounged in chairs and couches and around the kitchen table with this very nice couple. They had that Kansas prairie personality. Kansas people are so nice. It's not like it's a studied gentility like southerners have, or a slick graciousness like Julia Childs had, they just don't know how else to be. I think it's written on their DNA or something. Throw into the mix our man from Georgia. A loud, hilarious, raucous guy, incapable of not making fun of anything and everything, this guy had the owner/wife in stitches the whole time. Mr. B&B actually warmed up to him, too. He was a little quiet and reserved before he got wound up. At one point, he was sharing with us a story about what an idiot his cousin's son-in-law was. I can't remember the particulars of the story, but it was incredible that this guy didn't burn down his house and shoot his foot off.

You can't help but visit a place like Greensburg and wonder why it was that people wanted to live there. There was a time when Kansas was free land. Most people farmed for a living and 40 acres was the ultimate dream. Nowadays most of the land is owned by big corporations and farming is only done on the mega scale. You won't find a farm with livestock and crops. People don't have chickens and a milk cow. Sheep and goats and free roaming pigs are really rare. Forget about horses and mules. Kansas is miles of wheat fields and an occasional field full of cattle. I'm not sure what the people in these little towns do for a living. Sure, you need a diner and barber, maybe a couple of bankers and lawyers, but 1400 people? There was only about 20 businesses in the whole town. Were they all hired hands in large corporate ranches?

The 2006 Harris Directory of Kansas Businesses lists 10 businesses. Four are health care related. Those are the four biggest. There's a tractor & implement place (the next biggest with 45 employees) and construction sand & ready mixed concrete. The farmer's coop, which is probably that white silo that survived the storm, employed 15 people. Not listed in the guide would be government, city administration and the county seat, and there would be schools. None of the gas stations, retail stores, or cafes or diners are listed in the guide. Kiowa County had about 3600 people in it and half were in Greensburg.

What happens to your stuff when a tornado hits your house? I'm assuming that you survive. Furniture gets shredded and crushed, plates get smashed, and clothes get blown away. What about all your photographs? Your computer hard drive and all the files? Your financial records? How do you rebuild after that? How is having your house destroyed in a matter of minutes any less traumatic than being in a war zone? What about the pets? How many of them were wiped out?

9 deaths in a town that size has got to be hard, too. I'm sure everybody in town knew of them, if they didn't know them well.

I can't imagine what they are going through. I just remember what it was like before when someone opened their home to us and welcomed us into their lives.