The Secret Kansas Elms

No. 4 -- This remote grove of elm trees survived a 20th century plague of Dutch Elm disease; now in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, I suspected the worst

Western Kansas is called The Golden Buckle of the Grain Belt and these cattle feed lots (enjoy your burger!) and grain elevators highlight the intensity of the agriculture in the area. “The smell of money,” I would say out loud to myself whenever I smelled a feed lot — an old, dumb farmer joke. I was searching for a forgotten stand of surviving Elm trees. Sound by NPR. All photos and videos by Stephen

Riding high in my pickup I had a clear view over wheat fields to the horizon. The highest point in Kansas is still shy of the lowest point in Colorado, and the state has always burdened itself with an altitude complex. As a kid growing up in Kansas, I was taught that the state was actually flatter than a pancake. Sure enough, decades later, scientists compared the surface of Kansas to a flapjack from The International House of Pancakes. The flapjack lost.

I headed towards the Nebraska border to an area I’d never visited, even though it was only 50 miles from Jewel, where my maternal grandmother grew up on a farm. My phone pinged and I pulled over to read the text: Jolynn, a childhood friend from Eastern Kansas, where I grew up. Over the years she’d spent a lot of time around the small towns that hugged the state line.  Near the town of Kirwin, she said, was a mysterious grove of tall elms I should visit.

It was uncanny that she would intuit my fascination with elms. In mythology, elms are gatekeepers to the underworld. Greek myth has it that the first elm sprang up at the spot where Orpheus paused to play Eurydice a love song after rescuing her from the abyss. Celtic stories say that elms are closely linked to the elves that guard burial mounds and openings to the underworld. In ancient England, witches shunned elms, which were known to drop heavy limbs on people passing below, even when there was no storm – thus the saying, “Elm hateth man, and waiteth.”

These slightly manic looking trees had lined the streets in Lawrence, Kansas, where I grew up, a defining presence of my childhood. Then they began to die, block by block, in the 1960s and 70s, as the Dutch Elm fungus spread from root to root, turning spring leaves brown. Tens of millions of elms in the US have succumbed to the disease since it was first detected in 1928. Yet, apparently, the elms Jolynn spoke of were so isolated that the disease had never reached them.

Western Kansas used to be dotted with thriving small towns, but now they all struggle to keep a cute face.

Driving north on the empty two-lane blacktop I thought about an impressive stand of elms in the middle of New York City, along the mall that leads to Bethesda Terrace in Central Park. I loved walking through their tunnel of green on hot summer days. They, too, had been so isolated in the center of Manhattan that the fungus never reached them.

I recalled a day two years before when my daughter, Aspen, and I walked to Bethesda Fountain, near the lake. She was sixteen years old and feeling very low, to the point that I was worried about her. We talked. We people watched. And then she asked if she could climb a high statue on top of a nearby hill. She was into parkour back then and loved to show off her climbing skills.

“I don’t want to watch you kill yourself,” was what I thought, because she was so depressed.

There’s suicide in the family,and my mind just naturally went there. Somehow, magically, I had to prevent that with my positive thinking.

So I said,“Yeah, go ahead.”

As frightened as I was, I felt she needed to be trusted, needed to be liberated from everyone thinking that she was troubled. She had to know she could take care of herself – I couldn’t protect her 24/7. As I watched her climb the stone base and onto the statue and up to the top where she leaned out and looked down 30 feet to the concrete, I held my breath.

 Later, a therapist told me that I had committed an act of love when I trusted her to climb. Then he paused for a beat.

“But it could have gone very badly,” he added with a grin.

I chuckled. Seriously? You find that humorous?

After she came down, Aspen and I walked together up the path into the elms. She appreciated the nonsensical ways the gangly branches entwined.

“Like giraffes dancing,” she said.

“On quaaludes,” I said.

I told her about lying on my back under our neighborhood elms when I was a kid. How once, when I was very young, I lay back looking up at the highest leaves and they started to glow and for a moment I felt my spirit rising up to the canopy, floating among the leaves, and it was the only perfect sensation I’d ever had. In that quick moment that endured in every moment that followed I sensed that I was protected, securely cradled by the vast unknown. I told her that this sensation, which I could recall when needed, had kept me going through the darkest moments of my life.

Before Jolynn’s text, I’d had no particular destination other than into the pandemic. In fact, it was not just that I had no itinerary for that June day – I had no itinerary for my entire trip. But now it was important that I visit the surviving elms.

So many of the little towns that had been rich with parades, chicken dinners and tractor pulls when I was young were now populated by a few hangers on, with no stores or services. Corporations owned the farms, not families that would keep the small town shops in the black.

Behind some of the occupied houses nice rows of beans and tomatoes and other delights rose toward the sun. Imagine for a moment if we all lived that way, with a little plot of land and the knowledge to grow food to help us through the year. Why didn’t these towns fill with people who wanted a simpler life? They’d also want Internet, and trains to get them to the city as they wished. Why couldn’t they have that?

Each community was built around a grain elevator. Seen from miles away the elevators might have been medieval cathedrals rising from a hill town in Emilio Romano.

I headed east to Agra, which was named for the town where the Taj Mahal sits – no one seemed to know why. The wheat fields went on for miles here, and each distant grain elevator might have been a medieval cathedral rising from a hill town in Emilio Romano. At times I could see three or more of these distant campaniles rising out of the plain, in towns with names like Cedar, Smith Center and Glade.

In the Kirwin National Wildlife Refuge on the edge of a huge lake there were many cottonwoods but no elms. Turning down a narrow road I saw a policeman and a fisherman talking. As I approached, the policeman checked me out, his palm on his holstered gun. I asked if they knew the location of the last remaining grove of elms to survive the Dutch Elm disease of the mid-20^th century. The policeman kind of chuckled and gave me a sideways glance that said, Weirdo.

“I never heard anything about that,” he said, his pistol hand going slack. “But maybe it’s buried under that lake.”

I laughed.

“I’m serious, he said. “That lake is new. Man made.”

 I rolled into the vacant town of Kirwin. It was a small, dying place, though not without its decrepit charms, such as a row of abandoned wooden storefronts and a sometimes-open cafe that was closed today. No elms. No people. Ping: Jolynn reaching out again. “I think it actually might have been Kensington,” she texted. I pointed the truck in that direction on an empty asphalt road.

A sign said, “Caution, Wind Currents.” and as I climbed a little hill I pondered that message. It didn’t say “Gusty Winds” or “Watch out for Wind.”  It said, “Wind Currents,” which sounded much more ominous. I imagined a rip tide of wind dragging me and the truck up the highway before spitting us out.

I bought a salamwich at a convenience store — two slices of marbled cheddar making a sandwich of a slice of salami. It was delicious, and did well on Instagram.

Unlike most dead little Kansas towns, Kensington didn’t have the dusty appearance of a place that might one day soon simply be blown away. I saw no elms. The town was anchored by a gas station and convenience store where I bought a prepackaged “sandwich” made of a slice of salami between two slices of cheddar, no bread. High fat, low carb, maybe it would keep me slim during all the idle hours in the truck. I asked the 50-something store clerk if she knew anything about the elms and she gave me a look that suggested she was hiding something.

“Never heard of them,” she said, her pink hair falling in her eyes. “You are the first person ever to ask.”

“Ok. I’ll keep looking.”

“You let us know if you find them, ok?” she said with a twinkling smile.

She was suspicious as hell – I suspected she was a faery in charge of protecting the trees. I’m always fascinated by older women with pastel hair, who generally seem like they couldn’t care less what another person thought.

Leaving Kensington, munching my salamich, I spotted a city park on the right, just at the edge of town. Some little limestone buildings, a stream and some big trees. Wait! I said out loud and did a quick u-turn to enter the park. Lo and behold, they looked like elm trees to me. Tall, gangly, graceful, like ballerinas in the sky. But so many of their leaves were discolored. Brown. The fungus had gotten them. They had Dutch Elm Disease. This grove had avoided the disease for over 50 years, but now it had arrived, in the year of corona. Soon they would be dead, and no one even seemed to know the trees were here, let alone that they were sick.

A superstitious person could see the dying elms as a portent of what would come.

I thought back to the elms in Central Park. Maybe it wasn’t just their isolation in the middle of Manhattan that kept them free from the virus. They might also have been saved because of the attention people paid to keeping them healthy and safe. The same held true for Aspen, I realized. Like most anyone who feels troubled, my teenaged daughter had retreated into an isolated world as a way of protecting herself from feeling worse, or more. But she still needed the attention that I and many other people paid to her. I hoped that showing her the elms that day in Central Park, and explaining to her what they meant to me, had helped her heal. All these little steps we take to care for each other. All the ways that we buck ourselves and others up. She might do the same for someone else in the future.

Here in Kirwin the elms were dying, and the local people didn’t notice, or didn’t care. Similarly, their eyes were closed to the reality of the other virus, the one that people said traveled through the air all the way from China. Coronavirus. The locals felt free to not wear masks, to shake hands with abandon, because, really, in these underpopulated expanses who else was breathing this air? Well, me, for one. And I was expelling it, too. There were ways the virus could sneak in. Not all the random travelers through here had antibodies. Just as these trees were in the end unable to escape their disease, I suspected that Phillips County was in for a reckoning from the virus, too.

The elms, dying.

I sat and drank an iced coffee beneath the canopy. When I looked up at the crowns of the trees the branches  swirled – that is the nature of elms, when you look at them, they move. Some communities of trees are connected underground by fungal networks that share water and nutrients. They warn each other of pathogens and share resources to heal. These elms “knew” that they were sick, and they shared this information with the outside world by showing brown leaves and sparse canopies. But no one was looking. They were going to die.

Five months after my visit the county had 223 positive diagnoses and nine deaths. Most of the infected were under age 50. This, in a county of 2,488 people, with only a couple of ICU beds.

We are never as isolated as we think.