All my holiday memories begin with the bleating of an alarm and being ripped from restorative sleep into confused panic – who’s dead? What’s on fire? – until I remember and silence the source of the sound. I’m bleary and weary, double-checking the bags I packed the night before. The holidays would officially begin a long way away from the warmth of plastic lights on a plastic tree – my mother’s victory after decades of fighting against the mess of a dying tree only she would clean up after – the ruckus of other people’s children, and a buffet of poorly made casseroles.
Journeys in and out of my home state of Kansas always started this way, because getting in and out of Kansas – whose public transportation system is at this point almost entirely nonexistent – is onerous. While passenger rail and then intercity buses used to link up even the smaller towns with the larger cities and out to the rest of the nation, what we are left with is one major airport in the neighboring state of Missouri, one Amtrak train that lumbers through Kansas in the dead of night, a couple buses that may or may not actually be running that day as scheduled, and long stretches of interstate highways.
