YATES CENTER — The wind was blowing steadily from the south, and my breathing shallow, as I sat catty-corner from the Hotel Woodson on Yates Center’s town square, watching the vehicles pass.
My favorite are the golf carts, which folks around here use as a kind of inverse convertible. Instead of the top being down, it’s the only thing that’s up.
I asked my friend, four-branch veteran and unapologetic Kansas Democrat, Troy Shaffer, if he chose to live in the hotel given its incredible past, but said his decision was based on cheap rent as opposed to nostalgia.
After some pestering, Troy gave me a tour of the hotel, where he confirmed the tin ballroom ceiling and sleek wooden bar are indeed original, though the floor plan has been converted from twenty-one small rooms into four large ones.
In a letter written by Edwin Guy Reid, son of the hotel’s original owner, he recalls having to swap every stained-by-who-knows-what sheet, shove coal in all 12 stoves, fill all the oil lamps and burn endless piles of garbage.
He also added: “in the morning you would have to … [e]mpty all the slop jars and carry all the waste water down back of the hotel and dump it.”
You can imagine poor Ed trying his best not to gag as he repeatedly descended the stairs before reaching the hog pen.
In his nasal drawl Troy pointed north, remarking “Now, all the outdoor toilets and everything was back there, too. And the well. There was a big well. It was 1887! You still had to have water. There was prolly a dresser and a water pitcher in each room, you know, to warsh up in.”
No amount of water, though, I imagine, was enough to fully exorcise the ghostly residues of countless ragged prospectors and cattlemen, belaced prostitutes and cigar-smoking oil barons.
ABOVE THE hotel’s cream-colored corbels and Victorian era moulding, the sky was a single shade of periwinkle.
Its monochromatic expanse was oceanic, as if one could turn the world upside down, the air would possess a solidity that would allow one to reside within it, be held in the arms of that vastness and receive something ineffable and uncannily still.
It dawned on me just how many sandstone blocks there are lining the hotel’s facade, but I didn’t have the patience to calculate them.
When next we see one another let me know what number you came up with, as I’ve yet to find consensus among counters.
Don’t worry. We have ample time for such things in this place where the clock hands crawl, present and past bleed into one another and divisions between culture and history break down.
One feels this most acutely, I think, at night — when the streetlights gleam eerily and the wraiths of Yates Center begin to murmur aloud.
A SQUIRREL scolded me from the tree behind my back, despite my having arrived first.
