I stood transfixed behind the barbed-wire fence by the side of the gravel road, watching in awe as bright orange fire snaked across the pasture in Liberty Township.
The air was heavy with dancing smoke that turned the air a hazy blue and obscured my view into the distance where a single tree with gnarled black branches stood.
An April wind suddenly began to churn in the southwest, such that what had been a controlled burn began to surge hungrily in my direction.
Flames leapt more than a dozen feet into the air and soon the soot was swirling frantically all around me.
A monstrous roar sounded, an insane popping and crackling of dry brush mixing with an atmosphere pulsing and bursting with movement.
In “Prairyerth,” William Least-Heat Moon described a similar scene as “red-gold on jet, angles and curves, oghams and cursives of flames, infernal combustings.”
Despite feeling intense heat on my face, at first I was immobilized, shocked still as “the red buffalo” began to stampede near the fence-line.
Realizing almost too late there was no fireguard burned along the roadside, fight turned to flight as I spun around to race for the open car-door.
As I sped away, I watched through the rear-view mirror as flames gnashed at the roadway where I had stood only moments before.
The 25 million year-old indigenous ritual of cleansing and inoculating the prairie had almost purified me as well.
Shaking her head with its cropped blond locks, my girlfriend looked across at me from the passenger’s seat and said: “You have ashes in your teeth.”
I could only grin in response …
Realizing what parallel I had found myself on, I proceeded slowly down the gravel road to the east, gazing into the distance at columns of smoke rising in almost every direction.
During the spring burn, rural Kansas looks like a war-zone, a volcanic blast site.
At that moment, an ambulance tore by, lights flashing red and blue, and I wondered who else had gotten a little too close to the flames for comfort.
SLOWING to a stop as I came to the northerly bend in the road, I could see white crosses adorning the field in Goings Cemetery, marking out a fraction of the 50 people interred there.
At one time you could have also seen a number of raised sandstone vaults that had once been a unique feature of the pioneer burial-place — situated along the LeRoy-Eureka trail — where long smooth stones had been quarried and dressed nearby, then fitted together with iron bars.
