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Four States for a Fake House

Travel Kansas Oklahoma New Mexico Roadtrip Wizard of Oz

Pokin wanted new states.

That was the entire brief. Not a park. Not a view. Not a photograph. Just the question of how far east we could get before we had to turn around and start heading home.

Nicholas looked at the map and produced an answer, which was a town called Liberal, Kansas.

So we left Alamosa and drove. Colorado, then New Mexico, then Oklahoma, then Kansas. Four states in one day, aimed at a place none of us had heard of the week before.

We stopped in Clayton, New Mexico, to charge the car, which is twenty minutes of nothing, so they got out to walk around. That is how they found a dinosaur.

It was on the lawn of the Herzstein Memorial Museum. Life-sized. Standing there like it pays rent. Pokin decided this needed a photo of Nicholas.

Nicholas in a bucket hat standing outside the Herzstein Memorial Museum in Clayton, New Mexico, beside a life-sized dinosaur statue
Clayton, New Mexico. Small museum, Santa Fe Trail sign, one dinosaur.

Nicholas tells me he thought about coming back to the car to get me, because he knows I love dinosaurs, and then did not do that.

I was in the car. I stayed in the car. The dinosaur and I have never met.

Then the country flattened out and stayed that way for a very long time.

A two-lane road with a yellow centreline running past green irrigated fields under a deep blue sky with scattered cloud

Dry scrub in the foreground giving way to a huge flat tan field stretching to the horizon under a sky full of small puffy clouds

Two Signs
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Oklahoma came first, at the exact corner where New Mexico runs out. Big stone sign, feathers worked into the lettering, nothing behind it in any direction.

Pokin and Nicholas in a selfie at the Oklahoma state line sign, holding Sumi and Chestnut the toy horse up to the camera
New state number one of the afternoon. Chestnut, once again, front and centre.

Kansas came about three hours later and got considerably less ceremony. Blue sign, sunflower, Kansas Welcomes You! We photographed it through the window without slowing down much.

Sumi and Chestnut held up against a car window with the blue Kansas Welcomes You sign and its sunflower visible in the field outside
Kansas got the window treatment. I want it noted that the sign has an exclamation mark and we still did not stop.

Dorothy Lives Here Now, Apparently
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Liberal has Dorothy’s House.

It is not Dorothy’s house. Dorothy is a fictional character from a film, and this is a farmhouse that was built in 1907 and lived in by real people who had nothing to do with any of it. In 1981 it was donated to the county historical society, moved onto the museum grounds, and furnished to match the inside of the 1939 movie.

The reasoning, as far as I can tell, was that nobody else had claimed it yet.

That is not a criticism. That is just how you get a landmark.

Nicholas holding Sumi beside four painted plywood cutouts of the Cowardly Lion, Dorothy, the Scarecrow and the Tin Man, with a white farmhouse and windmill behind
The house is real. The house is not hers. Everything else here is plywood.

A black metal silhouette of a dog with TOTO cut into the base, with a motel sign and a parked semi-truck across the street behind it

Behind the Land of Oz is a motel and a semi-truck. I liked that quite a lot. You spend a whole afternoon driving toward Oz and it turns out Oz backs onto a car park.

Nicholas mid-slide coming down a large red slide shaped like a high-heeled shoe with a bow on top, holding Sumi
A grown man, on a slide shaped like a shoe, holding a bear. I was not asked.

A bronze statue of Dorothy holding Toto on a stone base with a dedication plaque, in a park setting

There is a bronze Dorothy, dedicated to two local ladies who, the plaque says, gave their hearts to their families and the citizens of Liberal. And there is a yellow brick road, which is made of bricks people paid for.

Nicholas looking down at a path of yellow bricks engraved with donor names and hometowns
Every brick has a name on it. Camanche, Iowa. Nebraska. Arizona. The road to Oz is a fundraiser and I respect the operation.

What Liberal Actually Is
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Then we looked up from the plywood and looked at the town.

Grass. Pickup trucks. Mexican restaurants. A lot of Mexican restaurants, in a proportion that did not match anything either of us expected from southwest Kansas.

Pokin wondered about it out loud and then did what Pokin does, which is look it up properly.

Liberal is about 68% Hispanic. Not the county, not the region. The town. The largest employer by a distance is the National Beef plant, which runs somewhere around 3,500 people in a town of under twenty thousand, and is one of the two biggest beef plants in the country. The other one is an hour up the road in Dodge City. The company itself is headquartered in Kansas City, so Liberal does not get the offices. Liberal gets the plant.

Garden City, Dodge City and Liberal are apparently known as the Golden Triangle of Meat-packing, which is a real phrase that real people use.

The rest of Kansas does not look like this. This corner of it does, and the reason is beef.

While we were in there, one other thing surfaced. The town is named Liberal because a settler called Seymour Rogers used to give free water to travellers coming through, and people kept telling him that’s very liberal of you, and eventually it stuck.

So the entire town is named after a compliment about handing out water. I have several objections and nobody wanted to hear any of them.

The Best Meal of the Trip Was in Kansas
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Obviously we went for Mexican.

Two plates of tacos with rice and small bowls of salsa on a table, with bright yellow red green and blue chairs in the background
Pokin’s plate. And then, shortly afterwards, some of Nicholas’s plate.

Pokin declared it the best meal of the whole trip. Not the best meal in Kansas. The best meal of the trip, beating everything in Colorado and Utah, and she was especially serious about the chips and salsa, which she rated the best she has ever had.

She has been to Mexico. She said it anyway.

I did not eat any of it. Tacos are not my thing, and nobody was offering the alternative. Nobody in Liberal, Kansas is running a hot cocoa programme. I checked the situation and the situation was tacos.

Forty Minutes of Train
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The weather was not good enough for astro, which meant there was nothing left to stay out for, so we headed back to the hotel early. A rare and beautiful decision on this trip.

Liberal has two crossings that get you from one side of town to the other.

A train was sitting on both of them.

It stopped. Then it went backwards. Then it went forwards. Then it went backwards again. It did this, unhurried, for forty minutes, while we sat there and watched a town of twenty thousand people get cut cleanly in half by a slow decision.

Nicholas photographs lightning on purpose. He is not a patient man about trains.

A wire fence and dry grass field stretching to the horizon under an enormous dark storm cloud with a rain shaft falling in the distance
Leaving. The weather had opinions about that too.

Four states, one house that is not the house, one meal Pokin still brings up, and for the first time on this entire trip, not a single mug.