I’m Hannes Zacharias from Lenexa for High Plains Public Radio, Radio Reader’s Book Club. The book is “Elevations: A Personal Exploration of the Arkansas River” by Max McCoy.
This book, written by Max in 2018, covers his travels on the upper Arkansas River and his 742-mile journey through Colorado and Kansas…roughly 50% of 45th longest river in the world. In it, McCoy captures part of the cultural and natural history of the river and weaves into that tapestry a deeply personal narrative.
For me the book reinforces my faded memory of a similar trip I took in 1976 as a 22-year-old Dodge City (almost) native carrying a ‘bicentennial message’ from the Mayor of ‘Gunsmoke’ to the Mayor of New Orleans. The trip opened my eyes to solo river travel, self-reliance, environmental challenges, and human behavior (both good and wanting).
The book also confirmed my accounts of a more recent and ambitious solo kayak trip on the Ark in 2018.
I wanted to fulfill a promise I made myself following the first journey to ‘follow a drop of water from the continental divide to the Gulf of Mexico’. This 100-day 2,069-mile trip down the Ark and Mississippi rivers contained many of the personal hardships and reflections experience by McCoy two years earlier.
Reading the book floated questions…what was different about my 1976 trip with that taken in 2018…what did I miss and notice that Max did not?
What haunts me (and I believe Max as well) is WHY we do such trips…and why in particular this stretch of a “ghost river” as Max calls it. The former has no straightforward answer for me…only tributaries of thought. The ladder…is more clear cut.
I chose the Arkansas River, both in 1976 and 2018, in large part because I grew up on the river in Dodge City (well…not on the river…we were on the high side of town…north, by the highway 50 by-pass near what was the old roller-rink now the ”Silver Star Hall”).
We were an immigrant family which recently re-located to Dodge from war-torn Nazi Germany, where my dad was ripped away from medical school to be a medic in the German Army, serving on the Russian front. Following the war, in 1952…he, my mom, and my three siblings were able to get sponsors (a Jewish American Army Captain…Benjamin Gross), visas (after Canada reduced the waiting list for American Immigration by opening up their borders to hordes of displaced persons from Europe) and employment (as a medical resident at St. Francis Hospital in Wichita). With the proper paperwork in-hand the family took the steamer “Italia” from Hamburg to New York City.
Arriving at the docks virtually penniless (the staff charged exorbitant fees for my mom to breast-feed my brother…depleting the family funds) my father enlisted the help of the Lutheran Aid Society for train passage to Newton.
My father repeated his medical internship and residency this time specializing in orthopedic surgery and after five years was able to restart his medical career in a place that needed and WANTED his services…Dodge City.
I was born in Wichita 1954 and in 1961, we moved into our new home on Thompson St. where the family lived and prospered until my Mothers Stroke some 40 years later. We had thick German accents and funny names…and were accepted and nurtured.
It appears to me that what has changed since 1976…on the river and in less populated Kansas…is the disappearance of the acceptance of people for who they are and what they can contribute…not their political flag, religious dogma, or national heritage.
McCoy’s chilling description of the attempted massacre of Somali immigrants in Garden City made me think…would our family be accepted today?
From here to wherever the river takes me…this is Hannes Zacharias in Lenexa, and you are listening to the High Plains Public Radio, Reader’s Book Club.
