Absence Makes the Adventure Matter
By Martin Fulmer
I’m Martin Fulmer from Goodwell, OK, here for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club’s 2026 Fall Read.
When I first encountered The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, I probably gave very little thought to Kansas. Like most people, I was interested in getting Dorothy to Oz. Kansas was simply where she started, a place to leave behind before the color and strangeness of the story could begin.
Reading L. Frank Baum’s novel now, though, I am struck by how thoroughly wind and weather shape Dorothy’s understanding of home.
Baum certainly does not make Kansas appealing. Everything is gray. The prairie is gray. The house is gray. Even Aunt Em has been changed by the landscape. Baum writes that the sun and wind have taken the “sparkle” from her eyes and the color from her face. Uncle Henry is equally subdued. There is little about this Kansas that sounds like a place anyone would choose over Oz.
Then the wind comes.
The cyclone is destructive, but it also does something peculiar: it takes away the very place that seems to have so little value. Dorothy does not walk through a wardrobe, follow a rabbit down a hole, or stumble into an enchanted forest. A feature of life on the Plains picks up her entire house and carries her into another world.
And Baum makes that other world everything Kansas is not. Dorothy opens the door onto green grass, flowers, fruit, strange creatures, witches, and eventually an Emerald City. Oz seems almost designed to expose everything her old home lacks.
Dorothy wants Kansas.
That desire seems stranger to me now than it did when I was younger. Baum has given Dorothy a more beautiful and exciting world, but she remains remarkably uninterested in exchanging her old life for it. Oz can give her wonders. It cannot give her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry.
Living on the Oklahoma Panhandle has probably made Baum’s opening landscape more recognizable to me than it once was. I grew up near the South Carolina coast, where wind usually arrived carrying humidity and the smell of water. Here on the High Plains, wind can carry dust and sand across a landscape where the horizon sometimes seems impossibly far away. Baum’s Kansas no longer feels like an abstract backdrop for a fairy tale. I recognize something in its exposure, its dryness, and especially its wind.
Perhaps that is why the cyclone interests me more now. The wind does not simply transport Dorothy to the place where the adventure happens. It creates the absence that makes the adventure matter. Dorothy could hardly understand what Kansas means to her while she is still standing in Kansas.
Oz gives her something to compare it with.
By the end of the journey, Dorothy has traveled through a world far more spectacular than the one she left. Yet Baum never has to reveal that Kansas was secretly more beautiful all along. It wasn’t. That is precisely the point.
Home does not have to win a contest.
Sometimes home is simply the place we want the wind to carry us.
I’m Martin Fulmer from Goodwell, OK, here for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club’s 2026 Fall Read.
Martin Fulmer is an Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Writing Center at Oklahoma Panhandle State University. His fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in Story Quarterly, Burrow Press Review, Story South, and other literary journals. He lives and works in Oklahoma with his dogs, Rose and Hector.
