The More Things Change . . .
Essay Posted July 27, 2007 by James E. Nelson
I was out of town for a conference last week and on the way home had the chance to stay overnight in Hays, Kansas. I used to live in Hays and was curious to see how the town had changed in the quarter century since I had been there.
The change is remarkable.
Since I worked at the Ramada Inn while living there, let me put Hays’ growth into the context of motels. Back then there were four chain motels and a couple of pretty seedy independents. Back in those days there was a severe shortage of motels between Kansas City and Denver, and if we didn’t fill every bed every night, someone got a serious chewing out. It was usually me because I was the night auditor and it fell to my watch to sell the rooms of any last minute or late night cancellations. The only exception to the “we have to be completely full” rule was Christmas Eve and Christmas night, when we sometimes had as many as five or six rooms empty (gasp!).
If people were traveling west, we often referred them to a hotel in Hill City, KS (25 miles north of the Interstate). Because I-70 takes a big jog south at Colby, Hill City wasn’t that far out of the way for those traveling west. All the major motels between Goodland (near the Colorado border) and Junction City had a network so that we all knew if any of those motels had an empty room. Generally by 10:00 p.m. there was not a motel room available from Topeka to the Colorado border.
Of course Joe Traveler rarely believed me when I said he wasn’t going to find any rooms for the next 200 miles, if he stayed on the interstate. It was good training in conflict management and served me well when I later became a pastor.
When I pulled off the interstate last week I saw a huge conglomeration of motels. A couple motels, restaurants, and a huge Wal-Mart now sit to the north of the I-70 where water bug infested wheat fields used to predominate (but more about that later). To the south, both sides of U.S. 183 are crowded with new motels and restaurants. All the old ones are there, except the Ramada is now a Days Inn, and the Chinese restaurant attached to the Ramada is gone and replaced by a freestanding steak house. But crowded between these old motels, and on all sides of them, are new motels and restaurants all with bright signs beckoning visitors.
The new development continues a mile down the highway. To add to the confusion, KDOT is rebuilding the highway from the dirt up, so the traffic is congested and just a bit dangerous.
Old Hays (a few miles south of the interstate) has changed little. Surprisingly, most of the downtown businesses are still there. (A testament to the ongoing strength of the core economy.) And of course, the university continues mostly unchanged except for a few new buildings. My old apartment (a storage shed—I think, it was too small for a garage—converted into an apartment) was getting a make-over. It was completely gutted. A crew was putting on new shingles and there were new windows and a door ready to be installed. The inside had been stripped down to the studs and it looked like they were ready to put up new sheet rock.
It was a sort of metaphor for the town. Everything in the apartment was going to look shiny and new, although the basic structure remained unchanged. Given its location (the rest of the alley had changed little), I suspect cockroaches were going to continue to be a major problem. It was still a storage shed with a bit of fresh make-up.
And it seems to me that this was the situation in Hays. There was no new manufacturing from what I could see. In fact, a large plant was closed down and seemingly abandoned. (I forget what it used to be; the name is now faded and long gone.) Twenty five years ago Hays was an oil town. I would guess that half the regulars at Ramada Inn were employed either by Haliburton or one of its subcontractors.
On this trip I didn’t see a single Haliburton truck. (And I was looking.)
Driving around the edge of town it didn’t look like it grown much either. It had all the appearance of a stable western prairie town that hadn’t changed a great deal in a quarter century.
Except for the U.S. 183 corridor along the interstate, which, like the old apartment, looked like a bit of fresh make-up on the same old thing, when put into the larger context.
Just as the apartment is a metaphor for the town, so the town is a metaphor for the nation. The U.S. is currently suffering from monetary inflation. The federal government continues to print money at an unbelievable rate, so that we have lots of money while our wealth stays about the same.
Lots of money without the equivalent wealth creates a very surreal scene. There are no new signs of wealth building (such as manufacturing) and the town’s greatest source of wealth (the oil industry) seems to be drying up. But even though there’s no new wealth, there’s lots of new money, so the community builds lots of things that will allow them to trade their money with each other (restaurants and retail) and skim a bit of money off of those traveling through (motels). It’s a nice shiny exterior placed over a community that has changed hardly at all.
One of these days the monetary bubble is going to burst. All that funny money will disappear and America’s money will realign with its wealth. That will most likely happen by means of high inflation (the good scenario) or hyper-inflation (the bad scenario). And when inflation finally takes its toll, Hays will no longer be able to support the four steak houses and various and sundry other restaurants along the edge of town.
Businesses will close. Windows will be boarded up. Weeds will begin to grow in parking lots. And people will think it is an economic disaster.
And in some ways it will be an economic disaster; some individuals will be destroyed economically. But in the larger context of time, chances are, few things will have changed. The university will continue to teach. The downtown will continue to provide the basic goods and services the town needs. The farmers will continue to raise wheat and cattle. A bit of oil will continue to be pumped from the ground.
Same town. Different façade. Same storage shed qua apartment, different shingles and siding.
Twenty-five years ago the motels had a huge problem every year right after the wheat harvest (which would be right about now) with water bugs coming out of the shorn fields to find refuge from the sun in the motels. We were assured that they were water bugs—harmless beetles that had lost their home. To all of us (and the motel guests) they looked like little, tiny cockroaches.
One night I had to refund a room and leave it empty (the unforgivable sin) because of the water bugs. The guest said there were thousands of them (although he called them cockroaches). I knew there weren’t thousands of them, but I went and had a look-see anyway.
As it turns out, there were probably a thousand of them on the walls, on the floor, completely covering the pillow and crawling out from between the sheets. (Oh, for a camera phone on my belt holster so I could prove it to my boss. But 25 years ago Dick Tracy and 007 were the only guys with a camera phone.)
Lest you think Hays must be a terrible place because it is cursed with water bugs, we had a related experience when living up the road a bit in Blue Rapids, KS. One July night we went to the Pizza Hut, out on the edge of town, amidst the freshly harvested wheat fields. We ordered a black olive and italian sausage pizza. About two thirds of the way through it, Chris noticed a water bug cooked into the pizza. It looked just like a black olive. Wondering how many water bugs we had already eaten, we called the waitress over. She looked at the pizza nonchalantly and confirmed that it was a bug. Then she said, "Yeah, we've been having that problem a lot lately. And then she left.
The manager then came out, comped us our meal and gave us a coupon for two free pizzas. But that's a gross story. Let's get back to the much more pleasant story of hundreds of water bugs crawling out from between the bed sheets:
The next morning—I’m told it’s because they like the cool of the night—the water bugs were gone. Disappeared just like Kaiser Soeze. I got chewed out royally for not renting the room. I was assured that the exterminator came every month and made sure we didn’t have a major problem like I was describing. But later that morning the old maintenance man sprayed the perimeter with “magic juice” as he called it; “magic juice” that the professional exterminator didn’t have. We knew it was illegal. We suspected it was DDT. It was whispered that all the motels used it around the time of the harvest.
But back to the present. Walking out of my motel room the next morning, I saw, just outside my door, three water bugs on their back flailing their legs in their final death throes. I wondered if it was magic juice.
In the end we are what we are. It doesn’t matter how fancy the façade is, the basic structure remains the same. It doesn’t matter how much money is flowing, the underlying wealth hasn’t grown. No matter how fancy and high falootin’ we get, the basic realities remain.
It was good to see Hays again. But I was reminded, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Copyright © 2007 James E. Nelson (Just Another Jim). All Rights Reserved.
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