M.T. Liggett – Kansas Highway Artist

Mullinville, Kansas

We’re cruising highway 400 West on the way to Dodge City. “Free Bird” is coming in clear on a Wichita FM station. We come around the curve and see a half-mile of tightly packed spinning windmills, whirligigs, and political caricatures made of abandoned farm equipment, old cars and railroad parts. Mrs. Phred swerves the RV to the shoulder and I grab the camera.


This guy is 73 years old and completely outrageous. He’s been writing an insanely clever political blog in solid steel for at least 20 years.


"Evolution is wrong," one display reads, "Only a miracle from the Almighty could have created the moronic dumb asses on the Kansas State Board of Education." Mrs. Phred points out an "intelligent design" totem with the words upside down. The Kansas Board objected to teaching evolution in 2005.


Hillary Clinton is, "Our Jack-Booted Eva Braun,” Mr. and Mrs. Clinton caricatures are labeled, “Pothead” and “Porkadolf”. Mrs. Clinton is done up with swastikas.


He’s got one that equates Waco with Auschwitz. Janet Reno has her head stuffed up her butt. A right wing Republican has his thumb in the same position. Halliburton is represented by a dark pig’s head.


It’s tough to figure out Liggett’s political position. He seems equally pissed by just about everything and everyone, especially politicians.


We passed a town destroyed by a tornado a few miles back. Liggett devotes quite a few displays to FEMA. “Tornados blow, FEMA sucks!” he proclaims.


Lots of the “totems” are devoted to M.T.’s old girlfriends, who he has immortalized in junk. You have to wonder about his relationships with neighbors. My money says he doesn’t much care much what other people think.


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Good Reasons to Get Out of Dodge

Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado

We’re not in Kansas anymore. We’re at 8200 feet in the middle of a huge high valley surrounded by the snow-capped Rocky Mountains. There are four nearby mountains that exceed 14,000 feet.

We spent yesterday looking at Dodge City in Kansas. The main employer seems to be Cargill Foods. They truck in 10,000 head of cattle a day to be slaughtered and processed. There are massive cattle concentration camps everywhere where cattle are packed in feedlots to fatten up amid gigantic piles of stinking black dung.

Dodge is a poor, sad, shabby place now. The saloons and bawdy houses are gone. The buffalo hunters, steely eyed lawmen, gamblers and cattle drive cowboys are only a memory. The old Front Street stores and saloons burned down long ago.

We visited the Boot Hill Museum. The old gravesites have been preserved. It’s the kind of place you go to see to be sure you haven’t missed anything. The answer is no. That’s about it for Dodge.

This morning the stars are out, the sky is clear and the moon is down. I glance up and see the Dipper, the Navigator’s Triangle, the Milky Way burning a swath across the sky and Sagittarius in the South.
The temperature warmed up into the seventies yesterday and dropped to 22 F. during the night. The dunes here are the tallest in North America. They are most beautiful at sunrise and sunset when the colors and shadows form strange shapes.

We’ll do some hiking in the Park today and then take the Toyota on a daytrip to Taos, New Mexico Tuesday. Taos is only 100 miles south. We might not have another chance to see it.

Mrs. Phred said she loved me last night after I got the satellite tuned in so she could watch tennis. She reminded me that I had threatened to make her set up the satellite because I thought it was a bad idea. “Right! Like that’s going to work!” I told her. We laughed.

With longitude, latitude, azimuth and altitude precisely established in three widely separated locations, I can easily find the satellite now from anywhere.

Here are a few more pictures of the dunes and surrounding area.

Wichita Museum of Art

Wichita, Kansas

There are 16 museums in Wichita listed in my Streets and Trips software. We have a day so I scribble the names and addresses of eight and we head downtown.


First stop: The Museum of art...a knock-out. I enjoyed it more than the day we spent in the Louvre.


I took about 75 pictures. They made me sign an agreement not to use flash, sell the pictures or take pictures of art on loan to the museum. Too bad. They had a great collection of Inuit scupture on loan.

It's a wonderful place in a lovely setting on the river.

One special feature is a very whimsical blown glass chandlier.

These mid-west cities are full of surprises.... on to the Coleman Camping Gear Museum and Factory Outlet..Then the World Treasures Museum. It's full of dinosaurs, pieces of the Berlin Wall, minerals, laughing Buddas, war stories and other treasures...here are some pictures of Wichita.

Crop Circles

Wichita, Kansas

Mrs. Phred and I dress all in black and check our equipment list:
- 200 feet of rope
- Stakes
- 3 foot planks with attached ropes
- Laser pointer
- Protractors
- Night vision goggles
- Camera

We decide on dinner at the Texas Roadhouse before heading out to the wheat field. It’s really crowded for a Thursday, so we drive west of town and find an empty restaurant called the Siesta Lounge for dinner.

After dark we park the Toyota and unload our gear. It’s going to be hard minimizing footprints in the muddy field. I follow her and step where she steps.

Suddenly, we look up and see a huge glowing saucer shape materialize in the clouds. I snap this one picture.

We feel a strange floating sensation and lose consciousness. When I wake up I find myself naked and strapped facedown on what appears to be an operating table. A group of small gray creatures with large black eyes approach. One appears to be holding a probe of some sort.

Somehow we can understand their thoughts. They are tired of being blamed for cattle mutilations and crop circles. We’ve been swept up in an alien crop circle interdiction program. They implant devices will make us very sick if we even think about making crop circles again

We lose consciousness once more and awake next to the Toyota. We dress and go back to the RV.. “Everybody Loves Raymond” reruns are on the TV.

Big Brutus

West Mineral, Kansas

We are alone with Big Brutus in the gathering darkness on the windswept plain. Tornados and three more inches of rain are expected tonight. We’re microwaving TV dinners tonight. If a tornado approaches, we need to run 100 yards and stand between the treads of Big Brutus.

The treads of the Bucyrus-Eire earth mover are seven feet high and five feet wide. You could surround this thing with German 88’s, fire at will, and be perfectly safe between the treads. Each tread is powered by a 250 HP DC motor. Brutus has a top speed of .22 MPH and each of the four treads had 2,200 gallons of gear oil. If you look closely, you can see me standing by a tread.

I stood inside the scoop. It measures 12’x 15’x15’. One scoop holds 90 cubic yards or 150 tons of coal. The one below is from a baby earth mover.

The power plant provides a peak of 15,000 horsepower to drive the various electric motors. Brutus is 160 feet tall and weighs 11 million pounds. I climb into the machine and explore. The walkway to the tip of the boom is no longer accessible because of insurance.It took 52 men a year to assemble Brutus in 1963. The parts came in on 150 railroad cars and cost $6.5 million dollars.

But these are just dry statistics. Tonight at midnight, Mrs. Phred and I will climb to the top of the boom and kiss the sky while the tornados stalk the land. We dress in black and check our equipment.

Maybe Tomorrow?

Wichita, Kansas

A woman with a fear of facing the world is reported to have sat on a toilet seat in her boyfriend's apartment for over two years.

Each day he would pass food and water to her and encourage her to come out.

"Maybe tomorrow" was her daily response.

Ultimately, her skin grew around the toilet seat and finally emergency responders were forced to transport both the woman and the toilet seat to the emergency room, where the seat was surgically removed.

Mrs. Phred and I would like to visit Wichita in April. We'll apparently have a hard time now saying, "We're not in Kansas anymore" as a measure of locational weirdness.

Kansas was once a standard for middle American normalcy. When Dorothy was swept into Oz these were her words to her dog Toto. Yes, Toto...we're still in Kansas and it is weird.

Here's the full story from the Associated Press.