Ecotone

145 Hear the words Dodge City, Kansas, these days and you’re apt to think, depending on your age, either of a moribund 1960s TV series—the wildly fictitious Gunsmoke, featuring Miss Kitty, Festus, and Marshal Matt Dillon—or else of a favorite phrase of screen hacks and gleeful, road-tripping frat boys: Let’s get the hell out of Dodge! Few indeed are the souls who would hear the town’s name and think of the real Dodge City, self-proclaimed “Cowboy Capital of the World,” with its beef-packing plants and used car lots and the tired tones of boosterism (Come Grow with Us!) emanating from its chamber of commerce. To know that Dodge, you’d have to cross southwest Kansas in a car, an experience road-weary travelers have been known to compare to crossing the ocean by sail. Either that or, like me, you’d have to be from there. It’s been twenty years now since I escaped the place, and in that time, the real Dodge City, with its dry riverbed and red brick streets, grain elevators casting shadows across an empty downtown, the air filled with dust or tinged with a fecal tang blown in from the feed yards, the Dodge of the Red Demons and the Conqs (short for Conquistadors) and the defunct St. Mary of the Plains Cavaliers, of the dying mall called Village Square, the scarred but still functional South Drive-In, the cheesy tourist traps (Boot Hill and Front Street, Home of Stone, Kansas Teachers’ Hall of Fame), none of them worth the drive and not meant to be, the Dodge of the diseased Dutch elm and incessant, driving wind, with its country club and taquerias, its chiropractic clinics and failing farm implement dealerships, and its Gene’s Heartland Foods that used to be a Safeway that used to be the hospital where I was born . . . that Dodge City almost ceased to exist for me, having been replaced in my mind by the Dodge of legend and myth, the so-called Queen of the Cowtowns, the Wickedest Little City in America, the Bibulous Babylon of the Frontier. Almost, but not quite. Dragging Wyatt Earp Robert Rebein 146 Ecotone: reimagining place For while I confess to a weakness for tales of the Old West, particularly those having to do with my hometown’s sordid past, in most important respects—in memory, imagination, all the infinitesimal allegiances of identity—I remain tied to that other Dodge, my Dodge, the one that raised me up and forgave my feeble sins and never once asked for a single thing in return except that I leave and find my future elsewhere. For a teenager suffering the boredom of the Cowboy Capital circa 1980, the only thing to do at night, so we all said, was to “drag Wyatt Earp.” By this we did not mean, as the image would suggest, that we’d pull the nineteenth-century lawman through the streets by his boot heels, but only that we’d cruise up and down Wyatt Earp Boulevard in our beatup Chevrolets and hand-me-down Buicks, searching for that elusive bit of excitement that always seemed to exist just outside of our reach. Wyatt Earp, to us, was not a person but a place, a mile-long ribbon of asphalt that stretched from Boot Hill on the east to the Dodge House on the west, containing in that brief space all of our teeming and awkward adolescence, our collective longings and flirtations and our often ridiculous mistakes, few of which we had to pay for in any meaningful way. Dragging Wyatt Earp was a ritual and a clearly demarcated rite of passage, one that began at fourteen or fifteen, the years when most of us were beginning to drive, and that ended two or three years later, when the pool halls and beer joints and lakeside keg parties began to absorb us. Had we been city kids, we’d have been hanging out at the mall or the cineplex. But we weren’t city kids, and Dodge was a suburb of nowhere, hundreds of mostly tedious miles from Dallas, Denver, or Kansas City, and...