Jim and Gabriela's Tandem Travels: Gramma Billie

We're in Denver now making some preparations for the adoption and will return to Quinter, Kansas Friday with the possibility of bicycling across Kansas before returning to Denver to await the big event. We had a good visit with Gabriela's grandmother Billie Flora in Quinter before we returned. Gramma Billie is nearly 89 now, a product of the high plains of western Kansas. In the four years I have known Billie, she has provided me with countless laughs, as well as many new ways of saying old things. Here are some of her sayings:

"Good night nurse!" This phrase is used as an exclamatory statement, usually following an important story. It's a way to emphasize the gravity of a situation or event.

"Well, my land!" This phrase comes from the biblical story of Joseph, from the story in scripture of Jacob forced by famine to come to Egypt and settle in the Land of Goshen. Billie uses this phrase in a similar way as Good Night Nurse, as a means of emphasizing her surprise or exasperation over an experience.

"I'm full as a tick" This phrase follows a long and full meal.

Gramma Billie is also full of old songs. She periodically breaks into verse. One of her favorite goes something like this: "The old gray mare just ain't what she used to be, ain't what she used to be, ain't what she used to be...........the old gray mare just ain't what she used to be."

A large old map of Kansas is taped to the wall of Billie's kitchen. I like to play a kind of game with Billie. I choose towns within a 100 mile radius of Quinter and throw out the town name to Billie. Every town that I mention triggers stories about relatives or buildings or tornados; stories of floods, robberies, civil war raiders, and Indian wars. Billie paints a landscape of western Kansas with her memory, turning a standard road map into an oral history.
"My parents were in that flood up there in Atwood in '35. It was terrible."
"The Battle of the Arikaree, up there near Wray. My mother used to say that they took it out of the history books. What a shame that children no longer learn about that stuff."
"The BOD [Butterfield Overland Dispatch Trail] runs just south of here. They need to get more markers out there so that it's not lost."
"There's a famous black man, an inventor, from Minneapolis [Kansas]. I can't remember his name. He went out east and started that school [Tuskegee] with that other black man [Booker T. Washington]"

Every time we visit, we choose a town on the map, some place within 50 or 60 miles of Quinter, and drive out to visit and see what we can learn from the town. When we drive through a town that appears to be whithering up, losing population and businesses, this upsets Billie. She is pained anytime she learns of a store closing, or a school consolidating, or young people moving away. We drive to the selected town, eat at the lone cafe, and visit the historical museum. Nicodemus, Hill City, Colby, Hoxie, Gove, Dighton, Wakeeney, Ellis. This Saturday, we'll be driving to Ness City to see what we can see, to excavate the place based upon Billie's memory.

"They have a big bank up there in Ness City. I hear they're doing this and that with it. We have to get up there and take a look at it."

Once we visited the Plains Museum in Colby. We wheeled Billie outside to where they

had an old sod house. It had been a long day and we were all tired. We wheeled her all the way to the sod house from the museum building and walked her inside of the soddy. Her entire demeanor changed. She reached out to touch an old Iron. She smelled the earthen bricks that composed the walls. "My mother was born in a soddy," she said. We backed off, sat down, and allowed the moment.

Sometimes we visit her siblings in the area. Uncle Bob lives on a farm south of Quinter. A recent visit there turned into a two ho

ur party with his son R. W. and R. W.'s children. Uncle Bob was a cook in the Navy in WWII and is still very active on his farm. Bob talks about enormous bobcats, wolves, and foxes in the area. Yancy, one of Bob's sons, is a one-armed welder and an amazing fisherman. Yance, as he is called, embodies the independance of this place. He welds on new oil rigs, fishes in nearby reservoirs, and tells stories of life in small town Kansas. Aunt Peg (Billie's youngest sister) lives in an assisted living facility in Dighton, the town she used to live with her husband before his death. She is an avid fan of KSU women's basketball and during the winter can usually be found watching a game. Aunt Marcheta lives on in the stone farmhouse Billie and her three siblings were raised in south of Quinter with her daughter's family living next door. She is a few years younger than Billie and still helps out on the farm, spinning stories of assisting with the birth of new calves. Marcheta always mentions how much rain her farm received from the most recent storm, reflecting the rain-worship that comes from nearly nine decades on the arid high plains.
"We got 38 hundreths last friday, it felt like more."
Each visit to Quinter ends

with a meal at the Q Inn, Quinter's only real restaurant. Billie enters the diningroom at the Q, stops, looks around, before making her way to a booth. She holds court

at the Q, telling us in a hushed voice who we are sitting close to, or who might be across the room. Eventually, she rises and slowly traverses the restaurant, visiting with other Quinterites. When she sees a young person whom she doesn't recognize, she pointedly drills them with this question, "now who do you belong to?"

"Jim, I need you to make me a sign. They're moving the Farm Service Agency out of Gove. We need to speak out about this. Make me a sign that says, 'Keep the Farm Service Agency in Gove!'"

When we arrived at Billie's at 9 pm on our tandem bicycle on Sunday, Gramma Billie informed us that we were wanted at the Quinter Advocate office the next morning...they were going to do a short article about our tour. This year's tour of the High Plains belongs to Gramma Billie.
Each night on our tour, we take a walk at dusk around the tiny town that we are staying in. During these walks, it has become customary to call Billie and talk with her about our day of bicycling. Putting her on speaker phone, her western Kansan dialect echoes down the streets of these tiny settlements. Billie likes to open her statements with the phrase, 'well I'll tell you.............' I have taken such a liking to this phrase that I frequently say it to Billie even though I have nothing to say after it.

"Well, I'll tell you Billie"

"You'll tell me what?"

"I'll tell you..............."

"No, I'll tell YOU"

Thanks for four years of telling me Billie. Your stories will live forever in the wide open plains and wheat fields of western Kansas.