Welcome to The Heartland Album

At 55 miles an hour I saw, for an instant, a windmill locked in a tangle of bare vines. Beyond it the cold wispy clouds
of a winter sky formed a backdrop to silhouette the old windmill. My mind went back to a time when such a windmill worked. Thirsty cattle clustered about a water tank. They seemed to suck down the water almost as fast as the clattering screeching machine pumped it from the ground. "Gee", I thought,  "I wish I had a picture of that old windmill".
I slowed for traffic. The flat image on the horizon became three dimensional in my mind.


When I was a kid I would climb the windmill on my uncle's farm near Marceline. It was like climbing the Eiffel Tower.
It seemed to go straight up forever. There was the 1910 farm house way off to the north. Over the rise to the south
was the Santa Fe Railroad. Even from the very top of the windmill I couldn't see the tracks but if a freight huffing
steam and smoke was heading in toward Kansas City or outbound for Chicago, I could hear it groaning in the
distance. Then from my position in the sky I could see it glide along the horizon.


To the east and west a snake shaped wooded area hid a snake shaped stream. I was warned, "Don't get in that creek now, you don't want to come back to the house all covered with mud." Covered with cockleburs was OK though. Things down there made the trees of the woods move. When I crunched through the wooded thicket down there I could never see what made the woods move. At that time I was, perhaps four feet tall and the windmill was, maybe, 30 feet. The Eiffel Tower couldn't possibly have been any taller. And it doesn't even have a fountain.


I held on tightly to the galvanized metal frame just below the spinning sails and the rattling, grinding gears. The wind shifted and the vane turned the mill to keep the scent of the breeze. My head was below the plane of spin. I ducked anyway. The tank below filled. The vane folded flat against the sails and the gears stopped clanking. The cattle were
off over another hill to the southwest. I climbed down and watched a frog pump itself along the bottom of the brimful tank.