All the Way Around

“Alright,” Dave said to me, as we packed up the car, ready to head from Boulder to Salina, Kansas, “Do you have the directions?” “Yep,” I replied, and looked down at the sheet of paper I held in my hand: Route 70 East for 425 miles. “It’s pretty simple,” I added.

As we had been warned, the drive through Kansas revealed not much more of the state than it’s commercial farm fields, with the high points being a solitary, wispy, cloud in the northern sky, and a sign for some sort of farm sideshow that read, “come see the five legged cow and the wild boar from Tunisia!”

One of the ways we found to amuse ourselves on this long, humid car ride was to argue about the way to pronounce Salina, our destination. The actual pronunciation surprised us both: Sa-line-a.

The Salina contra dance, held in a dance studio on the town’s main street, occurred on the fourth Saturday of every month. We had talked to the dance organizer on the phone the night before, and he informed us, “The Salina dance is very small, and its only been going on for a couple of years. We may even have to dance to recorded music.” Dave told him that we didn’t mind—it would be a new experience for us.

I was especially excited to visit Salina because it is home to The Land Institute, an organization concerned with topsoil loss caused by current farming practices, particularly in the Midwest. Their primary goal is to use traditional breeding methods to replace annual food crops with perennial versions similar to the area’s native prairie species. Perennial roots would stabilize the soil and the long lasting crops would eliminate the need for yearly tilling. The organizer of the contra dance, we found out, was actually working for The Land Institute, so I was hopeful that I could find out more about their work.

We arrived at the Dance Elite Studio just as the organizer rode up on his bicycle. We introduced ourselves, and he asked if we had found a place to stay for the night. When we told him that we hadn’t, he invited us to camp on his land. We gladly accepted, and walked inside the studio. We saw that, indeed, there would not be a live band that night—we would be dancing to recorded music.

The space had a mirror lining one wall and awards and pictures from different dancing competitions lining the other. About 15 people were present, enough to fill a contra line, and we got to dance with each of them during the first dance: The Cabot Schoolhouse Mixer, a common circle dance. This, and the contra following it were called by a woman who was calling her first two dances ever.

Most of the folks there were older than us with a few exceptions: one dancer was from a local college and two very young girls came with their parents. I danced with the youngest, who was about 6 years old, and complimented her on her pretty pink dress, which she proudly showed me matched her pretty pink shoes. When we got to the end of the set she looked up at me and said, “It’s fun when you spin me around, I get soooo dizzy!”

During the break the organizer approached us. “As you can see, this dance is not doing well, so any suggestions you guys might have would be greatly appreciated.” We talked together about how to keep a contra dance alive, and gave him our best ideas: getting live music, even if it’s just one fiddle, advertising, membership, and doing dances at local festivals. He worried that there were not enough local musicians and people weren’t eager enough to become involved with the dance, leaving him as the sole organizer. He wanted more young people to come and wondered how he could attract a critical mass to his dance. One of his methods of getting people involved was teaching them how to call. This also had the benefit of allowing him to dance more often, as he was the main caller. That night, he planned on calling all but the first two dances. Once Dave heard this, he offered to call one himself: The Scouthouse Reel.

That night, we drove back to the organizer’s cabin and pitched our tent, something we hadn’t done since the wind storm in Texas. In the morning, our host served us pancakes made with wheat grown at The Land Institute.

-Salina, KS

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 29th, 2007 at 8:06 am and is filed under 20 Kansas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.