With 60+ miles to cycle and the threat of a storm, I was looking for ways to speed my trip. I made a right choice (and a right turn) when I decided to take the road to the Butler County Landfill. My theory that dump trucks need pavement—not the slower, more energy intensive, gravel—proved correct. When I stopped at the landfill to take this photo, two men in a pickup truck pulled up to me and asked me if I was lost.
I guess the landfill is not on your average bike route. Turning north from the landfill road I ended up on extraction road. First I passed a quarry.
Then holding tanks for crude oil.
Then Emerald Oil City!
It was overwhelming to see those massive stacks and tanks rise up from nowhere, and then to descend upon them on a bike. My route took me straight to the entrance of Holly Frontier Refinery. It seemed foolish to linger to take photographs as big trucks passed. However, there was a cemetery directly abutting serviced by a gravel road.
Back on gravel, Whiskey and I felt more in our element and I was able to take some photographs.
I was taken by how much intricate infrastructure laced through the fields of tanks.
I also was struck by the poignancy of the facility’s placement next to a cemetery. As we extract oil from ancient life buried deep in the ground, we bury human lives back into it. One such life was that of a United Steelworkers member who worked at the plant, and lost his life in a fire there in Fall of 2017 (there is about one fire at U.S. refineries every week). Maybe partially in recognition of these safety issues, this message greets workers as they drive into the plant.
As the mercury rises on this day, I also think about the lives—human and non-human—lost as the planet warms, partially due to carbon emissions. Just last year the refinery settled a case with the EPA for exceeding emission limits. Today fire fighters in California are shrouding giant sequoias in tinfoil blankets trying to protect some of the oldest and largest trees on earth from fires ravaging the West during this summer of record high temperatures. By now it is the noon hour, and I am very hungry, so I head over to Hampton’s on 2nd Avenue for lunch. It recently opened to rave reviews (I learn from an old timer that it used to be a chili house). As usual, I am the only one wearing a mask, but no one seems to treat me poorly as a result. The staff are very friendly. I order a fried chicken sandwich, fries and a limeaid. The limeaid—excellent—comes with refills, and the staff visit frequently to top you up.
I am eating and checking routes, when one of the women at the table across from me asks me where I came from. I respond: Wichita, via the oil refinery. I learn from them—both retired teachers—that the refinery was the number 1 employer in town followed by the hospital and the schools. But, they add, El Dorado also has a prison. I was struck by how much interest they seemed to have in the prison. They were unsure if women were kept there, but the man at the table next to them confirmed yes. Thus began a vigorous three table conversation about El Dorado—details of its prison’s “famous” inmates (TMI about TBK); effects of the booms and busts of oil on the town (“when the price of oil is down a lot of people in this town struggle”); the temporality of the refinery (turnaround is about to happen, a biannual event where the plant shuts down and thousands of maintenance workers descend to service it).
As we are talking, someone in a brand new Ram truck tries to create a new driveway by running into some massive rocks that are in their way.
Soon the noon hour had ended, the sun had intensified, and the clouds gathered on the horizon, so I began to pack up. Before leaving, though, I stop by an organization devoted to promoting and supporting El Dorado’s identity and stability. I learn about efforts to diversify the town. More to come on this.
From El Dorado, I head Northeast to Cassoday, hoping that Kansas’ famous south wind will carry me. No such luck. Uncharacteristically, there has been little wind the last several days. I cycle the several miles around the reservoir outside of town. Built for flood control in the 1970s by the US Army Corps of Engineers, El Dorado Lake has a surface area of 43 square kilometers. I exit the lake onto highway 177. Despite my advance worries, it provides deluxe biking. No more than 8 cars pass me the whole 25 miles, and the road is perfectly paved with a shoulder.
The only trouble came when I passed over the railroad tracks and a pack of dogs ran after me from quite a distance away. I thought they would not catch up with me, but they did. I kept to my ignore dogs policy. It worked.
Having lost the dogs (and a few extra beats of my heart), I continued my lonesome ride. To my left I saw massive electrical poles constructed of iron that extended for miles. Despite their industrial purposes, non-humans used them as habitat. The tops were covered in bird droppings (with few trees, poles of any kind are prime bird perches), and cattle are lying in the shade underneath.
Further up on my right I begin to see evidence of the massive BNSF railroad double tracking project. Piles of old railroad ties lie stacked up along the side of the lines.
The project is adding line so that the trains can go north and south at the same time and increase volume.
A bit further on I come to a place where double track work had temporarily stopped, and one could get a closer look.
Instead of wood, the new track uses concrete ties, which apparently are cheaper and more stable. The spikes are installed in a manner that looks more secure, and might lessen the need for railroad workers to hammer back and replace spikes.
The final stretch of my ride brings me into Cassoday. Earlier in the day a friend relayed the bad news that its store—the only one on the 32 mile route from El Dorado to Matfield Green—planned to close from 3-6PM to prepare for fried chicken and music nite. When I roll in at 3:30, desperate for a cold drink, I decide to stop anyhow. I was greeted by one of the proprietors, Jenny, who asked me what I needed. “Just Gatorade,” I responded. “I gotcha,” she said, and waved me in. Not only did I get Gatorade, I got an invite to the dinner and festivities later, which they were setting up on their “porch.”
The “porch” used to be a filling station, but Jenny explained it was not worth all the government red tape to sell gas when people could just go to town or the turnpike rest stop five miles away to get it. I downed half the bottle of Gatorade, and traveled the final 10 miles to Matfield Green. Trains shot through the prairie on my right.
Trucks drove by on my left. They were ending their shifts hauling materials to make the new railroad beds. For reasons I am yet to uncover, BNSF sited their staging site right in front of a scenic overlook.
I stopped and read the signs telling me about the “beautiful prairie” before me, and how it is today home to artists and preservationists.
The massive industrial earth works before me belies a more complicated story. But that is a story for another time …