AND IF YOU ASK ME

by Grayce Pitera

Last week Harry and I loaded up the car and headed out to Kansas. The plan was to visit Merrie Jo at her new home and capitalize on some real quality down time. The drive as always was beautiful. The mountains, rivers and then, of course, the plains all passed by my window, whether I was driving or simply lazing in the passenger’s seat. It is a drive that keeps getting better and better, the further you go, literally placing the best our great country has to offer at your feet.
We pass through mountain tunnels and continue on by working windmills, pure blue lakes, running rivers and cornfields. We marvel at the old barns and their meticulous farmhouses, fields and grounds. We see clothes hanging on the lines at almost every farm. If there are no clothes, there are empty clothes lines waiting to be pressed into service. We find it remarkable that there are actually ladies at home who still hang out the weekly laundry.
This is an idyllic life, for certain, I tell myself. We stop at rest areas where people invariably strike up conversations. They are locals in Indiana, passersby in Illinois or the levelheaded Kansans we’ve grown to know and respect.
“Nice day, yup?” a man remarks as he passes us at an Indiana stop in 84-degree weather.
Two hours later an Illinois stranger adds, “Cool weather for this time of year,” as the temperature plummeted to below fifty degrees. Then a short chat ensues centering around how we hit three seasons in just one day, just moving along I-70.
Starbucks kept us going until Ohio. Soon it became scarce and then nonexistent. Finally we pulled off the highway following a huge sign directing the way somewhere in Illinois and stocked up before continuing on our way.
The next day we awoke to rain showers. One system forecasted flooding in Missouri, the exact direction in which we were headed. We were also warned by MapQuest to beware of the construction in St. Louis. Lucky for us, we met neither delay.
Happily, we arrived at my daughter’s doorstep the next day. “This is a really nice neighborhood,” I said to Harry, and even when our visit ended I felt the same way. The homes are imposing, yards well kept. The street is wide and there are cars in all the driveways, indicating that these are not homes where both owners work. Instead, these families enjoy every nook and cranny of their homes every day of the week. These are homes where family members cannot wait to return.
Greetings over, we take the tour of Merrie Jo’s new home. And, new it is. She only moved into it two days before our arrival. We, of course, love it. That evening we settled down in front of the TV for the late news. Another pleasant surprise. The news is really the news. We weren’t held captive listening to reports of violence for the first fifteen minutes.
Instead, we learned of school events and around-the-town happenings. However, a headline caught my attention. Coyotes were the subject of a true area problem. I really didn’t zero in at first. What could be so intimidating about a bunch of coyotes out on the plains somewhere?
Then I heard it. The coyotes weren’t staying out in the plains any longer. These intimidating creatures have become a bit more brazen. They are coming right into these towns, including the one where Merrie Jo lives, and attacking tiny pets. This is a widespread problem especially for Kansas City and its suburbs.
I had written about the bears of New Jersey a few years back and mentioned how they were expected to come into the South Jersey area. Rangers track bears. They know where they are at all times.
We enjoyed a leisurely breakfast at Mary’s on the morning we left for this trip. Inside, regular customer, Joan Perna, served us coffee. Only in Hammonton, especially at Mary’s, do customers feel so at home, they actually serve their own coffee as well as those tables around them.
Outside I overheard two men talking about bears being sighted in the Wharton tract. “They won’t bother you unless you bother them,” one man said. I wanted to interrupt and tell him that he should have read my column. My friends in the New York State mountains do not bother the bears, but the bears still visit their yards. One even broke through a screened porch to retrieve some apples the owner had forgotten there. So the bears will encroach on us if and when they settle in our area. That was bothering me a bit as we drove out of town that day.
However, the bears seemed tame after hearing about the coyote problem here in Kansas. A woman’s tiny dog treed a bear in New York. Here the coyotes were eating tiny pets.
Later in the day I accompanied Merrie Jo to her kitchen designer’s studio. After the work session had ended, the designer mentioned the coyotes. Apparently she is as worried about the coyotes as I was about our bears.
“The home associations are saying it is up to the city to deal with the problem,” she said, “and the city is saying it is up to the home associations.” Her frustration was apparent.
“I wonder how long before a child is attacked,” I responded, adding fuel to the fire.
“Exactly,” she replied.
By the next evening the newscaster was happy to report that an effective solution to the coyote problem had been agreed upon and would be placed into action the following day. No long debates; just plain talk and the situation had been amicably addressed.
The next day we were scheduled to move on to Dan’s home in Detroit. We couldn’t wait to see Anneka who is now five years old. The night before we left, we learned that a two-day series of violent thunderstorms were expected to follow the same path and timetable as we. We decided to play it by ear.
These two news flashes remind me that no matter how wonderful a section of our country appears to the eye, there will always be problems to solve there too. That is just life.
We have no coyotes here in Hammonton, but we will always have business at hand such as the encroaching bears. I only wish we could handle it with the speed and grace of the Midwesterners that I know. But then, that wouldn’t work either.
“He has that East Coast attitude,” Merrie’s friend said to me without even a flinch as he described his co-worker’s hard-to-take demeanor earlier on the day of our visit. As taken back as I was by that assessment, I realized the Kansans wouldn’t have that negative example at their disposal if we “east coast” people didn’t behave as we do. It just wouldn’t be neighborly to change now.

Grayce Pitera is a weekly columnist for The Gazette.