Tom Lesovsky: 950 Acres of Community

“Some people think I’m a good speaker,” Tom Lesovsky told me, chuckling as if he didn’t quite buy the compliment himself. “I think it’s just because I’m loud and everybody can hear me.”
— Tom Lesovsky, kitchen‑table interview, Cuba Kansas

The kitchen where Tom and Peg Lesovsky pour coffee is square and utilitarian—formica counters, a stove that has outlived four presidents, and a window over the sink that frames a slice of Republic County prairie. Tom pulls up a chair, braces weathered elbows on worn pine, and begins to talk. The cadence of his voice rises and falls like wheat in wind, and soon the room itself seems to settle, listening.

Sixth‑Generation Roots

“I didn’t get very far,” Tom says, nodding toward the yard beyond the window. He means it literally. The 950 acres that unfurl from his doorstep have carried a Lesovsky name for more than a century—Grandfather, Father, Son, and now, for a final season, Tom himself. He tried college once: “A semester and ten days … last day you could get any tuition back.” After that he came home for good, married Peg from nearby Concordia, and folded himself into the layered history of Cuba Kansas.

Sixth‑generation farmers talk in seasons, not quarters, and Tom’s sentences are stitched with weather and soil: ridge‑till corn, double‑crop beans, the stubborn resilience of wheat that survives a Czech‑country winter. There is little romance in his tone—only stewardship, the plain duty of handing the land forward. 

Church, Then Town, Then Everything

The first formal volunteering, Tom recalls, began at the Presbyterian church on Main. Peg taught Sunday School; Tom ushered, fixed leaky faucets, stacked chairs after funeral dinners. In a town of 130 people you do not wait for permission to pitch in—you notice, you act. Soon the Lesovskys were drafted into the Cuba Booster Club, a homespun civic engine chartered in 1976 (bicentennial year) “to do things the city can’t.” Within months they found themselves chairing subcommittees, herding entertainers, balancing budgets scrawled on yellow legal pads. It never really stopped.

“Pretty soon you’re on this committee and another committee. Hence the Rock‑A‑Thon.”
— Tom Lesovsky

The Rock‑A‑Thon—Forty‑Eight Years of Motion

If Cuba has a pulse, the Rock‑A‑Thon is its heartbeat. Every April the community hall fills with donated rocking chairs—oak ladder‑backs, maple gliders, red‑vinyl relics rescued from farm auctions. For decades the chairs rocked seven straight days and nights, propelled by volunteers who traded shifts like barn dancers changing partners. Onstage: 4‑H fiddlers, polka bands, Methodist bell choirs. Downstairs: fried chicken at noon, chicken‑fried steak in the evening, kolache by the dozen whenever you wander past the bake‑sale table.

Covid clipped the marathon to a long weekend—Thursday through Saturday, doors locked at 10 p.m.—but the spirit holds. Two hundred plates of Czech sausage vanish in twenty minutes. The final auction, conducted by local cow‑country ringmen who accept “supper and a beer” as salary, still hauls in fourteen grand on a good year. Every dime cycles back into Cuba: sidewalk cement, abandoned homes razed and land cleared, roof tin for the community hall.

Tom’s role? President “a couple times,” default emcee always. “Welcoming people,” he says, as though greeting visitors and making them feel at home were no heavier than turning on a hall light. Yet the success of rural fundraisers is rarely measured in dollars alone; it lives in the steady voice at the microphone reminding tired volunteers why they started rocking in the first place.

Restoration as Calling

Money raised forks quickly into projects, each a testament to Tom’s fatal inability to look the other way when a building starts to sag. The 1884 blacksmith shop, roofless and collapsing when I first passed through town years ago, now stands square under tin because Tom badgered the Booster Club—“Doc’s building got fixed, why not this?” Another $20,000 in grants, “fifteen to twenty” more in donated lumber, hundreds of volunteer hours directed by Tom’s insistent laughter.

Same story for the two‑room country schoolhouse hauled a mile into town on cribbing beams. The Heritage Center—Doc McClaskey's former office—was another salvage. When potential visitors call ahead Tom or Peg unlock doors, lead strangers through exhibits, speak of chloral hydrate and forge smoke and one-room arithmetic lessons as though these histories were family heirlooms (because, in Cuba, they are).

The Unpaid Logistics of Belonging

All good small‑town enterprises run on unpaid logistics: the last‑to‑leave crew who sweep floors at midnight, re‑stack folding chairs, wipe spills so elderly church ladies do not return to catastrophe. Tom and Peg are that crew. “We’re the cleanup crew,” Peg laughs, yet there is pride beneath the joke. They do the unnoticed tasks—inventorying toilet‑paper supply, unlocking thermostats before funerals, coaxing the new wireless mic to life before Harvest Festival bingo.

When the aging volunteer fire‑chief stepped down, Tom organized a meeting, phoned young neighbors, convinced them to suit up. New leadership emerged, the station revived. No applause followed—only a quiet reduction in communal risk, measured in faster response times and lower insurance premiums.

Farming Still Pays the Bills

Ask what Tom does “when he’s not volunteering” and he answers without irony: “We farm.” Nine‑hundred‑fifty owned acres, a couple hundred rented. Wheat, corn, beans, some hay. No livestock now—too many meetings. Tractor hours still anchor his calendar; harvest finished last week. Volunteer work expands to fill remaining daylight.

Why keep pushing at seventy? Tom’s reply is soft: “Satisfaction of seeing something saved.” A building repaired, a tradition renewed, a stranger who drives forty miles to photograph a schoolhouse because they read about it in National Geographic.

Tears and the Pandemic Pause

In March 2020 the Lesovskys had fryers ordered, flour delivered, chair‑rockers scheduled—then the virus shut the world. Cancelling the Rock‑A‑Thon broke them open. Peg still tears up remembering the emergency meeting, the phone calls, the scramble to sell perishables via curbside pickup. Tom admits he wept later, too, his eyes welling up now. The town survived; the fundraiser returned in abbreviated form. But the memory lingers, a testament to how deeply the tradition runs.

Mentoring by Example

More gratifying than money, Tom says, is watching younger neighbors shoulder the load: the barbecue contest he and Peg merely supported, the Harvest Festival games planned by adults who once rocked chairs as children. He hopes visibility—seeing Tom and Peg present at every event—breeds imitation. So far, signs are good.

“We take our kids everywhere. Didn’t worry about babysitters. Now our daughter and son‑in‑law are real involved. They saw that’s what you do.”

The sons farm careers elsewhere—Chicago finance, Texas tech—but the land will stay in the family, leased maybe, loved certainly. Legacy is a mosaic; each generation chooses its tile.

Jim Richardson and the Gift of Narrative

Cuba’s renaissance owes much to National Geographic photographer Jim Richardson, born ten miles away, who wandered in thirty years ago convinced he should document the town before it died. Instead Cuba refused to oblige, and the photos—shown during slide shows at Rock‑A‑Thon nights—helped ensure survival. Tom recounts the story with a mix of gratitude and Kansas understatement: “Some of it is luck to have Jim.” Yet luck favors towns that rock chairs for seven straight days.

A Thousand-Dollar Gesture

When the Hope & Generosity Tour rolled back into Cuba in 2024, I carried an envelope marked $1,000. It weighed less than a loaf of bread but felt heavier than a mortgage. I had been told, several times, by women at the café and by men sipping coffee at the co‑op scale house: “You’ve got to talk to Tom. He’s got his fingers in everything.” Now, across the kitchen table, I knew why.

I slid the cash toward him. For once he fell silent; Peg covered her mouth. "Oh no. No, no, no," said Tom trying to push it back—“There are others—Clegg, Lynette—” But the rules of the road are clear: refuse generosity, and you rob two parties at once. Finally he nodded, cleared his throat.

“Well,” he said, voice low, “we’ll make it multiply.”

I believed him.

The Gospel of Doing

Tom Lesovsky will never headline a cable segment or trend on a Thursday hashtag. His currency is volunteer hours, auction items gathered, and chairs rocked through midnight. In a world devoted to pixels and posturing, he practices something older—what he calls “background work,” what I call the gospel of doing.

When the interview ended, Peg sent me off with a plate full of baked goods and a mental picture: Tom, broom in hand, sweeping the community hall stage at 1 a.m. after last year’s auction. The image was utterly perfect. It is the shape of service rendered quietly, long after applause has gone home.

I jumped in Josie and headed out County Road K—fresh gravel, the mid-afternoon sun punching gold through the windshield. In the mirror Tom shrank: a silhouette in a sea of wheat, hand still raised, barn behind him cut sharp against the sky. I drove until the figure blurred, then vanished. Only fields remained.

Somewhere past the county line I realized this meeting wasn’t about the $1,000 at all. It was about the moment Tom decided where to send the money. He recognized need the way a sailor recognizes rip current—instinctive, immediate. Generosity wasn’t an act; it was muscle memory.

I tapped the steering wheel to the beat of some earworm and thought of Steinbeck’s line about people in infinite worlds. Thought how Tom’s world fit inside 950 acres yet touched every loaf of bread baked 1,500 miles away. Grain, roads, shelves. Circles.

The road bent east. I followed and felt the axle of the earth shift a click toward grace.

The land pulls you in before the town ever reveals itself. Highway 36 drifts east–west like a slow-moving river, its asphalt edges blurred by wheat that grows shoulder high and sings when the wind tumbles through it. One moment you’re alone with the horizon, and the next—blink—you’ve crossed an invisible threshold, and Cuba is spread out before you, modest as a handshake, stubborn as a prayer.

Population 140. Give or take a birth or two. The weather-curled sign says so with a wink, and you believe it, because Cuba doesn’t bother with exact numbers. She counts by memory, not census. The folks here tally stories, not surnames.

Cuba never bothered to shout its own name. It breathed, steady and slow, like wheat before the wind, satisfied to let the outside world thunder past on Highway 36. Then one October afternoon photographer Jim Richardson rolled in behind the wheel of a battered F-150, two 35mm camera bodies on the seat.

Richardson wasn’t chasing spectacle; he was courting hush. And hush obliged him. In the rusty glow of late fall he crouched down in the middle of a gravel road to catch Betty Klaumann leading a small flock of young geese across the street to a patch of grass where they could snack on grasshoppers. No headline could do that justice; only silver halide and prairie light could carry such truth.

When National Geographic laid his photographs across slick pages, readers in Tokyo, Toronto, and Topeka paused mid-commute, arrested by scenes that felt older than asphalt. CBS lugged a crew out for weekend television, microphones fluttering like meadowlarks beneath the co-op’s corrugated roof. For three breathless weeks the town’s name rode the jet stream of American chatter.

Yet Cuba itself barely tilted. Richardson’s images were mirrors, not billboards. The morning after the magazine hit newsstands, Charlie Andrews still unlocked the door of his barbershop at 8 in the morning, same slow key turn, same creak of the ancient weathered front door. Wes Kilma still pumped gas at his corner station while his dog, Nixon, held court in the office. Kids still lugged trumpets down Main for band practice, boots scuffing dust no camera could romanticize into sepia.

The attention came and went like a hard Kansas thunderstorm—flash, rumble, hush. Folks here greeted it the way they greet rain: grateful, a little amused, then back to the hoe and the hymnbook. Because worth, they’d tell you, isn’t measured by the stranger’s applause. It’s measured in rows kept straight, promises kept quiet, and the soft, steady heartbeat of a place that knows who it is long after the photograph fades.

Morning arrives in three notes: the slap of a screen door, the click of a neon “OPEN” sign warming to life, the sizzle of bacon in a pan that has seen more sunrises than most local kids. The café, pours coffee that could blister paint and serves kolaches dusted with powdered sugar so fine it drifts away if you breathe on it.

The morning I arrived the café wasn’t officially opened, but you’d never know it by how easy the front door just swung open. The place was dark, or maybe it was just my eyes trying to adjust to the inside after having their fill of the bright Kansas morning sun. A group of all women sat around a massive wooden table that itself held more secrets than you could imagine. They were playing “Pitch,” a card game staple out this way, each carrying a name I can’t pronounce and a laugh that fills the room. They talk of everything and nothing at all. That’s the secret—small towns survive on the music of casual talk.

I asked if they were open. “Depends,” came the answer in a chorus. “What’cha looking for?” Just coffee. “Well, we can certainly do that.” Before I could manage the first gulp, I found myself invited to sit with them. They’d spotted Josie rolling up the street and well, that was about as much excitement as they’d had all morning. I was pummeled with questions and was happy to answer. And, yes, I’ll take a second cup…

Outside, Main Street is two blocks long if you’re generous, one if you’re rushing, which no one is. A pair of teenage boys on dirt bikes idle past the post office, wheels spitting dust, throttle notes bouncing off limestone. Across the street is the restored doctor’s building where Doc C.W. McClaskey—the only one in town—practiced for 50 years. The place had fallen to rack and ruin over the years but the town rallied and rebuilt it and turned it into a museum of sorts to chronicle the life and times of Cuba. The Czech flag still flutters from the pole. Red, white, blue. A little faded, a lot proud.

The Community Hall once shook with polka on Saturday nights, I’m told. The brass would start low and lonely, gather courage, then blow the roof right off. Folks came from eight counties, shoes slick with dance wax, ready to stomp their hearts back into rhythm. Those nights ended sometime in the late ’80s when the last accordion player moved north for factory work, but local legend says you can still hear a faint oom‑pah on humid evenings if you stand quiet beside the doorway. I tried. Heard nothing but wind and my own blood in my ears. Maybe I didn’t stand quiet long enough.

Midday lifts the sky to its bright zenith, and Cuba feels small yet limitless. There’s a prairie paradox at work: the more space you have, the more the tiniest details insist on being noticed. A white‑haired man angles his pickup just so next to a gas pump; he chats with the clerk about calves lost in last winter’s storm. A UPS driver scans a barcode, tosses a box onto the porch of a boarded‑up storefront, and drives off without killing the engine. Two minutes later woman ambles out, collects the package, and stands a full thirty seconds studying the label before disappearing behind a locked door again. Life here isn’t measured by transactions—it’s measured by pauses.

The grain elevator looms at the west edge, a concrete cathedral casting a shadow that creeps across the landscape by mid‑afternoon. There’s a baseball diamond where kids used to play Legion ball there. Now the backstop rusts and the dugouts sag like tired old men. 

I climb the elevator stairs—201 of them, each metal rung a whispered threat of rust—and step onto the narrow catwalk. The view is prairie forever. Fields stitched brown and green, windbreak rows soldier‑straight, the bone-white ribbon of Highway 36 slipping off toward Missouri. On a clear morning, the locals say, you can see the curve of the earth. Today haze softens the edges, but the sense of vastness remains, and I understand why the old farmers pray not to a distant God but to the sky itself. It’s closer.

Afternoon slides into dusk with a shrug. Shadows stretch, colors turn the hue of low embers. The teenage boys on dirt bikes have traded their wheels for fishing rods and cast lines into a local pond that resembles a coffee stain on the prairie quilt.

I walk Main as darkness settles. The rhythm of my sneakers is the only percussion in the stillness. A dog barks, then thinks better of it. The streetlamp at the corner winks on—a lonely sentinel—and moths commence their mindless pilgrimage to the glow.

Halfway down the block, a storefront window holds a diorama of the town’s history: sepia photos, a rusted milk pail, a child’s leather glove cracked open like a fossilized handshake. I press a hand to the glass, feel its cool indifference. The display is curated by a group of volunteers. They meet now and then to dust artifacts and argue whether the Czech settlers first camped by the creek south of town or on the hill to the north. No consensus expected, nor needed.

Night lays its quilt across the prairie. Stars ignite one by one, then in reckless clusters. Cuba surrenders to the hush. Diesel trucks moan past on the highway; their red taillights drift away, tiny comets burning out. Somewhere a screen door slaps shut—final punctuation on the day.

I sit on the edge of the ballfield bleachers, notebook balanced on my knee, and listen to nothing. It’s a big, articulate nothing, full of withheld stories. Ghosts of laughter float above the infield dirt. A distant freight train murmurs, pulling the year’s harvest toward a city that will never know the hands that grew it.

If you’re looking for revelation, Cuba will oblige. She doesn’t court outsiders, doesn’t disguise her cracks, and will grin for the camera. And if you stay long enough—longer than a fuel stop, longer than a festival day—you’ll feel the heartbeat beneath the silence. You’ll understand that endurance can be gentle, that belonging can be as simple as waving at every windshield that passes and knowing most of them will wave back.

The wind rises, cresting the wheat like invisible surf. It carries voices, rumors, maybe even that lost accordion line. Tomorrow the sun will climb over the elevator, neon will spark alive, and the café grill will hiss again. And Cuba will do what Cuba does best: wake, work, wait.

There’s a lesson in Cuba's story. It's their enduring spirit. In a world obsessed with faster, newer, bigger, Cuba stands as a testament to the beauty found in constancy and the quiet grace of ordinary people living extraordinary lives.

Sometimes surviving is the most radical act of all.

Rain like you’ve never heard unless you’ve worked tin-roof poultry barns in spring. Fat, grape-shot drops hammer Josie’s sheet‑metal until the panels vibrate in sympathy with my ribcage. One mile back I could see the wall cloud roll across the Kansas plain, darker than a banker’s ledger, pulsing with heat lightning. I bargained—just ten more miles, girl, we’ll outrun it—but the storm was quicker and meaner than my optimism. We dove off US‑54 at Exit 257, skidded across standing water, and nosed into a Love’s Travel Stop lit the yellow of old bruises.

Now Josie idles beside Bay 27, the farthest corner of the truck lot, hiding her sun‑faded Assuan Brown from the sodium glare. Outside, eighteen‑wheelers rumble in the dark like dinosaurs bedding down. Inside, the van rocks under wind gusts, each sway reminding me that homes built on wheels answer to weather before will.

1 Weather as Warden

I’ve been sick for days—lungs full of yard gravel, voice a cracked fiddle. Earlier I convinced myself another fifty miles would burn the fever out with sheer velocity. The storm convinced me otherwise. There’s a humility in conceding to forces larger than horsepower. Tonight sky and body conspired to pull the emergency brake.

A Love’s at midnight is its own small republic: chrome‑stack Peterbilts idling for heat, fluorescent vestibule buzzing like a beehive, the hot‑case burritos revolving under heat lamps, a clerk half my age ringing diesel and cigarettes with astronaut detachment. I paid for Diet Coke and cough drops with fingers that shook from chills, then retreated to Josie’s tin chapel to wait out judgement.

Thunder cracks open overhead—white flash, instantaneous boom that rattles washer fluid in the bottle. For three breaths everything glows magnesium bright, then drops into ink. That flicker‑dark rhythm becomes the metronome of my musings.

2 Philosophy in Fluorescent Shadows

Down the service lane a pair of truckers in Carhartt bibs lean against a flatbed’s fender swapping stories. Laughter cuts through rain, warm and reckless. I envy their companionship—two silhouettes stitched together by the needle‑thread of shared miles. Illness pares life to bone: what remains is longing for human touch, for a hand on the shoulder that verifies existence. On healthier evenings I might stride over, offer coffee, trade anecdotes about blown wheel bearings. Tonight words would exit my throat shredded, apology baked into each syllable. So I sit, mute philosopher of bay lights and diesel fog.

The windshield fogs; I draw a circle the size of a silver dollar to watch the world. Storms, I decide, are editors. They slash the manuscript of intention, strike adverbs of ambition, leave only nouns that matter: shelter, heat, breath. Everything else waits in the margins until morning.

3 Inventory of the Temporary Hermit

One electric blanket, Walmart special, smells faintly of dispair.
One half‑drunk Diet Coke warming toward room temperature.
Two menthol cough drops, paper crinkling louder than thunder inside a tin van.
One journal, pages curled from humidity, awaiting enlightenment that fever denies.
Outside: the baritone of exhaust stacks, the soprano hiss of rain slurry on asphalt, the percussion of ice pellets strafing the roof. A full symphony for the price of parking.

I wrap the blanket tight. My body registers both fever heat and Kansas chill, a battlefront with no demilitarized zone. Somewhere beyond the cab, diesel generators drone electricity into sleeper bunks where other drivers watch game shows, telephone sweethearts, reheat foil dinners on inverter microwaves. The wide logistics machine of America hums right through the tempest, unflappable. Commerce has deadlines; weather has merely commentary.

4 On the Uses of Forced Stillness

Downtime is a thief disguised as a teacher. It steals momentum, schedules, illusions of control; then—if you stay quiet—it tutors you in what remains when motion ceases. I thumb through earlier notebook pages: lists of towns, mileage logs, dollar totals for donations handed off. Worthy numbers, but they feel brittle against the soft animal fact of fever. What good is mileage if the pilot flame sputters?

I resist the lesson, then surrender. Tonight the quest pauses. Tonight the hero trope crumples beneath a roll of paper towels wicking condensation off the dash. Tonight I am apprentice to my own limitations.

A memory surfaces: childhood storms on California Bay Area porches, my mother counting seconds between flash and rumble—one‑Mississippi, two‑Mississippi—to measure distance. Safety through simple arithmetic. I count now, voice a cracked whisper: six seconds, eight. The storm wanders south. Relief inches in, molecule by molecule.

5 Love’s Midnight Congregation

Neon flicker from the store front paints puddles radioactive pink. Through the glass I see the clerk hand a free coffee to a college kid in a hatchback, both smiling at the absurdity of travel. A bearded driver buys two pecan rolls and a phone card. A woman in leggings towels rain from a border collie’s back, murmuring comfort. This is no dingy outpost; it is a human aquarium where kindness swims in unremarkable gestures.

I realize I am witnessing the purest form of roadside fellowship: strangers aligned not by creed but by circumstance—storm‑stopped, night‑caught, engine‑weary. A truck stop at midnight is democracy rendered in florescent hues: everyone pays the same for stale coffee, everyone curses weather in the same hushed tone, everyone’s destination sits on equal footing with everyone else’s because no one’s moving until the radar clears.

6 A Brief Homily on Hugs

Earlier, when lungs cooperated, hugs punctuated my tour: church ladies in Marshall, a foster grandparent’s side‑armed squeeze, Michaela’s sideways shoulder bump lest dog hair transfer onto my jacket. Each embrace calibrated the soul, reminded flesh it was not merely vehicle. Now, starved of touch, I feel phantom hollowness around the ribs, as though air alone can’t keep my frame upright.

One day soon, after antibiotics and sleep and sunlight, I will step from Josie onto some small‑town sidewalk and accept a stranger’s handshake. I will convert that greeting into the full grammar of an embrace, and the marrow will remember how to thrum. Until then, the thought itself is sustenance.

7 The Slow Fade of Weather and Doubt

Near 2 a.m. the rain slackens. Trucks downshift into sleep. My cough abates to embers. I crack the slider two inches; petrichor drifts in—wet asphalt, diesel, alfalfa from somewhere beyond the lot. The storm has washed doubt as clean as the van’s windshield. Purpose, which earlier felt like a banner shredded by wind, now lies folded but intact on the dash, waiting for dawn.

I whisper a gravel‑voiced goodnight to Josie, to truckers in their bunks, to the storm limping east—thanks for the sermon, preacher sky. Then I close my eyes, counting Mississippi seconds between last lightning glow and the long, low hush that finally follows.

Outside, the battered Love’s sign buzzes, humming a benediction over Bay 27: Rest easy, traveler—road work resumes at dawn.

1 Leaving Marshall with Too Much Weather in My Head

I had pulled out of Clarksburg under a pewter dawn. The storm that had baptized the town two nights earlier had marched east, but its echo still rattled somewhere behind my eyes. Josie idled rough, her four cylinders coughing like a chorus that had sung too hard at Wednesday prayer meeting. I chalked it up to damp spark plugs and the cheap gasoline I’d swallowed near Sedalia.

Thirty miles later, on the long straight knife of Missouri Route 20—one of the original 1922 highways—a different cough—my own—answered Josie’s sputter. It began as a tickle at the top of the chest, little more than a clearing of the throat. By Higginsville it had settled into a gravel rattle, each hack snapping muscle across my ribs, stealing tiny bites of oxygen. The road unwound ahead, but inside the van a second road curved downward—steeper by the minute—into the fever alley.

I kept driving because that is what men of a certain stubborn stripe do when trouble taps the window: we nod, adjust the mirror, and apply light throttle.

2 The Double Betrayal—Machine and Flesh

Past Knob Noster the van began her own rebellion. Press the accelerator and she’d surge, then—just when confidence returned—drop power in the span of a heartbeat. Not a stall, more like a stutter. A mule buck. RPMs dipped, came back, dipped again. My chest answered with its own stutter: two coughs, then three. Van and driver in mismatched duet, each accusing the other of sabotage.

Near Rocheport I pulled onto the shoulder. The Katy Trail cut the bluff above, its sycamores already shedding copper leaves onto the asphalt. I lifted the engine hatch. Nothing obvious: no loose wires, no vacuum hose off the plenum, fuel lines dry. But the air-cooled engine radiated heat hotter than normal—as though Josie, like me, nursed a fever.

Temperature outside: forty-eight and falling. Temperature inside my skull: climbing toward the moon.

I closed the hatch, eased back onto the blacktop, and resolved to push west until both coughs— hers and mine—forced surrender.

3 Night at the Fill-and-Go

Darkness caught us just before Prarie Home on highway 87. Somewhere I found a truck stop squatting in a halo of sodium lamps, and pulled under the awning. Diesel pumps chugged beside idling Peterbilts, their drivers clawing incremental sleep before the next logbook entry.

Inside the convenience mart, fluorescent lights hummed at a key that set my teeth on edge. I bought generic cough syrup, two packets of lemon tea, and an overdone hot dog. The cashier, a woman with half-moon spectacles on a beaded lanyard, asked if I needed anything stronger. I said no; the road was strong enough already.

I parked out on the fringe of the lot, nestled among a mix of cars with fogged-up windows, their drivers all trying to snatch 15 or 20 minutes of sleep. I folded down the rear bench. Night settled like wet wool. The fever marched to my temples, drumming a tempo I could not ignore. Cough after cough ricocheted off the tin top ceiling. On the worst spasms my vision sparkled at the edges, constellations forming and bursting behind eyelids.

Out past the truck-yard chain-link, prairie grass rattled under a north wind. The sound made me homesick for Brenda’s kitchen, where onion skin crackles just the same. I let the homesickness keep me warm until exhaustion inked out the lights.

4 Fever Dreams and Dashboard Ghosts

I dreamed Josie was a steam locomotive, pistons pumping slow but sure toward some indigo horizon. Every valve tap echoed like Gloria’s footfalls down Spainhower’s kindergarten hall. I tried to wave her into the engineer’s seat, but she faded into black smoke, leaving only the smell of chalk dust and Juicy Fruit gum. The locomotive paused at an endless crossing; my mother appeared, hammering a “ROAD CLOSED” sign into the ballast. I wanted to ask which road, but the whistle blew, shrill as a cough, and I woke tasting copper.

Three-fifteen a.m. Diesel rigs idling, lights of the truck stop flickering through condensation on the windshield. My throat burned like hot tar. I gulped cough syrup, chased it with a swallow of lukewarm water, and lay back listening to the engine of my own body misfire in the dark.

5 Morning Without Mercy

Dawn came colorless. The windshield was filmed with faint ice crystals. I cracked the sliding door; prairie air knifed inside, smelling of manure and diesel exhaust. Fever sweat chilled against my spine.

Josie fired on the second try—bless her—but the idle still hunted. We rolled onto highway 87, a nondescript two-lane backroad. Forty-five minutes later she hiccupped three times in a row and I thought a valve might have jumped ship. I coasted to the dangerously narrow shoulder. Semi-trucks screamed by, buffeting the van, setting it rocking like a canoe.

I waited, engine running, foot feathering throttle. The sputter evened out. I practiced deep breaths—inhale four counts, exhale four—but each exhale dissolved into coughing fits that left stars exploding at the edges of vision.

I plotted a course to Wamego, Kansas, not for any particular sightseeing or cultural experience, my survival instinct had kicked in, and I needed a shelter from the storm, a place where both Josie and I could heal. (In hindsight, I sorely regret not having ventured into the “OZ Museum,” where “all things Oz” were on display, from the original movie through Michael Jackson’s remake.)

Wamego happened to be the hometown of a friend of a VW buddy—Kevin—whom I’d never met; all I knew about him was from his postings online and several phone calls and texts we exchanged when Josie had me flummoxed. 

Kevin sang the praises of Dave Cook who owns several VWs, including a bus and a Westfalia (pop-top camper) Vanagon. Dave was supposed to be a brilliant troubleshooter, and if anyone could figure out Josie’s intermittent bucking, it would be Dave. But first I had to get better.

I camped out in Dave’s driveway for a few days. On the first day I surrendered and sought medical care. Wamego had a walk-in clinic attached to its healthcare center, and I took advantage of it.

6 Four Walls of Fluorescent Mercy

Wamego’s urgent-care lobby smelled of Lysol and plastic upholstery. A television mounted too high on the wall broadcast headlines about October retail forecasts: “Optimism despite supply chain woes.” I chuckled, then coughed. My name was called by a nurse whose badge read Lillian. Her voice was the color of chamomile: “Let’s fix you up, hon.”

Flu test negative. Strep negative. “Likely viral bronchitis,” the doc said. He was all business with the bedside manner of a Marine sergeant doing inspection. He printed scripts for cough suppressant and antibiotic “in case of secondary infection.” I told him I lived in a van older than the foundation. He grunted, eyes on the electronic chart, and advised rest, warmth, hydration, the usual quartet of impossible instructions for travelers who sleep in Walmart parking lots.

I tracked down the Wamego Phramacy on Lincoln St. and handed over the scripts. “We can have these for you in 20 minutes,” said the clerk. She asked for a local address. I gave the license plate number of the van. I tried to explain. No dice. I relented and supplied my home address. She typed it without a blink—Wamego must see its share of highway nomads—and handed me a brown bag of pills labeled with warnings: May cause drowsiness. Take with food. I bought beef jerky and an orange to count as food.

I swallowed the first antibiotic with a gulp of orange juice and climbed behind the wheel. Engine settled into a patient thrum, as though mocking my earlier despair. Body still ached; but the mechanical crisis, at least, had bent its knee.

8 The Motel of Necessary Surrender

It would have been folly to chase more miles. I surrendered. I fired up the GPS and headed back to Dave’s driveway to hunker down for the night. I unfolded Josie’s bunk and hit the sack still fully dressed; the thin mattress sagged like topsoil in a spring flood.

Outside, Kansas wind combed the prairie grass westward. In endured a fitful start/stop sleep pattern over the next twelve hours, rising only to swallow pills by phone glow.

9   Shade Tree Alchemy

I’d been hunkered down in the driveway of the Dave Cook family going on a couple of days. Trying to get both myself and Josie healthy again.

Because I couldn’t exactly be going out and meeting people—my voice alone would’ve  scared a small child—I decided to just ride whatever viral demons rested in my bloodstream. The doc had given no definitive diagnosis; probably bronchitis of some kind, hence the antibiotics and antihistamines.

I then turned to Josie and Dave’s expert assistance. We were trying to nail down why she would intermittently “buck” on me.

Dave suggested perhaps the coil was breaking down when heated to maximum temperature. To simulate actual road conditions, Dave grabbed a heat gun and we pummeled the coil from close range. A quick check with a voltmeter showed the coil putting out less juice than it should have. We stopped at a local auto parts store, bought a new coil and installed it. 

Then we went to check the dwell angle of the points inside the distributor; the points control the timing of the spark sent to the plugs. The dwell was well out of spec, and we readjusted. At some point I thought to pull the coil wire out of the distributor cap, and when I did, I was shocked.

The firing end of the coil was completely, utterly corroded. As was the hole in the distributor that it plugged into. It was a wonder how it was generating any spark at all. I then pulled the spark plug wires, and three of the four were also corroded. 

So we went and bought a new distributor cap and installed that after we cleaned all the wires up.

Finally, we retimed the engine because we had messed with the dwell. Whew.

Sad to say, further on down the road, the problem remained; she still bucked at me a few times, but only after I’d driven her hard for four hours straight. The search continued.

10 Dusty Morning Resolutions

Two dawns later I could swallow without knives dancing in my throat. Cough had dropped an octave from gravel to sand. The fever receded like creek water after a storm, leaving debris: rubbery legs and a head stuffed with cotton, but nothing I couldn’t drive through.

Josie started crisp. I turned her nose south on Highway 50, bound for the Oklahoma line. Outside the window winter wheat shimmered hopeful green across plowed rectangles of earth. Somewhere behind, Marshall’s kindergarten greeted Monday with a yawn and a grandmother. I pictured Gloria smoothing a child’s cowlick, and a fresh dose of strength bloomed under the healing ribs.

11 Lessons from the Slow Lane

Illness on the road is a peculiar tutor. It strips the nickel-plated romance from travel and makes you count actual costs: the weight of loneliness, the gamble of trusting eighty-thousand-mile spark plug wires, the humiliation of coughing in a crowded pharmacy line with strangers stepping back. Yet it also clarifies the marrow of adventure: forward motion in spite of hesitation, improvisation in spite of ignorance, gratitude stitched to every narrow escape.

Somewhere near Arkansas City, where the Flint Hills fall away into wide cattle flat, I realized Josie’s brief mutiny and my own viral uprising were twin reminders: partnership is fragile. Machines and flesh share one commandment—maintain or perish. Ignorance is no plea when a vacuum hose whispers of rot; arrogance is no cure when the lungs complain of neglect.

But partnership, once mended, may prove stronger at the splice than at the original weave. I pressed the accelerator. Josie rose to the call, steady as a sermon. My breath did not hitch; the cough waited, patient but defeated.

The road ahead curved south into winter’s promise—Arkansas pine smoke, Mississippi river fog, Georgia red clay, and finally the sandy loam of home. Christmas lights would be twinkling on the porch by the time I crossed the state line. Brenda would ask how the journey went, and I would tell her the short version first—storms and saints, van trouble and coughing nights—but save the longer gospel for later: the gospel of limping on, of accepting days when freedom tastes of cough syrup and tire rubber, of learning—again—that the hardest miles are not thieves of joy but their forges.

Above the low roar of tires on asphalt, I heard the echo of ancient Sunday School sessions: Jesus loves me, this I know. Whether a man sings the words or not, the melody works on him all the same—softening the metal, loosening the rust, urging both pilgrim and machine a few more miles down the calendar toward the next hard lesson and the next unearned mercy.

I settled deeper into the seat. Josie hummed. The land stretched wide and wind-scoured, ready to test us again. I let myself rest, let Josie rest. This journey is serving up different rhythms than I’d anticipated. This wasn't the plan, but perhaps what I needed.

So together we pressed on—the van, the fever-faded driver, and the quiet knowledge that the road, like grace, makes room for those who limp.

The road into Clarksburg, Missouri, is hardly wide enough for two combines to pass without trading paint. It rises and falls over a quilt of corn stubble and winter‑wheat green, then drops you—almost apologetically—onto a single paved block of town. From the highway it looks like a place where nothing happens, where Tuesday is identical to Monday except that the postmaster wears her blue cardigan instead of the gray. Yet here, behind a white farmhouse trimmed with last year’s paint, Michaela Cate has carved a refuge out of stubbornness and galvanized pipe—a rescue for the creatures most folks step around like potholes.

1    An Accidental Beginning

Michaela did not set out to become the county’s conscience. She was thirty‑two, working the front desk at the Co‑op in nearby California, Missouri, answering phones about fertilizer spread rates and bulk diesel. The days were ordinary as oatmeal until the afternoon she swung into the Food 4 Less lot for a sack of potatoes and spotted a dog nosing through a Styrofoam clamshell. Ribs like barrel hoops, tail thumping a rhythm of last‑chance hope. She whistled. The dog ambled over—no collar, plenty of copper‑colored mites in its ears—and leaned his full hunger against her shins. With that simple press of weight, the story bent. Michaela opened the passenger door. The dog climbed in like he’d been waiting on the invite all his life. She named him Spud, after the errand she never finished.

Spud became the fifth dog in a house already fitted for four. She scrounged a spare crate from an uncle, wedged it beside the water heater, and told herself it was temporary.

In a town where a new recipe at the bar & grill qualifies as news, one woman taking on strays quickly became lore. Folks started leaving dogs the way others leave church casseroles—quietly, on the porch, with a note and a whispered apology: Can’t keep him; husband sick;  keeps chasing calves; sorry. Dogs arrived in the hush before dawn, nails clicking across the wooden steps, noses pressed to the screen door, waiting for the smell of scrambled eggs.

2    The Math of Mercy

Twenty‑seven. That’s the count so far—twenty‑seven dogs re‑homed, vetted, vaccinated, healed of mange, heartworm, or the wound of simply being unwanted. Twenty‑seven is also twenty‑seven rabies tags paid out of Michaela’s paycheck, ninety‑four bags of kibble, and untold gallons of bleach erased across kennel floors. She works full‑time at the Co‑op, part‑time evenings tallying books for the hardware store, and somehow still logs Thursday afternoons balancing the food‑bank ledger because, she says, “Hungry’s hungry, whether it walks on two legs or four.”

Inside the garage the concrete floor is scrubbed and sealed. The kennels line one wall, pristine steel pipe uprights, chain‑link sides hung with laminated cards: Name, Intake Date, Weight, Temperament, Vaccines. Cade, her partner, welded the frames on weekends, sparks flying into humid air thick with the smell of cut metal and dog shampoo. Cade seldom says much; his love language is sweat and fence staples. When they argued about the growing pack, he’d bite off the rim of a smile and give her a knowing node. That was permission enough.

Each kennel has a raised cot, a stainless bowl, and a toy—rubber chicken, tennis ball, or knotted rope depending on the occupant's demeanor and overall appetite for such "finer things." A box fan murmurs at one end, pushing heat toward an exhaust vent Cade cut through siding. Above the noise hangs the tang of bleach and optimism.

3    Paper Walls and Moving Goals

Missouri law calls her operation a boarding kennel—that is, if she wants to stay on the right side of inspectors. When the first state inspection went down, Michaela failed it within twelve minutes: feed sacks stored on concrete, no laminated cards on the kennels and other nit-picky items. The inspector's words droned on as he cited statute numbers. She watched his pen scratch the page and felt her chest plate shift like a barn board in freeze‑thaw. Failure is expensive. But so is giving up.

She paid the re‑inspection fee out of her meager savings, printed the regulations, and taped them beside the washing machine. Then she and Cade set to work—lifting fifty‑pound feed bags onto pallets, running a dehumidifier line to the drain, cataloging every shot record like sacred scripture. Within a the state seal stamped Approved, Provisional. She framed the certificate, hung it in the garage where the dogs couldn’t pee on it, and christened the place Mission Monipaw—Moniteau County’s first and only licensed shelter.

4    Pushback and Kryptonite

Not everyone applauds the rescue. In towns this small, virtue can look like vanity from across the fence line. One neighbor complained about barking. Another hinted that dogs carried disease. The county dispatcher called twice about so‑called vicious animals loose on Highway 87, both times describing the same aging wobbly canine. To her face they grumble, but online the words grow sharper—Facebook threads accusing Michaela of hoarding, of drawing strays into town, of “wasting tax money”— though she’s never taken a dime of it.

She answers criticism with data sheets: vet receipts, adoption contracts, before‑and‑after photos of mange turned to velvet fur. Most skeptics fall silent. Those who don’t find themselves staring into a woman whose gentleness ends exactly where a dog’s safety begins. “If I need to be ruthless,” she warns, eyes level, “I will.”

Her kryptonite, though, is the ceaseless tug-of-war between her advocacy and the public’s misunderstanding. Her mission is as unrelenting as it is tender, as unforgiving as it is filled with love.

Then there is fatigue—the bone‑deep ache that creeps in around midnight when the last kennel is latched, the medications logged, and the house lights darken except for the glow of the rescue’s PayPal page on her phone. Donations come, trickle‑style: twenty from a retiree in Sedalia, five from a second‑grader who sold bracelets, a hundred slipped anonymous through the mail slot in an envelope marked simply “For the hounds.” Still, some nights the math doesn’t balance. That’s when doubt circles like a coyote at the fence. Michaela meets it with the same stare she gives skeptics—and keeps going.

5    Triage, Triumphs, and the Twenty‑Eighth Dog

The latest intake arrived as most others, scared and skeptical of human kindness. She names each dog and logs it in her calendar that measures time by rescues, not months.

The photo—before and healed—will one day join twenty‑seven others in a bulging 4x6 photo portfolio. Each frame hand‑lettered: BELLA → Service Dog in Columbia. HANK → Kids’ Reading Buddy, McGirk Elementary. No frame gets removed; this gallery stands as both scoreboard and reminder that mercy never finishes its innings.

6    The Day We Met – Hope & Generosity Tour Stop

I'd read about Michaela in the local newspaper. A headline story told of 27-dogs saved and adopted out. I met her at her home, rolling Josie up a gravel driveway and parked along side an ancient oak where she rattled to a halt. She met me at the door and invited me for coffee. We chatted a bit then went to look over the facilities. As she detailed the surroundings, she noticed a dog had pissed in the kennel, unable to hold it until a morning walk. She grabbed some bleach and roll of paper towels and began a cleanup routine she knew by heart. 

We stood watching, asking questions as other dogs took turns thrusting noses through the fence for a sniff of the newcomer. She told me the first dog story, the failed inspection, the three‑job weeks. She spoke without pity or polish, as if recounting chores rather than miracles. Her eyes lit most when describing a newly placed dog that was slated to be a service dog.

The longer she talked, the heavier my enveloped thousand dollars felt in my jacket. I had meant to give the money discreetly—snap an iPhone pic, shake hands, be on my way before she could refuse. But destiny seldom minds itinerary. Instead I listened for an hour, Only when the sun climbed high enough to silver the chain‑link did I take the bundle of cash out and slide it across the table. 

She turned it over like a library book, eyebrows knotted.  *

“This is just a gift. A $1,000 cash. No strings. You can do with it whatever you choose. It's a way of giving back for all you do without ever asking for anything in return." 

Tears started to flow once the reality set in. Her shoulders slumped as though some interior brace had, for once, been permitted to relax. She turned the stack of cash over and over in her hands, as if to make sure it wouldn't suddenly dematerialize. "Thank you, thank you so much," she said. "You don't know how many dogs this will save," her gratitude hummed in the air like power lines under frost.

I asked the question I’d asked of rescuers before her—Why keep doing this when the flood never stops? She watched a barn swallow dance across the soybean field, let two full breaths slide by, then said:

“They didn’t ask to be born. Didn’t ask for the chain or the ditch or the bullet. We did that. So we owe’m something decent in return.”

7    The Wide Echo of Small Kindnesses

Clarksburg will not erect a statue to Michaela Cate; the town budget struggles to replace cracked sidewalk squares. Mission Monipaw will likely never trend on social media beyond a few earnest #AdoptDontShop shares. Yet out there in the big roaming world—from Kansas City lofts to Ozark farmhouses—twenty-seven dogs (and counting) snooze on couches or guard back doors or steady the heartbeat of anxious children, each life a ripple widening mile after unseen mile.

A stray saved is not the whole ocean; it is merely one breath of surf pulled back from oblivion. Michaela knows this, and still she tosses the starfish, one ribby shadow at a time, into the froth. Evening after evening when the barks quiet, she stands a moment in the hush. She listens for gratitude—hers, not theirs—rising like crickets in the soybean dark. Then she locks the gate and goes inside to rest for whatever knock comes next.

Because in the folds of Missouri, where skyline cedes to soybean and seasons count by combines, ordinary women sometimes choose the extraordinary labor of opening their doors a little wider than reason. And the world—dog by dog, kindness by kindness—grows wider with them.