Ten thousand SUVs will be leaving Colorado for Kansas when bird hunting season opens Saturday.

The Kansas Department of Parks and Wildlife predicts half a million pheasant and a million and a half quail will bite the dust. It’s a safe bet all but 10 will be served with raspberry Jell-O salad, with and without marshmallows. Motels have set out signs welcoming bird dogs and warning of a $100 fine for cleaning birds in your room.

Clem and the Boys at the Bar still are chewing on last year’s hunt. They drove 18 hours for a quarter of a pound of meat, because you can’t eat anything but the breast, but they got their limit before the dogs broke a point. The hunters had a lot to say about the state’s ability to grow rest stops instead of trees for shade, build grain elevators bigger than the state Capitol and place historic markers overlooking feed lots.

Shame about the sparrows, they agreed, having to nest in the “u” on the Jiffy Lube sign because there are no trees.

Something funny happens when the land gets flat. People still sit on the front porch and listen to the bug zapper and spend Sunday afternoon poking the ashes in the burn barrel. They farm riverbeds, read books while driving, and refuse to shop without coupons. Instead of guessing the date of the first snow, they wager on when water will come into the Arkansas River and win a shopping spree at the Mall of the Americas.

They either have or lust for a cabin in Colorado.

There has been a lot written about the plains, and Clem says it’s all true.

Soda is called pop and damn is a dirty word. Every little museum in every little town displays a Mason jar full of 1932 Depression dust.

Conversations all start with Hi Howareya and end with Haveaniceday, even when it’s 10 p.m. and the day is darn well over. Birds get diarrhea from eating too many mulberries and kettle corn is a best seller.

In the Heartland, green vegetables are not a food group and canned peaches are considered a vegetable. White things are served on white plates, tone on tone, like creamed chicken and noodles on a bed of mashed potatoes with white gravy. Not a flake of parsley to break the glare. In country where you are invited to a “feed” to “stuff your face,” it is not surprising that Spam cupcakes beat out Sardine Cool Whip for a blue ribbon. Applebees is gourmet for special occasions.

The plains are filled with women who shouldn’t wear shorts, Kielbasa-faced dames who spend their lives looking at the Missouri River and thinking about where it might have taken them. They grow hostas with a vengeance and still use dishrags. Chicken fried steak and mashers are on the diet plate, and the ladies from Weight Watchers ride on the Dairy Queen float in the Fourth of July Parade.

Men still play Whist and hold doors open. Every one of them knows how to drive a grader and get to the landfill. They are addicted to ballgames, barbecue and beer, not necessarily in that order, and forsake NPR for farm reports on pork bellies and corn futures. They all want to hunt in Colorado.

Kids eat TV dinners and end sentences with prepositions. Boys jam their fists deep into their jean pockets to make bulges where they wish they had them. Girls are born knowing how to make apple butter and custard pie. They grow up convinced that the “good life” means making enough money to buy a second car, a fridge with an ice-making machine on the door and a vacation home in Colorado.

Clem and the boys did not linger long after the hunt. They didn’t visit the Lesbian Dude Ranch in the Flint Hills, the whirl-a-gig farm in Mullinville or the barbed wire museum in La Crosse. They passed up the bank in Norton that displays portraits of every losing candidate for president, and displayed little interest in the museum in a salt mine.

They did not stop to participate in contests for corn husking, pancake flipping and lutefisk throwing. And they had no interest in the world’s largest ball of twine, the world’s largest prairie dog or the world’s largest outdoor concrete swimming pool. But they were sorely tempted to spit chew into the world’s deepest hand-dug well.

The news from Kansas was equally bizarre this year. A lady legislator claimed women never should have been given the vote, and the governor finally replaced a 250-watt light bulb on top of the capital with a statue of an Indian. The Boys at the Bar seriously considered staying home and watching wheat grow on Kansas State University’s Web site. Instead they decided this year to toast Kansas by drinking the Marsala instead of pouring it over the pheasant, maybe while they are cleaning them in the sink at the Holiday Inn.

” Sureva Towler is a free-lance writer from Steamboat Springs who winters in Lawrence.