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Mon, 13 Jul 2009 15:26:56 GMT

Cheyenne Bottoms Neighborhood Compound

Yes, this has been the home of The Cheyenne Bottoms Neighborhood Journals on Radio Userland since 2004. This work of social science fiction tells the story of the Cheyenne Bottoms Neighborhood Compound from the point of view of a guardsman stationed there in the early 2030s. The Compound is a domed and gated city of the New Republic, situated in the old Cheyenne Bottoms Wildlife Area in central Kansas, near what was Great Bend. The heart of the country has been turned into a giant national park of sorts, as severe drought and tornadic activity over the course of a decade have forced the government to withdraw federal aid and support from the area. Result: very few people live there any more. But there are a number of gated cities like the Cheyenne Bottoms Neighborhood Compound that the government sponsors. Read the latest at "The Story So Far".

In other news, we are now dropping our Comrade Fidel site as those two rascally brothers are funnier in real life than anything I can come up with, but we may continue the Castro Brothers site, which features an imaginary trip across America by these two aging world leaders. Stayed tuned on that one.

And we're developing a new site hosted by the ghost of Emile Zapata, of Mexico Revolutionary fame. He's been gone for a long time, but he's still a hero to many, and with the shape that that country finds itself in currently, maybe he's just what they need. We might also toss in some material on Pancho Villa. (I knew a guy who claimed to be Villa's grandson a few years ago, and we might just get some mileage out of that!)

And we might bring back Comrade Fidel at some point if there's enough interest -- he might be doing some channeling and maybe some taxi cab driving in the future (perhaps he'll even try his hand at selling stuff on the streets of Havana!. You never know.

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Note: these Cheyenne Bottoms journals probably would have never been made public if the government had not showed reluctance to help members of Troop C of the 167th Calvary plan a reunion for those who served at Cheyenne Bottoms in the Heartland; that fact, yes -- and also a chance conversation I had with a stranger about that same time. Direct inquiries of any nature to donald_seger@crawler.com. Any similarity to actual persons, places, and things without satiric purpose is not intended.

The Great Challenge

So I told my friend and fellow guardsman, Johnny Ray Murphy, that I was certain that we were being watched there on the Kansas Prairies in the thirties, and that if they could have found someone to do it, they'd probably sift through our shit to see if we had been stealing anything from the Compound that we could eat. I had read that ancient Egyptian masters regularly ordered slaves to dig through the excrement of other slaves assigned to gardening duty, just to see if they had been stealing produce from the royal garden. So why wouldn't Uncle Sam? I was always looking over my shoulder, and Johnny Ray said that he was, too, and the truth of it was if we had had shit sifting duty, he and I would probably have drawn it. On a weekend. At night.

As it happened, we did do some gardening there in the Heartland -- out of necessity as it turned out-- a little stealing (leftovers from what we believed to be the cafeteria, and some over-the-counter medicines), and we even kept a few head of cattle. We also did a bit of poaching (the occasional buffalo, and an elk or two -- more on this later). But what we did mostly during our tour at the Cheyenne Bottoms Neighborhood was guard the Compound. That's what we did. From whom or for what reasons were never completely clear to us. And that was the great puzzle. Very confusing.

And the great challenge -- besides figuring out how to protect mostly unseen people from mostly unseen dangers -- was survival. Ours. It wasn't easy, and it sometimes seemed as if the government was making it more difficult for us to discharge our duties than necessary. And of course there was the occasional wolf who wandered into camp and disturbed things pretty much. And other intruders.

I served at the Bottoms for nearly three years just after my stint as a public school teacher, and just before I went to Fort Omaha to do some rather unusual work for Uncle Sam, and then ending my government service with a tour in Kansas City as a disc jockey. But back to the Neighborhood for now.

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Mon, 13 Apr 2009 16:17:23 GMT

Donald Seger's Radio Weblog

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