Is Kansas Flatter Than a Pancake?
Kansas is very good at some things. I once read a scientific debunking of the popular belief that Kansas was flatter than a pancake. Well actually it proved it rather than debunked it, but it all comes down to your concept of flatness.
Ultimately the point was that if you scale a pancake up to the size of the state of Kansas - and where I live, some people clearly have - you’ll find that Kansas is in fact flatter.
The problem there was that it really didn’t address Kansas so much as the pancake. They really just debunked the notion that pancakes themselves are flat to begin with.
So if you make the pancakes normal size, say five inches in diameter, and then scale them up to be four hundred miles wide they’re still not going to be flat.
For a true comparison you should scale up the ingredients and use a four hundred-mile diameter pan. Then I believe the pancake would be flatter, and this would also be truer to everybody’s popular concept of a pancake. But Kansas isn’t that flat anyway.
My point is that Kansas, believed by people in Ireland, and most places outside Kansas, to be flat, is not. If it were, the Flint Hills would be called the Flint Plateau.
Generally people don’t mean flat when they say flat. If you kick a ball on to the roof, and it always rolls back down, chances are you don’t have a flat roof. Well if you place a ball over on the state line by Colorado, it will roll all the way across the state of Kansas to my house in KC. Or it would if Kansas was a smooth slope.
Southeast Kansas is one of the most beautiful corners of the world I have seen. Quietly beautiful, not spectacular with mountains, coast, or even plains. Small rolling hills peppered with wild sunflowers and hedge trees. It has much in common with the Drumlin country of counties Cavan and Monaghan in Ireland.
Unlike Ireland however the roads do not follow the contours. You won’t even find any contours on American maps. I’ve looked. Because nature doesn’t conform to the order wished upon it, it in turn is ignored. Instead the roads go due north, south, east or west. Cycling them is not a flat ride.
Things get flatter as you start to go west, but first you have the amazing Flint Hills to see. In impact they are reminiscent of the Burren from home. You’re talking one seriously messed up pancake.
Even in the western half of the state where it seems indisputably flat, it’s not so much a pancake as a group of pancakes beside each other. And because each pancake is of different thickness, where they meet you get these fabulous ripples and bluffs.
Anyway, I don’t care about Kansas. Because I live in Missouri. And Missouri is about as flat as a plate of scrambled eggs. With cheese.
See Also:
• The Corned Beef Irish Thing
• The Best Place To Worship
• Chicken Sandwich Imperialism
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