Anthrax Scare Creeps Into Nation’s Heartland

It was a golden day in this sturdy farm town in the heart of America’s heartland. The middle school band was practicing outside. The local cafe had meatloaf on special.

And fear hung in the air.

The men and women of Cheney shopped and worked and shoveled in Gabby Jack’s sour-cream mashed potatoes as always. But they were saying things like, “This is really starting to scare me,” and “I’m terrified.”

They had awakened Thursday to the news that anthrax spores had been discovered in a Kansas City, Mo., postal center. Not much anthrax, to be sure. But enough to put 170 postal workers on antibiotics.

No one was sick. That was good. And there was a plausible theory about how the spores got to Kansas City: They might have been carried on a shipment of letters that arrived Oct. 19 from a tainted postal center in Washington, D.C.

So, on the one hand, the Kansas City contamination seemed limited and reassuringly logical.

On the other hand, “It’s getting closer,” said Bruce Uppendahl, 46.

He was selling scaffolding in his farm supply store. Greg Rose, a general contractor, was buying. “I’m watching it spread, seeing how much closer it’s getting to us,” said Rose, 38. “I try not to think about it.”

That was a tough strategy to stick to Thursday. The spores in Kansas City--a good three- or four-hour drive from Cheney--were on the front page of the paper, on the radio, on TV. No terror news had hit this close to home since dozens of passengers were stranded in Wichita when air travel shut down after Sept. 11.

Folks here, as around the country, had been jumpy for weeks, as they watched the spread of spores and victims through Florida, New York, New Jersey and Washington. Now their jitters had an edge. Now it was personal.

“I think about it all through the day. How can you not?” asked Brenda Lorenz.

She was setting up a Farm Bureau Insurance office she will run with her husband. But her mind was on an e-mail her son had sent, a news tidbit on foreigners flocking to flight schools. Her mind was on her grandchildren, one a teenager, one a toddler, and on what kind of America they would know. Her mind was on spores, and how they got to the Midwest, and where else they might be lurking.

The same questions kept looping through her mind. She knew there were no answers. She could not keep from asking.

“Where’s it going to show up next? If there are so many terrorists still among us and we don’t even know who they are, how do we know what they’re going to do?”

Lorenz, 55, tried to shake off the questions. But “It’s a very scary, very uncomfortable feeling,” she said.

No one here seriously expects Cheney to be a target for terror. In fact, folks chuckle at the idea.

This is a town of 2,400 smack in the middle of Kansas. Wheat fields and cattle ranches unroll on all sides. The biggest structures around are the huge irrigation rigs that sprawl across the landscape.

Though residents do not expect Cheney to be a target, they wonder about the random way the anthrax seems to be seizing victims. They look at the front page of the Wichita Eagle: A photo of Kansas City’s mayor and its health director announcing the anthrax contamination there. It’s hard to see that and not flinch.

“Everything just feels a lot different now,” said Katie Knowles, 15, stocking candy at the grocery store after school.

Down the street, Don Walker is picking up his mail--one bill and a postcard from the U.S. Postal Service telling him how to handle a suspicious letter. He chuckles. “I think the terrorists, they’re just playing with this stuff now to see what they can do,” said Walker, 64. He wonders when they will stop playing and get serious. He doesn’t want to find out.

On the surface, life here in Cheney seems to be going on very much as normal. Post office employees are not wearing gloves. Holiday stamps are on sale. There’s a Veterans Day parade coming up, and the annual turkey raffle. Over at the high school, kids are talking about the start of basketball season, about how many games the Fighting Cardinals will win.

But the terror of Sept. 11 does reverberate.

On Thursday, Paul Rhodes, publisher of the local paper, had to fire his only two editors because advertising has dried up since the attacks. And Uppendahl, owner of the farm store, has put his plans for a cruise to the Bahamas on hold because the world seems suddenly too shaky to venture that far from home.

Troy Collins, a 22-year-old carpenter, says he has found himself scrubbing his house, tinkering with his car, doing anything to avoid dwelling on terrorism. Robin Shoemaker, a 42-year-old waitress, can’t escape as easily, though she would like to. The breakfast crowd at Gabby Jack’s cafe talks Osama bin Laden over bacon and eggs.

Amy Crouch, a mother of three, insists: “I’m not going to let a bunch of wacko, crazy extremists determine my outlook on this country.” But she has thrown away every letter addressed to “occupant” at home, and she wears rubber gloves when she opens mail at the local newspaper, where she is business manager.

And there’s Olin Miles, an 82-year-old retired farmer in worn bib overalls and a John Deere cap.

Miles shrugs off news of anthrax spores in Kansas City, refusing to give in to the fear that grips many of his neighbors. He is calm and patient, and confident that America will prevail. He won’t waste energy thinking about terrorists. Unless he’s thinking about how to smoke them out.

“It’s kind of like getting prairie dogs out of your pasture,” Miles explained. “You’re going to have to go through many, many an ordeal to get them out. You have to go through every hole, one at a time.

“It’s going to cost a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of worry, a lot of fret. But there’s not much else you can do.”