Dead center.

October 23, Harveyville.

It was cold, the kids were sleeping, it was a perfect time to go for a walk. The place is hardly a hamlet, not big enough to have a stoplight or even an intersection, but it is big enough to have a pottery studio with the whole world in its shapes and glazes, the desert's hues, the ocean's blue, the starless night's infinite black, the sand dunes and the waves, they're all in the stoneware that owner Barry Jepson, with Linda, Julie and Robin make here in what at first sight appeared to be the forsaken end of the road.
"You're in the center of the United States here," said Linda, who is from Florida and followed her husband here from Seattle. They bought a three-bedroom ranch house and 13 acres for just over $40,000 two years ago, which could be another reason why the end of the road in Kansas is more attractive than it first seems.
And just down highway 31, Burlingame, a little bigger than Harveyville, just like so many other downtrodden corners of the country is a study in what America has left behind, with its cobblestone main street, handwritten shop signs, the haphazard quality of the buildings and stores, anything but pretty, flat tones, simple trades, a tire shop, a meat market, the Bug Guys and the Sante Fe Café, all neon lit and nowhere to go, haphazard, unadorned, authentic, but also anachronistic, as if someone had stopped the clock in the fifties and thrown away the key, before the chain stores, gentrification and manufactured tastes made the country look tiredly cute and the same from one end to the other.
But then the town is most probably dying, slowly oozing its population like rural communities the country over.