Brewed Fresh Daily

Name: Layton Ehmke
Midwest Home: Dighton, KS
New Home: Chicago, IL

The first chance I got, I took a job as far from the Midwest as I could get and still be in the U.S., which landed me in Homer, Alaska — 3,685 miles west of Dighton, Kansas.

I was a reporter there for about 1,300 days before I really started to miss consistent sunshine and thunderstorms, so I came back to Kansas for a year of farming before heading to the capital of the Midwest, which I’ve recently figured out, is a place I love.

But days before I moved to Chicago, one of my farm chores was to burn a neighboring farm house to the ground. The little house had stood there on the face of the High Plains of western Kansas–empty and weathered, for a generation. Then it was gone. Up in smoke.

There are more of them too, these farmhouses and barns leaning to their ruin–relics that dot the horizon, reminding us that farming doesn’t take the labor force it once did.

In 10 years, 20 percent of the county’s population had fled or died. One in five people I’d known were gone. Today in Lane County, cattle outnumber people forty to one.

I came to Chicago for something that both Homer, Alaska and Dighton, Kansas didn’t have, which was an opportunity to do anything outside of agriculture. I definitely found it on the 16th floor of 680 N. Lake Shore Drive as a researcher at Playboy Magazine.

Does fact-checking the magazine have any resemblance to cleaning a grain bin or driving a tractor for 15 hours a day? Nope. That’s the point.

Meanwhile, I keep in touch with my brother since he actually left Chicago to go back to the farm. Sometimes I wonder if I should join the family business, too, and give up the rest of the world to grow wheat in the wind.

I want to be part of Chicago, because Chicago has just enough. It’s not insane like NYC and LA. It’s Chicago: the great metropolis of moderation.

This is a shorter version of a longer essay originally published in the February, 2012 issue of The Chicagoan.