Tumbling along

By John Schlageck
Insight

Part cultural icon and part invasive nuisance, tumbleweeds have an intriguing and tangled history. You know, tumbleweeds — those twisted balls of dead foliage rolling across the open range and roads.

If you’re driving any distance this spring, you’ll see them rolling across the highways. Traveling on Kansas Highway 24 last weekend, I nailed a two-footer while bumping a few others out of my path.

Tumbleweeds first gained notoriety when the Sons of the Pioneers romanticized them in song back in the late ‘30s. I remember seeing my first ones in the early ‘50s. In the early spring, summer and fall when winds howled across roads in my native Sheridan County, tumbleweeds raced across the flatland.

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