Discovered Attack
There is not much in chess that is as satisfying as seeing that your opponent has slipped his piece across the board, and by moving your piece there is a great attack on his piece while you force his attention elsewhere. The discovered attack works quite the opposite when you are on the receiving end. If you are like me, the board is usually in a mundane state. You are trying to attack to open it up, or just develop your strategy. Then when the opponent moves, you realize what just happened. In the normalcy of the game, you missed a detail, and now you have trouble. As frustrating as it is, you can’t help but admire the simple beauty of it.
There are lots of fun and entertaining games, but the really good ones have life lessons in them as well. This is true of chess, and the last six months have shown me how complacent about the small things in life I have become. The crazy pace of life, and taking care of all of its responsibilities can dull your senses, as you just try to make something happen. Our family made a move to try and make something change, but there was a discovered attack waiting.
My wife took a travel contract in a small town in far northwest Kansas. Fly over country I think they call it on television. For me, it was drive over country. I have taken many drives and flights to Colorado from my home in Arkansas. Kansas was a place to endure. Of the sixteen or so hours it takes us to get to Denver, over eight of them are in Kansas. Hours of driving 75 or 80 miles per hour with not even a turn in the road for as much as 75 or 80 miles sometimes. Rolling hills as far as you can see. The only trees either mark a home, town, or creek. The creeks are mostly dry unless it rains, and you wonder how anyone even lives there, and why it is not desert. There is some relief when you finally cross into Colorado. At least it is a different state, but the landscape is the same. Finally, you are rewarded with the faint purple hint of the Rocky Mountains peeking above the horizon. Rising straight up out of the prairie like an oasis for the eyes.
When my wife told me about the contract, I remember thinking “well I did not expect Kansas but it is a start.” We were only obligated to thirteen weeks. You can do anything for thirteen weeks right. In a small town of 1,700 people, I was surprised at how fast she found an apartment. She moved out there, and in a couple of weeks, the kids and I were to join her. We began an adventure of living half time in Kansas with her and half time at home.
The drive out there was just as I remembered, and the kids were so bored. We finally turned off of the divided highway, and onto a two-lane country highway. We still had a little over an hour left. I do not think I realized what that hour was. The speed limit on that road was 65 miles per hour. There is no way they would let you drive that fast on that kind of road back home. Everyone was going 75 miles per hour. So an hour later at 75 miles per hour, down a road as straight as an arrow, we found our new home away from home.
God knew what I needed to get my head back in the game. A discovered attack. It was dark when we turned off the highway onto the Main Street of town. It was like turning back in time. It seemed like most of the trucks were vintage from the 1970s or 80s. The tires rumbled on the brick streets. Gas lights illuminated the street. People were out eating at the local bar and grill. The next morning I woke up to kids walking down the street in the neighborhood. Sidewalks everywhere meant you could circle the town walking in about 45 minutes. This was a world I knew from the past, but my kids do not experience. They found freedom to roam the town, and places to explore. I found a beauty in the prairie that I did not expect to find.
Forty miles from the nearest supermarket, and 4 hours from the nearest airport, we were remote. So we did what you can do there. Explore! I have to say I had my doubts about how entertained we were going to be able to keep the kids. But as we drove the prairie that day we discovered a wonderland. The mundane browns of the grassland were filled with low grasses and flowers of different colors. The only way to know would be to stop. And the colors of the pheasants and other birds were brilliant against the drab earthy backdrop.
As you top a hill and can see for miles. You learn that even though you have driven for miles over these same hills, there are surprises. All the topography in Kansas seems to be down. You top a hill expecting to see more open flatfish hills, and all of a sudden there is a canyon. Badlands they call them. Rugged rocks, and compared to the surroundings the browns and tans of the layers of rocks are vibrant. Wildlife moves in and out of them, and the sky over them is the deepest blue.
One evening I took the kids out to a park to use my son’s telescope. My daughter scampered around trying to see the prairie dogs that surrounded us. They would pop out of a hole. She would go over to get a look. They would dart back in to reappear somewhere else. It was quite entertaining. We got the telescope sighted in, and the sun began to go down. Back home this process would take less than an hour before the sun was being the hills, and twilight was in full swing. Here this took forever. I thing=k everything on the prairie requires patience. Then as the sun touched the prairie I experienced the most amazing sunset of my life. I have seen sunsets in mountains, deserts, and beaches. But this was special.
You could see every inch of the sun. The sky turned brilliant orange. There were very few clouds to capture the color, but the ones that did were glowing with it. There was no humidity or hills or clouds to stop the light. Fingers of brilliant color shot over your head meeting the twilight right above your head. Behind us, the sky was the pure indigo of night already, and stars were already showing themselves. I never noticed the deep purple hue of the night until it was in the sky around me simultaneously with brilliant orange to oppose it. Another discovered attack, as I experienced night, day, and twilight all at the same time.
Thirteen weeks stretched into twenty-six. There was a pause when my dad was in the hospital, but there were many more discovered attacks. We rode horses along the old Oregon Trail and the Platte River in Nebraska. Hiked at devils tower. Explored the black hills of South Dakota, and badlands national park. My kids got to walk on a frozen lake where the locals were ice fishing outside Rapid City.
I don’t know if I find chess because I love it, or if it has a way of finding me, but we stopped in Lindsborg Kansas to break up our drive on one of our trips out. It was supposed to be a neat little town, and there was an interesting-looking coffee shop there. We pulled into a parking spot, and in front of us was “The International School of Chess.” Apparently, seven-time world chess champion Anatoly Karpov found Kansas also. I am sure he has a story that made him locate one of his chess schools in a little town in central Kansas too.
We wandered down the street and grabbed some drinks. My kids found a chess set in the back of the store. As they played each other, I played one of you guys on my phone. Enjoying our drinks and the cool spring day. And I talked to them about how the little details matter. Maybe more than the big picture. And how there is beauty in discovery.
