You can hear the clop-clop of mules and wind howling in the background as digital evangelist Nicholas Berezovsky shouts into his cellular phone from somewhere near Topeka, Kansas.
"Sorry, could you speak louder?" he asks, explaining that a towel just blew out the back of his covered wagon.
Wayward towels, unexpected gusts of wind, and an occasional pounding by good ol' prairie hailstones are just a few of the things you have to expect if you're crossing Kansas by mule power -- even when your covered wagon has a satellite dish on top to provide high-speed access to the Net.
Berezovsky is on a mission to convince librarians, archivists, historians, and curators that their collections should be online to preserve the heritage of the American West. His 650-mile odyssey by canvas-covered wagon -- a West-to-East diagonal from Elkhart to Elwood -- is a publicity stunt for the Kansas Electronic Document Center, a nonprofit that Berezovsky hopes to grow into a search-and-indexing business.
A former patent attorney from the Ukraine, Berezovsky finds parallels between what he's doing and what some of his countrymen did in the Sunflower State 200 years ago.
"German settlers from the Ukraine brought red turkey wheat to Kansas, carrying seeds that were the foundation of the agricultural economy," he says. "I'm bringing the seeds of the digital revolution."
He'd like to see the Mennonite Archive at Bethel College in Newton scanned and indexed on the Web, for instance. Improving accessibility to a rare book collection dating from 1526, extensive genealogical records, and photographs going back to the birth of the medium is reason enough for Berezovsky and fellow travelers Frank Nettleton and Ron Rowe to put up with hardships like mud, wet sleeping bags, and the occasional catastrophe -- like the time Berezovsky ran over his laptop with a trailer.
The 12-foot-long wagon -- drawn by two-mule teams named Bonnie and Clyde and Barbara and Louise -- is an upgrade from the standard pioneer model, with a toilet, gas stove, digital camera, and a DirecPC dish that can suck email and Web pages down from a satellite at eight times the speed of a 56K modem. The set-up still requires use of a telephone connection, however, and in the most rural areas of the state, finding a tone-dialing line can be harder than finding people who are interested in the Net.
At his day job at the Salina Public Library, Berezovsky reports, "People are getting spoiled by the Internet. They don't just want a brief description of things, they want the primary source. If it's a law, they want the full text. If it's photographs, they want to see the whole collection."
The tech resources of even some small-town libraries in central Kansas have been boosted by income from oil and gas deposits, he claims: "In a town of maybe 500 people, the library will have six computers with Net access and 10 laptops for checkout."
Even "farmer-looking kids," Berezovsky says, pay visits to the wagon to tell him that they're already online.
"Instinctively, they want to break out of parental control," he observes. "The Net is their little serfdom."
