EL DORADO, KAN. -- Maybe I do take it a bit too seriously -- but it's such a good story."

Dave Clymer -- 77 years old, war veteran, double leg amputee -- props himself between his cane and the bare walls of his tiny downtown office (a gentleman stands for visitors), and talks about his lifelong affection for The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

His real-estate company is called Oz. A previous Clymer company, also called Oz, wired this little town of 13,000 for cable TV. His Cadillac even has the Tin Man and Scarecrow on the licence plate over the words: "El Dorado, Kansas. The Land of Oz" -- a project he spearheaded a few years back when his once-booming oil town was looking for a new identity.

The link is a bit tenuous. Kansas might be mentioned 23 times in the Hollywood movie of the 1900 L. Frank Baum classic, but nowhere was it ever specified exactly where Dorothy and her little dog Toto were plucked up from by that cyclone that eventually sent them off down the Yellow Brick Road.

Another Kansas town, Liberal, calls itself "Oz-some" and features a replica Dorothy's House, but what's the point about quibbling on location? There are still some in Kansas wishing no connection with a movie that chose to film the state in black-and-white and the rest of the world in glorious colour.

Like Dorothy's imaginary home, not much happens in El Dorado. The closest thing to a terrorist, according to the local paper, would be the youth who stole a cat off a porch, and the only thing currently striking fear into local hearts is the presence of the West Nile virus in several neighbouring counties.

Mr. Clymer hasn't time for the various interpretations of the Oz tale as an economic, political or even religious allegory. All he knows is that, as Dorothy says, "There's no place like home," and, as she found out, you can never tell what's around the next corner.

"Take my legs," he says. "If somebody had told me 30 years ago that I'd lose 'em both to diabetes, I never would have put on that 200 pounds, would I now?"

The other part he would agree with is you can never tell when something will crash down out of the sky, whether it be a house onto a witch, a jetliner into an office tower, or a federal building, as happened in Oklahoma City.

"We tend to think of ourselves as in 'the middle of nowhere' out here. But the fact of the matter is there is a lot of airplane manufacturing goes on around here, so you have to think about it."

But thinking about it is not an easy thing to do. Mr. Clymer may come from the Bible Belt, but that has not made the answers any simpler or more comforting.

"When you get older," he says, "you eventually come to realize that everything doesn't quite come together like you thought it would. You take religion. If there's a just God, then where is He? Why would He allow all this killing?

"I have three questions I'd like a chance to ask. No. 1, I'd like to know if there is a God. No. 2, I'd like to know if there is a Heaven. No. 3, I want to find out who gets welcomed into Heaven. Will it include the terrorists and the whole nine yards? . . . The terrorists believe they're doing the right thing. Those who are fighting terrorism are convinced they are right. Who decides who's right?

"The question I ask myself is simple: Why? What has the United States of America done to deserve this treatment?

"I tell you it's all given me a kind of fatalistic philosophy about life. What's going to happen is going to happen. If we get bombed in El Dorado . . . that must be the Plan."

Mr. Clymer stops and smiles at the thought, knowing it preposterous, but also knowing seven years ago in Oklahoma City people probably felt much the same way.

"I've had a heart attack and diabetes," he says. "I've lost my legs, I take eight pills a day and I walk with a cane -- but I'm not going home to sit and wait for something else to happen. I am not afraid."

Roy MacGregor is working his way from the heartland of America to Shanksville, Pa., where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed last Sept. 11. His journey began in Oklahoma City and will take him through Kansas, Missouri, Arkansas and Tennessee as he heads east for the anniversary.