There is much of it.
With middling cultural fare, short cities, bad food (really bad food), a past bleached and scraped away and replaced with the historical equivalent of a half-price sticker on an expired convenience store pastry -- this place's greatest asset seems to be what's not here.
All that wide openness into which one can imagine an escape.
Like every single teenage ever, escape -- the desperate anxiety to be somewhere else -- was the main focus of the fairly traumatizing four years of adolescence I spent in a dreary section of the heartland.
There was a Wal-Mart, some traffic lights, other stuff, and the hot weekend activity was sitting in your car in the Golden Corral parking lot. (I avoided the latter.)
The few romantic daydreams I had of what life could be like in this place were of me, fields, arms wide open -- like Katy Perry in that terrible video I will pretend I have never seen -- communing with the heavens.
Which should be so much easier here given the lack of barriers between yourself and it.
Shockingly, I never managed to commune with much more than the video aisle during midnight trips to Dillons (we were regulars), and the meager view of housing tracks from the top of the tallest hill (not that tall).
I think the closest I got to touching the heavens -- the only real moment that sticks in my mind -- is standing near a dumpster outside the movie theater I worked at as I unloaded trash one night, watching lighting on the horizon, slowing my task long enough to get soaked as the rain arrived -- finding joy in the novelty of wearing clinging wet clothing in public.
Yeah, that was it.
Soon after, I left hoping never to live in any square states, anywhere in the middle, again.
And, you know, decided New York was a good place to combat claustrophobia, what with all the tall buildings smashed together on an island surrounded by miles of houses and parking lots, only those parking lots are highways.
When I lived on a real island, every bit of ground had been reclaimed from the sea, and would eventually succumb to the black tide.
Despite the ring of water, on Guam I felt like I was part of the whole world, the expansive ocean extended me into the great blue soul of the world.
The first night I went to the beach, with the guy who was totally not seducing me and with which I totally did not make out, like, immediately, I looked up at the stars from the water, and thought, 'I'm never going back.'
And then two years later I moved to the Midwest, again.
Temporarily.
All mature and patient, knowing that the wide world is out there, and maybe there's something more to this place. Maybe?
A few days ago, I drove about three hours west along one of Nebraska's scenic byways (seriously, the video is totally worth it) in search of Sandhills and cranes, and proof that there is a world to be seen even when you are not seeing the world.
Mostly anywhere you want to go in the U.S. can be gotten to on I-80, a straight line bisecting the continental U.S., which apparently roughly follows the route of the Lincoln Highway, the first road across America, according to Wikipedia.
Having made the I-80 trek several times east and west, I can testify that most of the sites include gas stations doubling as Subways/Pizza Huts/Burger Kings, etc., and off ramps leading to wide drags peppered with neon signs offering cheap lodging and restaurants halfheartedly attempting to serve food -- a series of triage centers for those unaccustomed to difference.
I decided to skip that.
The route I took to Kearney (pronounced like the carnival folk) -- "the Sandhill Crane capital of the world" -- followed the Route 30 (the scenic byway) north and then west.
The view was basically the same, farms and sky, an occasional small town without big box stores obstructing the view.
There were flat brown and green fields that seemed to both reflect and emit the bronze and blue light overwhelming the horizon.
Every few miles, towering grain elevators popped up -- gargoyles simultaneously keeping watch over the landscape and hoarding the goodies from the plains.
Roads led to fields, and around fields there were more fields.
Along miles of track, trains still made stops picking up booty meant for larger markets.
There was space, but through all of it I didn't feel openness.
The massive sky was hemmed in by symmetrical rows waiting to produce for the collection centers, outside of which no piece of land had gone unaccounted for.
This place was carved up and doled out, maybe not in that order, and each piece of land has been cultivated for what it can produce.
The prairie -- little pieces of which exist here and there -- was long ago mowed and corseted for our benefit.
It was claustrophobic in a way that was familiar, and still surprising.
Here, the productive bread basket is bleak, unapproachable. There is property, and it is forbidden.
You don't need a 'no trespassing' sign to know that rows and rows of corn and soy and wheat don't belong to you, that nature is no longer beckoning there.
Still, it has its own kind of Gothic charm.
At the end of my hours-long adventure, there was this little part of wild, where there are birds and marshes and some river that still meanders under highway overpasses.
But I had to travel through miles of desert to get there.
Still, fun.
