Something about grain elevators, sunset

The thing one must grapple with in the wide Midwest is space.

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.

Other stuff that's interesting to look at in Nebraska

Cranes

Every year the Sandhill cranes come to Nebraska to eat as they make their way north. I saw some.

Chickens

Not having had an sufficiently bloggable experiences in Nebraska as of yet, here are some chickens. 

First days/last days

I never published, or only briefly published, my first blog post about Guam.

For those who don't follow the link, the post was about a weekend trip to Jeff's Pirates Cove, a southern bar/restaurant that features heavily in pirate iconography (strangely) and touristy knicknacks, at which my new reporter colleagues and a handful of off-islanders got drunk and merrily detailed Guam's many political and social foibles.

I wrote the piece, but rightly decided that chronicling the first bits of Guam's dirty laundry thrown my way for public consumption would likely not go over too well with my new employers.

Two and a half years later, and no longer in fear of being fired for lack of objectivity, or just generally talking shit about Guam -- although that was about half of our coverage on any given day -- I am revisiting the post.

What's interesting is how so many of my first impressions (or my first impressions based on the drunken cynical bluster of my colleagues) still hold relatively true.

But then, so much of that stuff I first heard came with the territory of reporting, and reporting on the stuff we report on, because that's what we report on.

My job was to see in finer and finer detail all the dysfunctional crap so broadly painted for me during my first few days on the island.

I ingested a whole bunch of it, and spewed it out. And I don't really remember much of it. And am not sure it's really worth remembering. It's all very fuzzy.

But there are other things about Guam that are much less fuzzy: walking my dogs on beaches, swimming at night, a few startling nights of bright stars, New Years' lanterns, sunset, lots of sunset, driving around the island in my beat-up car, or a beaten-up-more truck to go to different beaches. Jungle. Rain. Lots of rain.


On my last day on Guam, I wandered around Tumon Bay by myself, having nowhere to go, nothing to do, and looked at the blue water.

I felt like a tourist, and sort of was a tourist, for a day.

And all that stuff I had learned and carried around and ingested and fretted over was gone.

There was just blue.

similar thoughts about Saipan

I went to Saipan, like, a month and a half ago, but didn't bother posting any photos. I meant to, but the whole moving across the Pacific got in the way.

Most of what I saw were places off which people jumped/committed horrible suicide. There were also some mind-bogglingly tacky (even for Guam) tourist shops, and birds/beaches/jungle.

Here are some photos:

The first notable site we visited was "Banzai Cliff." Cheerily named because a bunch of Japanese families living on Saipan threw themselves (and their children) off the cliffs during World War II, when the American invasion was imminent. This was by far the most crowded of the sites we saw in our two-day Micronesian jaunt. Above: Japanese tourists take photos at sunset.

More Banzai Cliff. There were a lot of nice Buddha statues. This place also had that sort of haunted  feeling. Apparently there are white birds that roost on the cliffs, allegedly (love that word) carrying the souls of the dead.

More Buddha.

Having lived on Guam for so long, where trash is left in all sorts of inappropriate spots, I was at first  annoyed to see all the open bottles of water. And then I realized, oh wait, offerings. Sorry guys.

A view from Banzai Cliff. It should be noted that all that cliff stuff  is made of coral, sharp razor coral.

Which brings me to Suicide Cliff. Some ways up from Banzai Cliff is the aptly named Suicide Cliff. Japanese soldiers jumped off the cliff, otherwise did away with themselves at this spot as the U.S. forces pushed them farther and farther up this hill as they invaded.

Also, a very long way down.

Buddha and sunlight on Suicide Cliff.

This is just this really cool place called "the Grotto" where a bunch of rushing waves hit the rocks in this big cave, and then create a somewhat calm pool at the mouth of the cave.

Bird Island Sanctuary. All the birds died sometime after the war, when the brown tree snake at them all. Apparently they can't swim. And thus, there are still birds in this one place.

From above.

Sunset. The end.

the bomb holes

I went to Tinian to see the atomic bomb holes.

I rationalized going to the island to attend the (8th?) annual boonie pepper festival, which turned out, as I suspected, to be a large(ish) village barbecue, complete with coconut crab races and slippery pigs.

Tinian also hosts some other stuff -- big latte stones, more impressive and certainly more precise, than any I have seen on Guam.

There's a Chinese money-laundering casino, providing the best luxury a 1980s Las Vegas hotel room can offer.

But while being picked up at the airport by a limousine, stocked with the latest in VHS technology, and ferried to your entirely pink-striped room, complete with a pair Lucy-and-Desi appropriate (also pink) twin beds, has a kind of novel appeal, really, the bomb holes are why I came, and probably why most come to the island.

Once a Japanese sugar plantation, and then the center of American bombing operations in the Pacific, the island is green and mostly empty.

San Jose, the bustling urban center, is made up of a few neighborhoods of well-tended flat concrete houses, a convenience store that serves as the island's Wal-Mart, and other things I am sure I missed.

There's a nice beach, an abandoned and deteriorating pier, and some lovely walkways through coconut trees.

Outside the village, signs of domestic life quickly give way to what feels like a large field -- essentially the rest of the island.

Heading north, concrete roads constructed in straight lines become gravel roads constructed in straight lines, the north- and south-bound lanes separated by a wide grass median.

Along the way there are a few notable sites here and there, a Japanese shrine circled by roadway, some memorials to Korean workers enslaved during the war, a rocky ocean geyser.

But the real attraction is what's not there -- an expansive air field long ago carved out, now partly swallowed up by jungle and overgrowth.

Runways have been reduced to pot-holed gravel, and little vines with purple flowers encroach like tarantula legs from the corners of the greenery.

Real spiders, and proliferate wasps nests, have taken over whatever remains of bomb shelters and the buildings that housed Japanese military operations, located in what now look like concrete parking lots.

Maybe it's just that abandoned places are usually abandoned for a reason -- containing pasts better left undisturbed.

And I am, of course, biased. But clusters of large spiders in corners and hallways, and walls matted with brown wasps' mounds seem to signal a place haunted by the deeply wrong -- bellwethers marking things long askew.

Pilgrimages to World War II memorial sites -- or any war memorial sites, but particularly those from the "good war" -- can veer into the "Saving Private Ryan" territory pretty quickly.

Not that it wasn't all tragic, but mindless sap about sacrifice and all that does irk me.

There are World War II sites all over Guam, landing beaches, artillery guns and tanks rotting in the jungle, pill boxes turned into trash cans. But familiarity from tourist buses and dog walks has sapped most of the power from the sites, beyond the satisfied knowledge that Things Happened Here.

This place, however, did not ring of sacrifice or tourist buses.

I am sure Japanese tourists unload every now and then to see the markers of the weapons that ended the war.

But there were few, in fact, none others when we arrived at the site of the two glass caskets enshrining the holes that once held the atomic bombs.

Rationally, I know that we bring to places our own set of notions. We expect and we find. Not always what we expect, but we bring something to the equation that changes what we find.

This place was not like that.

I could have arrived giddy, or bemused or reverent -- I don't think it would have mattered.

Two holes, carved into the ground, with ladders climbed by real people, a plaque or two, some photos, the leftover scars of mechanical uplift -- that's all there was.

And yet, the place throbbed, sadly, deeply.