When I wake up, I don't need road signs, GPS, or the half-baked input of a cashier behind a convenience store counter to tell me where I am. I open my eyes, lift my head, wipe the spittle from my chin and take a groggy look around. Same malodorous car, same road-weary companions contributing to the malodor, same endless highway miles thunking away beneath the tires one crack in the asphalt at a time, but outside the land has flattened, and widened, to such an extent the edge of the Earth once again seems visible in the distance, that arrow-straight demarcation between land and sky interrupted only occasionally by a little cluster of buildings or a water tower - some tiny town's hopes and dreams soaring a whopping 50 feet in the air. The temperature has dropped significantly, the sun wheezing from behind a frosty haze, and snow is a permanent feature on the ground once more, seemingly untouched where we left it a week ago. Winter welcomes us back with her two broken arms halfway across Nebraska.
Yes, two broken arms.
This is no longer a mystery, some undiscovered country full of tantalizing 'other'. This is the Midwest laid out before me...the smalltown Midwest. I grew up here, intimately familiar with the flavor of life in these parts, from the politics afoot in even the most fleeting encounter at the Wal-Mart pharmacy to the base level of resignation intrinsic in facing each new day. It can be a tired place, a tiring place, and for anyone given to long thoughts, otherwise benign things - ice-ridden roads, cloudy afternoons that sink thickly into evening, empty buildings that have been that way for years, cracks that form in sidewalks - can engender a sense of despair without warning.
Hell yes, I know exactly what the end of the day looks like around here, how the last gasp of light from the setting sun swells like a big purple bruise, setting the very tops of a row of evergreens ablaze, or illuminating the mysterious little attic window at the apex of the Victorian house across the alley as the streetlight at the end of that alley flickers on and the first few stars become visible in the sky.
Yeah brother, I know the Midwest. It's blazing hot in the summer. God-awful cold in the winter. Miles are long. There is distance everywhere, sometimes as much emptiness between buildings in a town as there is between towns, and for this an unavoidable sense of lonesomeness/alienation that permeates the ground water. Parking lots are deserted after 5 p.m. and all day Sunday, as though a bomb has gone off, except at bars, where a high school reunion is going down on any given Friday or Saturday night, classmates turned co-workers and neighbors, trading memories in a bidding war for solace in the face of time's ceaseless debouch.
Small towns are small towns across the land; anywhere where the electric hum of that light shining above the alley is the only sound to be heard can be lonely...but there is something about the Midwest that digs a deeper trench through which despair can flow. It has forever been - in my eyes anyway - the place that either never quite got going or got forgotten along the way. It's in the name, after all: Midwest...the middle, in-between...that place on the way to the west or east coasts, where stuff that matters is really happening.
This is surely true of the rural areas, the little towns that popped up on a dime flung into the air by some long-gone entrepreneur, and now barely manage to eek out an existence, populated by die-hards who simply can't imagine living anywhere else. But even many urban areas in the Midwest have been pegged as 'rust belts' these days, for the same type of phenomenon: industrial decay has replaced a once-grand industry, some big employer of a generation or two that vanished in an instant, leaving behind not only crumbling infrastructure, but vestiges of a high life: city block-sized hotels, opera houses and ornate theaters that now seem morbidly out of place.
Sometimes it seems everything in the Midwest happened yesterday.
The York, Nebraska water tower looms closer.
HAZY SHADE OF WINTER - When I awaken there is little doubt that I am back in the Midwest.
A Good Trip
I-80's methodical chisel of the frozen Nebraska countryside is happily doing more than provoking l-o-n-g thoughts about my existence, it's also providing an opportunity to reflect on this trip, and I take it, if only to rein in those thoughts. 14 states, nearly 5000 miles, changing climates, landscapes, accents, attitudes and altitudes, all in just over a week. No unforeseen tragedy (which is note-worthy at the end of any given day), no car trouble, not even the most minor inconvenience. By that reckoning, it was a good trip. Just about everything I hoped to see I saw, and everything I hoped to feel - mostly the potent excitement of something new at hand - I felt. I am refreshed, invigorated, feel equipped to jump back into the real world.
Here though, I must acknowledge something that didn't occur to me until the very end: in all those miles, most of them empty miles through isolated regions, I saw not one animal or bird. Not so much as a crow dashing off a blob of roadkill on the highway shoulder in the wake of the vehicle in front of us, or tell-tale glint of a deer's eyes watching tentatively from the edge of the woods as our headlights swept past. The more I think about it, the stranger it becomes in my mind. Granted, we've spent a lot of this trip driving on Interstates where there isn't always anything to see, but that hasn't been the case entirely, and something about it, in terms of the odds if nothing else (not a single animal in 5,000 miles!), leaves an impression.
Reflections on 'Home'
Though we still have several hundred miles to drive, the trip has pretty much ended. Steinbeck writes of this phenomenon in Travels With Charley, coming home before he's actually there, the last several miles mostly a blur. As the cheerfully decorated York water tower passes, it is clear we've all checked out mentally. I for one am glad to be coming home, glad to be getting out of this car, glad to be released from the responsibility of travel. If a 'good trip' is also one that satiates restlessness, then mission accomplished. I've had my fill, for now.
I'm also anxious to be relieved of my responsibility to my travel companions. In the week we've been living in this Ford Taurus, crammed together like indigents in a stinking flophouse, we have become sensitive to - and increasingly intolerant of - each other's predilections, from the music being played to the temperature controls in the car to our conflicting schedules and priorities. There's been some bickering in this final leg, and this morning one major dust-up about something petty that has cast us all into silence. We are now more or less three strangers on a bus, pecking away at our cell phones, ear buds jammed deep into our heads to block out each other's presence, not merely resigned to the end, but anticipating it.
There are still little glimmers of 'trip' left, however. It occurs to me, with the same type of excitement I felt a week ago when we first set out, that Midwest or not, I'm someplace I've never been before - I'm in Nebraska - and this gets me smiling.
Nebraska is the birthplace of no less an eclectic list of luminaries than Johnny Carson, Malcolm X, Willa Cather, Henry Fonda, Warren Buffet and L Ron Hubbard. The Cornhusker state is the home of Kool-Aid, and the heart of the Great Plains. North Platte, where we stayed overnight, not only gave the world 'Buffalo Bill' Cody, but is the site of the world's largest rail yard - Bailey Yard - which sees traffic from over 130 trains every day.
It was while lying in my hotel room trying to sleep but being drawn out the window by the continuous peal of trains on their way, that I posed the heady question to myself, which I am at the perfect time in life to ask (and hopefully answer...?): we are headed home, but what is home, now?
'Home' has always has been the (aforementioned) Midwest. I spent most of my adult life in my hometown, and all of it - with the exception of eight short months - in Wisconsin. I've traveled of course, but the dairy state has always been the place to come home to, and that has informed in myriad ways any and all traveling I've done.
And truth be told? Home hasn't been all bad; I've known the good aspects of life in the Midwest too. Doom, gloom and alienation are but one piece of the puzzle here, or anywhere else. There's something to be said for the quiet, the cleanliness, the pastoral fields, woodlands and hillsides that at certain times of day, when the light is just right, actually sing. There is something to be said about the easygoingness of small towns, of knowing people, the sense of community that working with people you've known all your life fosters, and surely something to be said for that class reunion that pops up at a bar on Friday night. And there is something to be said for the culture I've known - the Packers, the Badgers, (sometimes) the Vikings, Lutheran this and Swedish that, smelt runs and fish frys and snowmobiling and northwoods, big lakes and wooded lakes and lake effect snow and famous for beer and cheese and world class muskies...that's home and, to some extent anyway, how I've identified myself as I've come and gone. Wherever I visited, however much I enjoyed myself, I could not imagine actually living there, and I was always glad to come back to Wisconsin.
Now, at just about the half-way point in life, I'm not so sure what I consider home. It isn't so much an aversion to the Midwest I realized, lying in that musty smelling hotel room in North Platte, it's more that for the first time I can see myself living somewhere else, and in some instances, want to. Central California, or certain locations in the southwest, have showed up on my radar as places I might want to land, places where I can see myself contentedly becoming a local, identifying myself as one in any conversation with a stranger that lasts more than ten minutes, and talking about things with the same assurance I now speak of Wisconsin. I have a fantasy of living in the Florida Keys one day, at least in the winter months...a fantasy where fresh crab and Corona have replaced turkey and stuffing on the Christmas dinner table.
This trip, if nothing else, made me realize for the first time ever that it needn't remain a fantasy, that 'home' is, or could be, simply where I lay my head at night. This is a liberating concept, revolutionary for the doors it opens; the possibilities, man, the possibilities...!
I'm headed home, and ready to be home, but I have a sense in my heart that my journey has just begun.
And that just might be what we should demand of any trip we take, whether it's an African safari, a road trip across America, or just down to the grocery store for milk.
