North Platte, Nebraska

Sunset in North Platte, Nebraska











Traveling southwest I past through the driftless zone, the area of Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa that escaped glaciation and thus is starkly unflat as compared with the landscapes that give these states their reputation. The sky was unfailingly grey. Not cloudy but rather as if you had, on photoshop, used the little paint can to turn everything that was blue into light squinty grey. The dirty snow on the ground added to the effect greatly. I passed into Iowa, the landscape a grainy B&W repro from a bad catalogue of Grant Wood and through small towns whose own greyness brought to mind the town where I went to college and what an odd setting it was for a boy from the east coast. Now, however, I think of the Midwest almost as a second home, it is just that in being away from it for so long it strikes me as foreign but familiar.
The trailer that I had, filled with paper towels from Green Bay I dropped in a glaciated lot in West Branch, Iowa, the home of the eminently forgettable Herbert Hoover. It seems in thinking back on the presidents, we had a lot of eminently forgettable ones. A bunch of important ones at the beginning, then some like Polk or Jackson who we remember because they were gigantic pricks and then the occasional Lincoln. Into the twentieth century they become less forgettable as the specificity of history favors the recent. I wonder if George W. will go down as a eminently forgettable president or a prick. Time will tell, time will tell. Let’s this year elect us an unforgettable one shall we. (All that being said I’m sure Hoover was a swell guy and the folks from Iowa sure love their only native son to make it to the highest office.)
I picked up a different trailer from the drop yard loaded with cereal (including but not limited to Chocolate Honeycombs and Fruity Pebbles) and lumbered along eventually across the Missouri and into Nebraska, the flash of excitement tumbling down from the Loess Hills and into Omaha and then the flatness. Oh! The Flatness. Eventually I-80 joins the Platte River, one of the primary routes west in the days when manifest destiny must have been a really god damn exciting idea. (my sarcasm might hide the fact that, had I been alive then, I too would have found it really god damn exciting. So much so that even today I only feel good when traveling west. (or north)) Settlers followed the flat fertile valley, with water for drinking and trees for fixing broken wagons (we have all played Oregon trail, yes?) across the length of Nebraska before emerging out of the green and into the wide desiccated landscape of the high plains that collapsed in on them with its immensity and surely they must have thought, what the fuck have we gotten ourselves into?