The middle of nowhere

This week we ran across a town in Nebraska that truly advertises itself as the middle of nowhere and the roads we have been traversing certainly seem to live up to that adage; the landscape vast and desolate, varied plains and craggy mountains, sage brush crouching close to the ground. Gnarled trees reach for glory. We hit the road riding hard--the rolling hills of Nebraska gave way to South Dakota's forested Black Hills. We spent a night among the pines before heading out across Wyoming to Yellowstone. A few miles outside of Cody, Wyoming we camped on the side of a mountain rimmed reservoir with starry heavens above us and the water lapping against a stony shore. I can't quite explain the beauty of the place.

To jump back a few days, last Friday we were able to go to my cousin Jeb's first game of the high school football season in Iowa. The excitement was palpable, the energy almost visible. The game went on, tied from the first quarter to the last when Jeb's team scored once more and that rumbling energy erupted into thunderous joy. It's been awhile since I've been around school culture and ironically for me, it was a lot of fun, fun being with people who had something to get excited about but weren't uptight about it either. And to my aunt Joani's relief, skinny tall Jeb finished with all of his limbs intact--albeit sore from holding off guys significantly larger in size.

After Joani and I chatted about how there was something so quintessentially "all-American" about that evening I wanted to include something of that evening here. Even as I say that, it brings to mind how America is always expanding and my definitions and experiences of it expand as well. I have the farm high school culture of the Midwest on one side and the vast unpopulated expanses of southern Idaho on the other...home of elegantly frozen volcanic fields and dropping grounds for nuclear waste. Not in my typical descriptions of American countryside. And I'm headed further west... the city cultures of Portland, San Francisco and Los Angeles await us. Even today, we pulled out of the wilderness and ventured downtown to the evenly laid city blocks of Boise, Idaho. Coffeehouses are a second home everywhere.