In Nebraska

Artwork by Michael DiMilo

By Geoff Carter

I recently had occasion to take a long cross-country road trip, spanning the Midwest, Colorado, and New Mexico. It’s a grueling ride, taking over twenty hours, but the pain is worth it. Driving through the plains and rolling hills and sometimes bleak plains offers the opportunity to get up close and personal with the land. 

We started early, taking county roads (by accident) over much of northern Illinois, that offered us views of quaint small-town life—including the boyhood home of Ronald Reagan. After we crossed the Mississippi and entered Iowa’s surprisingly—to me, at least–hilly terrain, I’d been expecting flat cornfields and old family farms. Eventually, we started seeing signs saying “Lincoln, 55 miles”. Nebraska was coming.

One of my all-time favorite albums is Nebraska by Bruce Springsteen. For those readers not familiar with, it is a stripped-down sparse acoustic album of some of Mr. Springsteen’s most poignant and disturbing songs, including the titular piece about Charles Starkweather, a young killer. The songs speak to frustration, desperation, and broken promises. 

There is also a film named Nebraska, written by Alexander Payne, (with the magnificent Bruce Dern) about an elderly man trying desperately to cash in an entry ticket to a sweepstakes, a ticket that he believes will bring him a million bucks. No one, not his sons or his wife, nor those who mock him, can shake him from his doomed quest. 

And so here I was, cruising along in my vehicle, approaching this fabled land of broken promises and shattered dreams. Or so they would have me believe. I was curious to see for myself what it was about this state that not only inspired such art, but also lent its name to it, because what other state of the union has albums or films named after it? There are no albums or films titles Utah, Arizona (Raising Arizona is a stretch), or California, even though each of these places offers distinctive flavors in their people and geography. As I said, I was curious. 

We finally entered the state of Nebraska and drove and drove and drove. Flat land, very flat, punctuated by occasional lines of trees, farmhouses, cattle farms, and light poles. There wasn’t much else, but the geography didn’t really seem to align to the sensibilities of its two namesakes of the arts. Then I started to sense, rather than to perceive, the space, the vastness, the volume, and—in some cases where there was only a single line separating land and sky—the emptiness of it, so much space that one feels overwhelmed, almost crushed by it. And the dreary monotony of the plains, the lack of geographical features or embellishments gave the impression of a land forgotten by the earth. No mountains, no hills, only gray plains, and the nearly invisible rivers. And the relentless cold and needle-sharp wind, seemingly there to remind us how insignificant we were truly were when compared to the vastness of this land. 

As we ventured further west, the sense of overwhelming space did not diminish; in fact, the golden rolling hills of northern Colorado and the vast valleys stretching to Denver and reaching up to the Rockies were grander and vaster than those of Nebraska, but this sense of distance—and my place in it—seemed different, friendlier. Driving past Denver, I spied a pair of horsemen that looked much tinier than the distance warranted. Their size seemed all out of proportion to the distance, but then I realized that we were at a greater elevation than the riders which—obviously—exaggerated the perspective, giving a fleeting impression of my own greater significance. 

The plains grew even hillier as we approached what became mountainous terrain between the border of Colorado and New Mexico. We wound our way through the passes, flanked by towering escarpments thinly populated with scraggly pines, finally entering New Mexico. The land flattened—almost suddenly—into gently rolling golden plains broken by an occasional mesa jutting toward the sky. The space in this place, as opposed to the bleak distances of Nebraska or the rolling valleys of Colorado, seemed very nearly infinite, almost an extension of the sky. Grazing antelope seen from our speeding car looked like children’s toys on a golden carpet. These wide-open spaces seemed full of promise, hope, and possibility, while the Nebraskan plains had seemed almost—weirdly—claustrophobic, its horizon a terminus. 

Of course, the land itself doesn’t give off vibes. In their all-consuming egocentrism, people have felt compelled to ascribe their own fears, hopes, and aspirations onto the earth. We are awed—and inspired—by the majesty of the Rockies and comforted by the gently rolling hills of northern Colorado, but we are somewhat spooked by the relentless monotony of Nebraska’s endless horizons. There is no resonance in its barren vistas, no visible landmarks. There are no clues for understanding the human condition. The earth refuses to speak to us in Nebraska. It refuses to reassure us. Those horizons are finite, like our lives. They are realistic. They have an ending.