Nebraska

    Maps are curious things.  Most people treat them like ear plugs; they use them once, maybe even a few times, only to toss them into a waste bin after they are no longer needed.  Their value is so low that they are seldom given back to the community, or traded in for an exchange.  A lot of maps will sit on someone's shelf for years without ever being used again, only due to the owner's futile hope that he or she will need it sometime in the future.  Locked away, folded up, hidden from the world; their secrets are ignored for reasons that escape the most avid travelers.  Nothing holds quite so much information on a single page than a map, nor does anything open up the imagination to as many places, peoples, and cultures.  When you look at a place on a map, you wonder what it looks like and what it's been used for over the centuries of mankind, perhaps even over the eons of natural history.  All of its dense intricacies of information earns the map every right to claim being the most undervalued and under-appreciated thing in the world.  As you can imagine, a map leads a rather depressing life, having never been utilized to its full potential. 
    It was precisely in this state of contemplation that I dozed off, heading westbound on I-80 through the heartland of Nebraska.  My girl Della had thought it fitting to play Bruce Springsteen's classic album of the same name while we drove through the state.  The music was as soothing as a mother's touch; it seeped into my mind with an earthy weariness that reflected our long journey from Massachusetts.  There's a place out on the edge of town sir, Risin' above the factories and the fields, Now ever since I was a child I can remember that mansion on the hill.  Out on these rolling plains of wheat and corn, one gets the sense of being suspended in a place called Nowhere, despite being in the center of the country.  This was it, the fringe of Ginsberg's Wichita Vortex Sutra, composed straight from a recorder that he'd used while traveling through Kansas, or so my girl had told me.  The Boss had clearly traveled in these parts too.  The bleak, criminally tainted stories of these songs were nothing like the calm atmosphere the music withdrew.  Della said Bruce's musical stories had been inspired by his reading of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States.  I swear, she knows the weirdest things. 
    When I woke up, the map in my hands had fallen to the floor of Morgan's '97 Dodge Ram.  I picked it up and read it again, as I'd done many times that day.  The first thing that caught my eye was the straight blue line that marked the interstate, flanked by the Platte River for most of the way through the state.  Soon we'd exit north on 83, for another beeline that would take us into South Dakota.  Green dots along some of the highways marked scenic byways, though since all the country looked the same out here, it was hard to believe that one road could be more scenic than another.  Orange areas smudged underneath big bold cities like Omaha and Lincoln stood for heavy areas of residence and commerce.  The capitalized, red, skinny names of counties like Cedar and Dixon were scattered densely in the east, less so in the west.  Spanning the whole of the state was a scenic byway that marked the Oregon Trail, which followed the freeway all the way to the western border before veering northwest into the panhandle on highway 26.  This looked to be the most interesting part of the state, where near the border with Wyoming stood the imposing crags of Scotts Bluff and Chimney Rock- monoliths of might that were recorded in many of the diaries of those who had dared to travel west in the 19th century.  I wished we were going that route, but Morgan and Della weren't interested in things so far off the itinerary.  But it's the Oregon Trail, I pointed out.  The blood, toil, and tears of thousands followed this path, searching for the promise of a better life in some affluent western valley.  To which Morgan looked at Della, and Della feigned disinterest, saying she wished they had more time to see it. 
    Highway 83 proved to be more of the same: just endless fields of crops waving in the wind above bluestem grass.  Here and there, a western meadowlark bellied up his yellow breast and sang a tune that dared to defy the drowsy pangs of the singer, though it never lasted long since Morgan was too busy bullying us through the plains at 80 miles an hour.  It had been like this for several days; one beeline over a sad excuse for a hill after another, rumblin' and tumblin' through the terrestrial waves like a catamaran on the ocean, juicing one bug after another on what Morgan called the Blue Ram's death shield.  Every minute or two, he looked up from whatever space his mind had become lost in to salute another splat on the windshield- his way of eulogizing insignificant critters that would only live for less than a day anyway.  Then would come the clean-up crew of the murder scene: an eternally busy wiper blade that needed to be washed, honest to God, every single day in these parts.  I didn't know how the locals could stand it. 
    I looked in the back seat to see if Della was still awake.  Sure enough, she was laying across it, reading a William Faulkner novel.  Absalom Absalom.  And so it was that the genius had immersed herself in the streamy language of one of America's greatest writers, while at the same time listening to one of its greatest lyricists.  It was typical of her to find the perfect atmosphere in all of her settings.  She believed that the right juxtaposition of artistic expressions could make any type of scenery more memorable, and this place really needed it.  Seeing as we were in the middle of Nowhere, she must have had to dig deep this time.  Faulkner?  To me the man made about as much sense as an African bushman in Siberia, but in Della's mind he was weaving intricate webs of dazzling beauty for her, webs of fractured sentences that had always lost me once the phrase headed in a direction I hadn't been expecting.  Often this would happen not once or twice, but several times in a single Faulknerian sentence, especially in Absalom.  The book is every bit as enigmatic as the time and place it was written about: the south during the Civil War. 
    Long ago, for no other reason than to escape the social pressures of high academia in Yorkshire society, Della had decided to move to Louisiana of all places, to the dregs of the Land of Opportunity; past bustling metropolises filled with promising students who attended great universities and all the way to the bayous of Dixie, where the subjects of her favorite poem Evangeline had built their new homes after being thrust away by the British from Canada in the Great Expulsion of 1755.  She’d just finished a double major in linguistics and art history when she decided to move there, but of the two it was linguistics that was truly the passion of her mind, and so that academical adventure- her first as a professional tutor- became dedicated to her teachings about the theory of language.  What lost days those were, her times in Yorkshire, when people actually thought she was worth something and valued her hospitality.  After moving halfway across the world, she felt like some helpless butterfly caught between the jaws of hungry toads that fought for her juices with their slobbering tongues.  Eventually she would ditch the south and settle in the hometown of yours truly: good old Amherst, Mass- a decision that quickly turned in her favor by meeting yours truly. 
    I can't imagine how hard it was for her live in a place that is quite honestly the polar opposite of Yorkshire.  Whenever I asked her about it she preferred to pass it on in silence, as if it were some forbidden trinket of her past to be kept locked away from everyone in a safe, including her man.  Yet she didn't miss England entirely; instead of abandoning her plans she rearranged them, opting to settle in a region of the United States that was far more similar to her home country: the quaint northeast.  Here she tutored a disgruntled physics student who was having problems of his own: those concerning grammar, which always surprised me because his speaking skills were exceptionally good.  The man she had tutored was my ever faithful roommate Morgan, who played the matchmaker more brilliantly than I ever could, which was truly odd because his social skills- including the ability to recognize those intangibles in people that would make them a good match for someone- have usually managed to put him in disastrous situations.  Despite his eloquence of speech, Morgan is as awkward as they come.  He's the type of breed that Hunter Thompson would've described as too weird to live, too rare to die, in a book whose beginning looked to be very similar to our story.  In Fear and Loathing, Raoul Duke referred to his attorney as such a creature, but Morgan didn't need drugs to be weird.  He was a natural oddball, born and raised in a household that allowed all his abstractions to take form without the assistance of psychotropics, hallucinogens, uppers downers screamers laughers and what not... Unlike those who sought to make beasts of themselves cruising the desert searching for the American dream while shitfacing themselves with as many drugs as possible.  Out in the desert the Duke had thought they were in bat country, but there weren't any bats out here; just the lonely moaning of the wind that flew over the stocks of grain and towering anvils of wrathful clouds that filled up the stratosphere and the steady drone of the Blue Ram failing to silence the country's orchestration outside. 
    When I looked back at the map, the strangest thing happened.  Things were out of place, lines were at the wrong angles.  Even after re-orientating the map, I came to notice that several of the highways had shifted course.  I thought I might have been losing my mind, so I took a sip of water and looked at it more carefully this time.  The same thing happened when I looked back; I saw that the road we were traveling on had little green dots on it, indicating that we were on a scenic byway.  Following the road on the map with my eyes, it looked like we were headed straight for the place I most desired to see in Nebraska: Chimney Rock and Scotts Bluff, which now appeared to be only about 10 miles away.  That could only mean one thing:  somehow we had gotten ourselves onto the Oregon Trail!  When I looked out the window, the road looked to be the same one that we'd been driving on, so it wasn't like we'd magically driven into a warp zone.  Yet something on the side of the road caught my eye; an unmistakable difference from what I'd previously seen, nearly verifying the map's eery transformation. 
    "Morgan, you see that?  Those tracks on the side of the road." 
    "Tracks?", he asked with suspicion.  He looked to our right and saw those same deep ruts in the soil that had been driven over for years, marking the dark brown stains on the Earth that the fields had never entirely re-conquered.  Ahead there was a sign that verified it all, turning my confusion into shock.  It read Oregon National Historic Trail. 
    "You scoundrel!  I should've known you would navigate us off the itinerary," he said. 
    "What's going on?", asked Della, as if she'd just woken from a sleep. 
    "Your careless beau has deliberately sabotaged this expedition."  Morgan was prone to overreacting.  Imagine a C3PO on crack, with the disposition of a teen-aged drama queen, and you might get a better sense of his character. 
    "No!", I said.  "Honest to God, we exited off 83, remember?" 
    "You don't believe in God.  Give me that map," he said in annoyance.  He snatched it away from me and looked at it for what seemed like a split second.  "The exit you gave me was 26.  Turpid Tommyknockers!  I'll be doing the navigating from now on, Christ." 
    We didn't turn around.  Della seemed indifferent to the whole thing, and Morgan thought it would take even more time to get to South Dakota if we backtracked.  So we stayed on the road.  At that point I was so overcome with confusion that I honestly couldn't remember if I'd given him the right exit or not.  Maybe he was right; maybe an unconscious part of me that wanted to follow the trail gave him the wrong exit by mistake.  Though his accusation was unjust, because it certainly wasn't a "deliberate sabotage", as he'd comically put it.  When I looked over at him, he seemed to be lost in the same sea of confusion that I was in.  Maybe I had said the right exit after all, and he was trying to sort through the error in some logical sequence that he couldn't quite realize.  Maybe he knew he'd accidentally taken the wrong one, and had prematurely blamed me in order to get himself off the hook, as people will often do before reflecting on things that have actually happened.  There was also the possibility that the map might have looked different to him than from what he'd seen before- a disturbing detail that he probably hadn't come to terms with yet.  His eyes were constantly shifting to the compass, and for a good reason; it was in fact pointing north as opposed to west- which it should have been doing if we'd been traveling along the trail. 
    Up ahead, the dusty horizon unveiled a frightening needle of rock that rose out of the haze to a high stature.  There it was; that towering chimney of Brule clay, sandstone, and volcanic ash that the settlers had written so brazenly about.  It was then that I dreamt myself into the historical period from which the legend had been born; suddenly I was a pioneer headed west in some wagon train that undulated like a snake through the sands of promise.  Perhaps I was suffering from diphtheria, dysentery, or any of the other terrible diseases that had made life miserable for the travelers of old.  Perhaps a gang of Arapaho Indians had raided our belongings or killed a loved one, though there was never any evidence of that happening to the travelers.  The long wagon trains that made hunting more difficult for the natives must have been frustrating for them, but they had never attacked one for it.  No, no Indians were in my fantasy, only stalwart pioneers and the slow-rolling ceiling of the clouds, which still seemed to be moving faster than my wagon.  There was only one thing I hadn't imagined; the compass on the dashboard still pointed north.