Back on the road by 9am. Johnny Thunders on the radio. Goodbye North Platte. Weigh Station. Exit 10. More fields. Hay bales like jelly rolls. Windsocks like empty condoms. Pony Express Station. "I'm living on the Chinese Rock, all my best things are in hock." Corn, in the cornhusker state. Eight foot tall white cross: Maranatha Bible Camp.
Exit 190.
More corn. Road weather information 2 miles. Corn and where corn was until recently. Reflection of face with caption: Objects in mirror are closer than they appear. Pioneer Village 300 antique cars: sign weather-faded almost to the point of illegibility. Three silver grain silos.
Des Moines: 385 miles.
Original Pony Express Station. Exit 221. Speed Limit 75. Fines Double. Farnham exit 211. Gothenberg. Comfort Suites. Robert Henri Museum in Cozad.
Darr Road. Exit 231.
Heartland Museum of Military Vehicles. Elwood Johnson Lake. Convoy of desert-colored military vehicles. Nebraska Prairie Museum. Elm Creek. Holdrege.
Stuhr Museum of the Prairie Pioneer. Odessa 1 mile.
Robert Henri's given name was Robert Henri Cozad. His father was a murderer and his brother an arsonist. The family relocated to Atlantic City and dropped the Cozad from their name.
Next rest area 47 miles. Kearney Visitors Center. Archway monument. Pioneer Village.
Exit 29. Minden. Gibbon 5 miles. Shelton. Kenesaw. The obsolete and naive notion that art must be in some way autobiographical to be authentic—especially autobiography. Lincoln 106 miles. Omaha 150. Cheyenne State Recreation Area Exit 300. Nebraska State Fair August 22 to September 1 already over.
Mormon Island State Recreation Area. Doniphan Exit 314. Entering Hamilton County. Giltner. Red truck tractor pulling three identical red truck tractors. About to write the sentence No corn but expecting to see corn, then looking up and seeing corn.
Why is it considered better to wait to die in a hospital bed drowning in your own fluids, tubes in every orifice, crucified by needles, than to hang yourself with a belt from a doorknob?
Beaver Creek. Wind buffeting the car from both sides. More calls to Jesus on the radio. Milled surface ahead. Frock Brother's Trucking. Speed Limit 65. Henderson Bradshaw 1 mile. Welcome to York County.
Red Dodge pick-up, Nebraska plate 804-BkG.
Corn again. Uneven lanes. Drug dog in use ahead. Uh-oh. Speed Limit 75. York 5 miles. Trailer: big dark eye of white cow through slats. York, Geneva —> Petro. Corn. Waco and Lincoln 44 miles. Noon. Corn. Money: the root of all boring conversations.
Bug ricocheting off windshield: can it survive without what it left on the glass? Utica 1 mile. Cordova Exit 366. Seward 5 miles. Nature Valley Crunchy Peanut Butter Granola Bar. Nibbling the last of it.
Lincoln 20 miles. Drivers in passing cars turning to look at you as you turn to look at them.
Pleasant Dale 5 miles. Corn, and not even noting it every time one sees it. Crete 1 mile. Doane College. Exit 388. The illusion of a single unified identity: how it requires so much energy to maintain, how its used as a collar to control us. Homestead National Monument.
Frontier Harley Davidson. Rosa Parks Way. Coddington Lane. Pioneer Park.
Palpitations: the wild timeless panic of being out of sync with life, wondering if your heart will start beating normally again.
Pen running out of ink, throwing it out at picnic area in park where you stop for lunch. What sounds unmistakably like gunshots in the distance.
Yellowjacket on sandwich wrapper, hair, weathered wood of picnic table, arm, the fevered heat of it's flight before it becomes visible.
Powerball 196 million. Rail-yard half-a-mile wide. Lincoln airport. West Cornhusker Highway. Thinking of how my silence and extreme isolation in high school would today be considered as a "warning sign," how it was a warning sign, and how I survived intact anyway. 2:12pm. Exit 403.
Hampton Inn & Suites. Abbot Sports Complex. Wahoo Fremont Exit 405. 90 degrees. Waverly 3 miles Omaha 50. Nebraska Crossing Outlets. A warning sign of what, I still wonder. The 7 warning signs of cancer: how you can always talk yourself into believing you have at least two or three.
Antique Mall open daily next exit. Exit 420. Ashland. The importance of living as many lives as you can within the single life you're given. Emerson saying, A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Wildlife Safari. Exit 426. The absolute artificiality of the "realist" novel. The omissions in nonfiction essays whose purpose is to prove a thesis. The system of lying that is known as the Platonic and Aristotelian tradition.
Single? Omaha.Love.com. Satellite Self Storage. Finish what you started without starting over. Depression if untreated can be fatal.
Des Moines Eppley Airfield. Ponca Smoke Signals Hot Prices. Henry Doorly Zoo. 29 North. Sioux City. Missouri River. The people of Iowa Welcome You. Fields of Opportunity. Horseshoe Casino. Peterbilt. Apple Barrel. Cracker Barrel Family Meals Homestyle where they fired that employee for giving free condiments to a homeless guy, haven't eaten there since. Council Bluffs 1/2 mile. All the men I've slept with, the women I can count.
Black cows on a hillside that for an instant look like buffalo. Des Moines 122 miles. Corn, even more than in Nebraska.
Neola 1 mile. Camping Exit 23. Kum & Go. Wondering why the contrivance of the K and then—oh, of course! Seeing cows lying on their knees in fields and wondering if cow-tipping really happens or if it's just an urban legend. Then wondering if you shouldn't more accurately call it a rural legend instead.
Corn going downhill, corn going uphill. Still not a single farmer in a field anywhere. In school being told how hard the farmers worked. Taking long solitary walks around the circumference of the schoolyard at lunch holding elaborate conversations in my head.
Exit 40.
Avoca. Harlan. Wind farms on either side of the highway. Seeing a single blade on a trailer at least forty feet long. Prairie Rose State Park. Elk Horn 9 miles. Des Moines 11 miles. Iowa Welcome Center. Danish Museum.
Wiota 11 miles. Des Moines 70 miles. Anita Corning Exit 70. Knowing only one Anita and that Anita dying of breast cancer. Never being able to see the name Anita without thinking of breast cancer and that one particular Anita who I never think about otherwise. A stretch of road grooved in such a way that it squeals like a high wind when you pass over it.
Nothing Adventured Nothing Gained—the rest of the billboard too small to read. Guthrie Center. Greenfield. 4.11pm. Exit 93. Stuart. Panora.
Realizing now that my fear as a child that my father would lose control and kill us was greatly exaggerated but still not entirely sure of that.
Dexter 1 mile. Exit 110. Adel. DeSoto water tower. Another Kum & Go. Bob Feller Museum. My father, did he or didn't he? Well, let's put it this way, if he did it would have seemed he had every right, such was the atmosphere in that house. 8789 Plum Drive, Urbandale, Iowa. Iowa Machine Shed Restaurant. Exit 117.
Waukee. Bonneville. White Eagle Multicultural Pow Wow. Silos and Smokestack National Heritage Museum. I-35N. Polk County. Upper Iowa University. Hickman Road. Exit only.
Iowa Park. Douglas Avenue. Urbandale.
Huge gaps of memory missing, blank patches on the map, fences, armed guards, dogs, no entrance without authorization.
Violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Guantanamo Bay, secret prisons, executive orders, enhanced interrogation, arrest without warrant or due process.
Even with a GPS there are still places you cannot find.
Everything that happened happened to someone else.
Holiday Inn Express. It is here we will stop for the night.
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