Imaging the open plains

As I was driving through the rural South Carolina countryside, I kept looking for all the familiar landmarks, the old farmhouses, the pastures and woods filled with oaks and hickories and pines. I thought about how comforting this scenery was, how seemingly unchanging, except for the ebb and flow of the seasons.

But then, at one point I imagined I was not headed back to my apartment in metropolitan Charleston, which was drawing nearer all the time, but instead embarked on a trip. I would be driving for days, and soon enough the woods and trees and fields would give way to wonderful wide-open landscapes as I approached the Great Plains and headed west, farther each day toward the vast, empty deserts of Wyoming, and beyond that to the north, the great land of dreams -- Montana. I could look all around and not see anything to surround or enclose me. There would only be the everlastingly wide open spaces. Hour after hour the car would make its way west. The rhythmic sound of tires on the road, and the engine humming in the background, would lull me into a trance-like state. I would lose track of time, and it would not really matter where I was as long as I was "out there" somewhere. Mile after mile. The car window open, the wind buffeting my outstreteched arm and hand.

Hardly a day that goes by that I don’t see something that reminds me of my travels across the country years ago. The other day I opened a book and saw an old country house in Leadville, Colorado. I recognized it instantly. I had toured it years ago when I visited that town high in the Rockies. I picked up a used book another day just recently, and it was a collection of Mari Sandoz’s writing from Old Jules country in northwestern Nebraska. I had been there, too, in 1984. I remember quite well visiting a small museum upstairs in a department store on a small- town main street that was dedicated to her life and work. I see pictures of the Grand Teton Mountains, rivers in the Missouri Ozarks, haystack rock formations on the Washington coast. All places and sights I have had the good fortune to see at one time or another, and hope to see again some day.

Now my traveling days are greatly circumscribed by the many obligations and responsibilities of life. But if I see someone in their late 20s or early 30s trapped in a dead-end job and seeing no way out, I want to go up to them and say, "Quit your job. Get on the road. Travel. Work at temporary jobs. See the world before you get old and have to hobble around in an RV camp or ride along in one of those hermetically sealed, sleek, air-conditioned tour buses that whisk you from place to place and take a good bit of the adventure out of your trip. Be adventurous. Embark on your own type of prairie schooner saga, across grasslands, hills and mountains until you find yourself beyond that distant horizon looking out over a vista as endless as the blue sky. Stand there and let the wind blow strong and free, and let the dry grasses crackle under your feet late in the afternoon beside a stream like Grasshopper Creek in Montana -- Big Sky country at last.