McCook, Nebraska

Falling from the heights of the Rockies to the wheat field flats of Nebraska is tantamount to putting a race car driver in a pushcart. If the driver was previously fighting off exhaustion with the sudden twists and plunges of a mountain pass, now he has only boredom as a companion. His other companion, the hitchhiker, nods off with his head occasionally pitching forward before jerking back violently to the headrest. This may wake him up briefly, and then in a droopy-eyed daze, if at all.

The driver doesn’t mind the lack of conversation. It’s just that the relentless flump-flump, flump-flump, of the tires on the asphalt lull him off like a rubber heartbeat. It provides the perfect –or unfortunate- soundtrack for unchanging scenery: endless rows of frozen stalks, for miles; and every thirty minutes or so, the darkened outlines of the same farmhouse-barn-silo triptych, sunk in the slumber of Midwestern winter.

The ground and road are covered in a fine frost, through which the rhythmic dashes of the middle marker can barely be discerned. The driver bemoans: he doesn’t even have the metronome of those yellow hyphens to watch, to keep time and measure distance. He wonders how far he would get if he were able to count each instant of their flitting past; or which would come first, hypnosis or insanity.

Orange pin pricks in the distance: they are either a factory or the same thing, a collection of smokestacks labeled a ‘city’ in these rural swaths. It’s too far off beyond the gentle curve of a field to identify anyway; and its gone before the driver would have had a chance to make up his mind, if he cared.

He recalls the conversation of an hour or so ago, when the excitement of an ancient, stone prison, with fortress-style turrets, passed their way.

“Ya ever been inside?”

“What? There?!”

“Nah, ya thick piece a…I mean in th’nick. Ya know, done time?”