On the road again

We are five days and 800 miles—halfway—into our border-to-border Route 83 road trip. The road (mostly two-lane) stretches from Westhope, North Dakota, on the Canadian border, to Brownsville, Texas, just across the Rio Grande from Mexico, traversing the width of both Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, a snippet of Oklahoma, and a Texas-sized chunk of Texas.

It is a lonely road passing through, and I mean right down the main streets, of small (sometimes microscopic) towns you’ve never heard of: Murdo, Max, McCook, Pollock, Blunt, Selden, Oakley, Gem. It passes through two state capitals, one of which, Pierre (pronounced Peer by its 13,000-and-change inhabitants) is the second least populous state capital in the U.S. It passes through Valentine where the only single-named, non-freeway road across the girth of the nation (Route 20) crosses this almost straight-as-a-die north-south highway 83. We were in Valentine almost exactly a year ago on our first let’s not fly over it all, we’ve all come to look for America road trip (which, in case you missed it, you can read about here and in six succeeding posts). Valentine is how we learned about route 83.

And so, the road again. It traverses sometimes astonishing beautiful country—the endless sunflower fields of the Dakotas, the Sand Hills and Niobrara River country of Nebraska—and sometimes mile after soporific mile of ironing board flat Kansas.

And the road teaches.

It teaches how big this country is, and how little we know of it. (The average American has visited only 12 of our 50 states.) It teaches that, as much as we are different from one another, we are also deeply connected by landscape and community and family, by the challenges we face and how we face them.

At a one-pump gas station in a one-street town somewhere in South Dakota, standing in the rain with us, the owner talked about her kids, the son who “went up to Bismarck and made his life there” and the daughter she cares for at home. “We had her in a group home for a while, but she belongs with us,” she said. “She…” the woman hesitated for a moment, “she is 32 but she has the personality of a much younger person.” The matter-of-factness of that statement, the beauty of seeing her daughter that way…it has stayed with me for hundreds of miles.