The Last Word On Nothing

If you are feeling down, or housebound or just uninspired, there are few better salves than a drive. First, put on comfortable pants. Then get in the car and drive to the nearest highway. Choose any direction; it usually doesn’t matter. Set your cruise control to 65.

After a few minutes, the right angles of your rust belt city will give way to the curves of nature, of rivers and farms. The sky will seem wider, the air fresher. Looking at the rolling fields, I can’t believe that we are free, you will sing to yourself.

You will approach your first great river, and drive across a pea-green bridge that looks as though it was last painted in the Eisenhower Administration. You will grip the wheel until your knuckles whiten, because you hate bridges and high roads. At least there are guardrails, you think, unlike your previous long-distance drive.

Safely over the bridge, the density of buildings begins to drop exponentially. At the same time, the density of pro-Christianity, anti-abortion road signs increases. One telephone pole is posted with JESUS in green letters, and you know it’s meant as a reminder, but you laugh because it seems like an oath: Jesus, you’re going too fast! Oh, Jesus, look what you’ve done! You wonder if there is a linear relationship between distance from a city and the density of such signs.

As the traffic thins, you begin to search the roadside for patches of color and you will immediately feel better when you find them. Dandelions, those dainty suns, decorate cracks in the road. Weeds blend together on medians as you drive past, and seem to paint your path purple. The deep-ocean blue at the top of the sky, glimpsed through your open sunroof, will catch your breath — especially in contrast to the meek cerulean at the horizon. You will note the darkness of the tilled earth behind the fences of farms. You will contrast the chocolatey loam to the sandy, pebble-strewn weedland at the highway’s edge. Such a weird boundary between darkness and light. One patch of planetary crust is empty for now, but on the cusp of genetically modified fullness. The other one is unkempt and untilled but full of life already.

Do insects prefer the weeds, or the crops? You once read something about milkweed along Midwestern highways but you can’t Google it because you’re driving. You wonder if any scientist has ever tracked insect density along highways and compared it to insect density on farms. You wonder how this would affect bat populations, because bats eat insects. What would a bat think of this?

What is it like to be a bat, anyway?

You will want a road snack, so you will stop at a Phillips 66 station in a small town and pick up a large bag of Smartfood. You will grab a bunch of napkins to wipe the Pasteurized Cheese Product from your fingers. Back in the car, you will find a side road that takes you along a horse pasture and choose it instead, because it is prettier than the highway and seems quieter.

Suddenly you will edge to the right, hugging the shoulder, as the silver cylinder of a dairy truck bears down on you. It will shove air ahead of itself and toward your sunroof, which will emit a terrible PHOMP and pop your ears. You will be annoyed by this intrusion of industrialized agriculture.

In a moment, you will realize that your podcast is really distracting you from the view, so you turn off the political bros and watch the scenery. You are driving along a white picket fence, and behind it you can see a hill and a wood-sided church facing south, and the church has a tall white steeple. It is almost too much, practically a Rockwell painting. You look to the right and notice a grove of trees lining the highway, a windbreak for the ranch.

A minute later you will come upon the horses. A dozen of them stand tanly, necks bent to the clover, which is mottled with dark purple flowers. You wonder if those are the same purple-flowered weeds that populate your lawn. Too bad you don’t have a horse who could eat them. You wonder how much it costs to own a horse. You start thinking about what you would name your horse. Rusty. That’s a good horse name.

On the way back home you will take the river road, and you won’t see any horses. You will see houses on stilts, ready to ride out the seasonal flood of the continent’s mightiest waters. You will see a vulture in flight and you will worry it is an omen.

You will drive through a tiny village with a playground and a general store and little else, and stop to take a photo of the road sign for the next village. The next village is called Time (pop. 22) and if you turn right you might reach it. You might visit its bandstand and shuttered schoolhouse, and think about why mid-19th-century white Americans would name a town Time, and think about time and why it moves too quickly and only goes in one direction, and think about the direction your own life has taken and what forks in the road await you, and get back in your car and drive south until you reach the Mississippi River and its absurd hugeness. You will cross the big bridge and look left toward the locks. You will think about how much you miss driving on roads flanked by mountains instead.

Later that night you will think about how you have resented the heartland’s politics, its parochialism. But you will also remember the soft sky, the chocolatey loam, and think, not for the first time, This is why people stayed here. You will remember the dual meaning of the word heartland, a meaning you have disliked, but you will think, maybe for the first time, that it’s a good meaning. Heartland driving is good for the soul.