emptiness

Imagine you’re living in Manhattan. As soon as you wake up, the city assaults you with the traffic noises from outside your apartment. When you draw back the blinds, there’s more activity in the streets below than your eyes and mind can process.

Now imagine that, after several years in NYC, you take your first trip out into the country, to a farm where you sit in the field for an hour. No longer is your mind forced to process all the input of a bustling city, and your mindset begins to change.

This was how I felt in Nebraska, on Route 2, which is 60 miles north of I-80. We see nothing except barbed wire fence posts, “miniature golf hills” (as THE RECORDER puts it), and the occasional freight train (Route 2 parallels the train tracks). Otherwise, there’s nothing.

We see dots on the map with names attached to them, but when we pass through the supposed towns, there’s not a single store open. Every few towns there’s a store, and perhaps a gas station. In the gas station, the display for work gloves and farm supplies dwarfs the chewing gum section.

You can drive Route 2 almost the length of Nebraska. On the map, green dots tell you that the entire length is designated a “scenic drive”. It’s not scenic in the classic sense, where there are broad vistas or dramatic cliffs. Route 2 is not flat like Kansas. Instead, the primary emotion is one of isolation. Missing are the visual input of billboards and the auditory input of traffic. The road weaves, so the monotony of a completely straight road is missing (go to Kansas and North Dakota for completely straight roads that stretch for over 100 miles).

When you first start down Route 2, your mind wants to fill in the stimuli that you’re missing, like the ringing in your ears you hear after things go silent. Your head jangles with what you remember from city life. But as the miles wear on, your head starts to calm down. It starts to accept where you are, and the ringing dies down.

Eventually Route 2 ends. You have no choice but to get back onto I-80 to resume your trip home, and the traffic and billboards return, and your brain reluctantly ramps up to process the relentless constant stimuli of modern life.