I drove the rental car 3,862 miles. I took way, way, waaaaaaay too many pictures. I’m going to post a whole bunch of the pictures in a travelogue type of thing this week, but it’s taking an eternity just to wade through them all and decide which ones to use and which ones I have anything to say about.

This little essay is really just an introduction to what I’m going to put up later this week.

In Nebraska I saw Toadstool Geologic Park in the northwest corner of the state, had a prime rib for the ages in Paxton, saw the world’s largest collection of windmills, and got my car stuck in the sand on a beach. I saw the Mansion on the Hill, Carhenge, Boot Hill, Scotts Bluff, and Chimney Rock. Best of all I spent a couple of soul-cleansing days in the Sand Hills, where the grasslands and the hills just roll and roll into infinity.

I also fulfilled a long-time desire of mine to drive through the state of Nebraska while listening to Bruce Springsteen’s great “Nebraska” album. The idea of making that drive while listening to that music was planted in my mind years ago by a friend, and some remote corner of my sometimes casually obsessed mind is happy to have finally done it.

Nebraska is known for its small towns, and that’s part of what drew me there. I have an endless fascination with small towns. I drove through more towns than I could count, many with double-digit populations. Through one town after another I tried to see every street and every driveway and every grocery store and schoolyard, and I fantasized about the lives that go on behind every single door and in every single room of all those houses, and in the soul and mind of each individual.

One of the high points of the trip was landing in a town called High Plains, Nebraska (population 4). This was an excellent find. It was on my way to the Hudson-Meng Bison Bone Bed and Toadstool Geological Park, and I’d been driving at a snail’s pace over dirt and gravel roads for what seemed like hours. I wasn’t sure if the Ford Taurus I was driving was really adequately equipped for this kind of road, nor was I certain how well it was holding up in the 110 degree heat.

The car held up just fine, and to my surprise I found the town of High Plains. It was not on any map, and it certainly was not in my plans.

High Plains is a real town with a real population of 4 people, but it’s no ghost town. The old buildings were immaculate, like pieces out of a Broadway theater set or a professional movie. There is a bed and breakfast there, and some of the classiest people and most elegant souvenirs I’ve ever seen. The ice cream was fabulous, too.

I don’t know if any description can express how excellent it was to find such an oasis in the middle of some of the harshest land I’ve ever seen. There are a number of places I saw on this trip that I want to see again, and High Plains, Nebraska, is one of them.

In South Dakota I stood shoulder to shoulder with real live cowboys. I saw my first-ever live rodeo on the 4th of July in Ft. Pierre. I saw the pillars of smoke coming from the Grizzly Gulch fires. They were strangely evocative of the billowing smoke that poured out of the World Trade Center site. I saw the Badlands, Mt. Rushmore, Wall Drug Store, and I learned how to correctly pronounce “Pierre.”

As much as I detest tourist hives, I went and saw Mt. Rushmore anyway, and I’m glad I did. It was much more impressive than I expected, although my expectations were pretty low. It was big but not overbearing; it was elegant but not dainty or twee. Of the works of art I saw on this trip, Mt. Rushmore was certainly the strongest.

The Mt. Rushmore park was also a hive of lowest-common-denominator tourists. As crowded and noisy as it was, I was there a few days before the utter mob scene it must have been on July 4th.

I got in and out of there before losing my mind among what a friend of mine would have described as “all of America laid out to dry.”

In North Dakota I found “The Mighty Og,” which is a giant gorilla (made of plaster? I don’t know…) that someone put in the middle of a field. Near the town of Regent I saw “The Enchanted Highway,” which is a collection of the world’s tallest metal sculptures. I visited the town of Amidon, which is the smallest county seat in the United States. Amidon has an amusing secret to fool passers-by. More on that later…

I made short excursions into Wyoming and Colorado. I drove out to Devils Tower in Wyoming, and had lunch at the Tumbleweed Café on 4th Street in Crook, Colorado.

Two cities I wish I’d stayed in longer were Fargo, ND, and Sioux Falls, SD. Fargo seemed like a friendly, laid back place, and Sioux Falls was a much bigger and more complex city than I expected.

I am not a fan of what I call “Airport Anthropology.” Airport anthropology is what people practice when they travel to a place they’ve never been, they pass through the airport, stay at a hotel, watch a local newscast in their hotel room, go sit in business meetings, then head home talking like an authority on the place they just visited.

The airport metaphor can be extended to other things, like “Cable News Anthropology,” in which people derive their point of view on the future of humanity and of the entire world and solar system exclusively from what they see on cable news networks.

That said, I’m not here to report on the state of America, or on anything except what I did and the places I went. The longer the trip went on the more I couldn’t help marveling at the freedom we have in America to just blow through state borders and drive wherever the hell we want whenever the hell we want.

Even when I was pulling cactus bulbs out of my shoes in Nebraska, I never felt far from home. It was all America. America looks a little bit smaller to me now. The pages of my road atlas are worn and even coming loose from the spiral binding, and I look at roads and cities and I re-read the routes I drove like one re-reads a great novel.

Many of the people and places made me think of something I read in a social studies textbook in grade school: A chapter on the United States started by saying that America comprises so many peoples and so many regions and is so vast in so many different aspects that to attempt to characterize its people or its personality in one chapter or even 100 chapters of a book would be hopeless and patronizing.

I remember sitting and reading that textbook in my grade school library. The book went on to describe different types of lifestyles and livelihoods, and as a 4th grader I had notions of going and seeing all those places and asking “Is this still America?”

I had an “Is this still America?” moment at the rodeo in Ft. Pierre, South Dakota. This was a real rodeo, and these were real cowboys. They wore Stetson hats and cowboy boots and spurs because that’s what they wore. They were not putting on costumes or acting the part. This was the real thing, and I’m glad I didn’t ask any stupid “Are you a real cowboy?” questions because I’d have sounded like the hick/asshole tourist that I try desperately not to be any time I travel.

There was a lot of driving. As satisfying as it is to look back on it all, I’m not going to deny there were boring stretches of highway. There were long miles of absolute boredom. I avoided Interstates for as much of the trip as possible, but sometimes there was really no other choice, and most Interstates are nothing if not boring. To that end, I hereby declare I-29 between Fargo and Sioux Falls the most boring drive in history.

But boring stretches of road are a part of any road trip, and that’s why I brought 90 CDs to listen to. And fortunately South Dakota Public Radio came in loud and clear for one of the most boring parts of the trip. I listened to hours upon hours of Allan Pettersson symphonies, and in fact I shall forever connect his 13th Symphony with that brutal drive over dirt and gravel road toward High Plains and Toadstool.

And I’m not going to say that everything was fabulous or great. There were some destinations that were really stupid wastes of time, some memorials and works of art that were just pathetic, and some whole cities that just made my eyes hurt because they were so damn ugly.

But that’s OK. Mediocrity is part of the deal when you have the freedom to travel anywhere and take your sweet time doing it. It’s kind of like listening to every single Elvis Presley song in the order he recorded them. There are consecutive tracks of greatness littered with songs so bad you just shake your head and ask “Did I just hear that?”

I talked to people along the way who thought a vacation from NYC to the Sand Hills of Nebraska or to Bismarck, North Dakota, was kind of a weird idea. But I don’t remember anyone who felt that way for long after I told them things they never knew about the state they lived in. Even North Dakotans!

In fact, the night before I left for Nebraska I was playing pool at a pub up the street and by chance I played against a guy who had moved to New York from Nebraska. That’s kind of a crazy coincidence, since I was leaving for Nebraska the next day. Well, maybe not that crazy. But the Nebraskan thought the idea of traveling that part of the country was pretty neat and he’d never heard of anyone doing it before, but he really respected it.

Yes, validation, that’s what I live for. The validation of pool-playing Nebraskans is what gets me through the day.

I have ideas and plans for more travel in the next couple of months. I’ve got time and funds, but who knows how long this situation will last.

For some reason I have this desire to go visit Detroit, and maybe Toronto. I’ve wanted to make a trip to Niagara Falls for a long time. I’m also planning a trip down to the Keys in Florida.

This week, I think I’m going to visit New York City like a tourist. I’ll go to the top of the Empire State Building, to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, to the Observation Deck of the Twin Towers... Oops. I do forget what it is tourists do around here. Oh, I’ll go to a ball game, and then I’ll see a show. Maybe I’ll even book a room at a hotel in Times Square.