all of the eggs in the Tacoma

a five paragraph essay

I hadn’t realized how flat the earth is, or at least North Dakota. We passed through Fargo, with white boxy apartment buildings and chain coffee shops and strip malls, out across the Great Plains, northern middle America.

Somewhere out here where dusty yellow rolls into indigo is the center of our continent, and sometimes it really hits me how big America is. Here, held together by the sprawl of the interstate, are hundreds of thousands of homes full of people with different realities. How could I know what it is like to grow up on a farm in North Dakota? How could someone on a farm in North Dakota know what it’s like to grow up in a big city, or the woods of northern Michigan, or a village in Eastern Europe?

Once in the mountains of Armenia, I met a man who lived in a small house with a broken window tending to his sheep and maintaining an old crumbling church. In the winter, he would go down to the city and live with his family. “They think I’m poor,” he laughed. Around us the mountains were green and the river that tumbled down from the peaks was clear. “I disagree.” He invited us to stay for dinner, and filled our hands with apples as we left.

The center of the North American continent was once grassland with bison and wild horses, home of the Lakota Sioux, Crow, Hidasta, and Mandan Indigenous Nations, and before that home to mammoths and big cats. Today it’s mostly farmland and dive bars, and the fourth least densely populated US state. It’s a place I wouldn’t want to live (I tell myself like I know what it is to live there, mostly rows of corn and beer and boxy homes).

At rural gas stations strangers with long beards and red shirts stare at our strange long kayaks on the roof of the car— we joked when we started the drive that we’re really in it now, what else would we do but paddle this summer (all of our eggs in the basket that is Andy’s Tacoma). I wonder what the stranger in the red shirt thought of us— a few 20 somethings with boats on the roof, stains on our shirts. More though, I wonder what what I think of him says about me. North Dakota, home of flat earth and strip malls, and the man in the red shirt, once upon a time home of mammoths and large cats and thousands of bison, and mostly I see a flyover country, a place I might name small-minded America without thinking too hard about how that itself might make me small-minded. There’s something pretty in the way the plains sprawl out on either side of you horizon line like the oceans, and the truth is I don’t know North Dakota— who am I to write about it?

North Dakota fields

*please excuse typos for the next four months; I typed this on my phone while the car was moving, and I’ll be writing from tents here on out