Nothing but Land

When I started writing this blog post, I wasn’t in Nebraska at all - I had flown to Vegas for two weeks to take part in a writing residency. Despite Vegas having its reputation for gambling, drinking and debauchery, this was a relatively boring few weeks during which I wrote, read, and paced around the apartment thinking about what I’d wrote and read.

Back at Doane, my students in Anglophone literature were writing papers about the necessity of knowing stories about place, especially those written by people of that place, and how that might impact our own experiences of travel.

Perhaps it is because I was in “storytelling mode” that I began to notice how they were bubbling up all around me. In a general sense, Vegas has its own mythmaking, from rancher stopover to neon Sin City, but those weren’t the only stories that interested me. During conversation, I realized the man who owned the bookstore downstairs was from the same Midwestern city as me, and we discussed the trajectories that had led us so far from where we began. My Uber driver described the shock of picking up his own long-distance best friend from the airport, who had been flying into the city to surprise him. Coincidences can be stories, shrinking the map, and the distance, from one person to another.

During my second week in Vegas, two friends came to visit me. We drove to Death Valley for the day, which luckily coincided with seeing Lake Manly in Badwater Basin when it had a scant foot of water after a summer’s rain, something that last happened twenty years ago. We waded out into that flat horizon of water, watched as the white suggestion of salt feathered up my wet leggings and hardened, striated, marking what it had touched and what it had not. We wondered if anything could live in this bleak and beautiful place, the blessing of meager offerings.

After, we drove to the abandoned town of Rhyolite at sunset, where the shells of former buildings took on a stately kind of grandeur beneath the moon. The nearby open-air museum had a Last Supper of ghosts arranged in a row, their empty white robes effacing individuality, nothing but shadow-selves. Compounded with the abandoned town of Rhyolite, those structures seemed like the suggestion of the townspeople’s former lives, blank but ultimately inhospitable shells that you might attempt to tuck yourself close to, trying on for size. Who could have lived here? Where did they go? Around us, visitors emerged, as we did, from the desert’s blue pall, shouting or walking or looking or laughing or studiously exchanging one lens for another on their bulky cameras. We briefly crossed each other’s paths in Rhyolite before dissolving back into the empty, dark land through which our true homes laid.

This is actually not a shameless plug for travel, nor taking travel courses here, although I think there are tremendous benefits from exiting, however briefly, the neat lines of your own life. Much has been written about how traveling can make you a more empathetic person. In a broad stroke, you can realize just how many people, just how many life stories, exist beyond the worn groove of your “regular” life. And, sometimes, that kind of distance from yourself, your normal surroundings, can give you clarity, perspective.

No, this is actually less about travel than it is about how very little distance we have to traverse to hear stories that matter. These trips are often framed about what we bring back home with us: we don’t change the places we visit, but we might be changed by the experiences, lessons, memories gained while there. Those are important, but what gets less fanfare are the experiences, lessons, and memories that can explain exactly where you are, exactly why you’re here.

I was excited to return home to Nebraska, although the winter landscape of gradual hills and muted metallics - fields shorn down, cow ponds rimed in ice - is nothing like Vegas. Willa Cather, who lived about two hours away in Red Cloud, wrote of Nebraska: There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.

I actually love this description - the potential, the possibilities, awaiting construction. Not just for the geography, but for its inhabitants, too.

When it comes to making and understanding our own stories, we have, and have always had, the raw materials at hand. I hope your time at Doane could act as an atlas, or a compass, as you find your way there.

Melanie Ritzenthaler, Assistant Professor of English