Is There Anybody Out There?

     Once you make it to the heartland of the country, you discover something: There ain't shit out there. The open space can be quite overwhelming for a born and bred Eastern Seaboarder. What appears to be only an inch or so on the map can turn into several hours of drive time. Naturally, your mind wanders in these wastelands. Whether it's gigantic expanses of corn, gigantic expanses of rock, or gigantic expanses of grass, you'll spend a lot of time staring through the windshield without much variation to stimulate your brain.

I've seen about 17 of these signs so far.

     Where I come from, one town ends, and then immediately thereafter, another town begins. There's a border, and theoretically, you could stand in two towns at once if you straddled it. This is not possible in most of the country. You leave one town, and a road sign informs you there isn't another for 34 miles. It's much like I imagined space travel to be as a boy. Propelling your way across the infinite void, random planets and outposts are encountered extremely rarely. I'm like a modern-day Captain Kirk, minus the hairpiece.

These are the voyages of the USS Chevy Cavalier...

     Instead of green-skinned alien babes, however, the only life forms you might encounter between towns are cows. Brown cows. Black Cows. White Cows. Brown and white cows. Black and white cows. It's a veritable rainbow coalition of cows out there in the abyss. The sad thing is, after a while, you're glad to see the cows. It's a sign of life, and something that is actually variable, as opposed to the endless, symmetrical rows of corn. You see an oddly colored cow, or (you gotta be real lucky for this) one doing something other than standing still and eating grass, and it's like you won the Powerball Lotto. An example:

          Me: "Holy shit, JZ! Did you see that cow over there?"

          JZ: "No, damnit, I missed it! What was it doing?"

          Me: "You wouldn't believe it, man- it was drinking some water, then it stopped and walked away!"

          JZ: "Wow! Ugh, I can't believe I didn't see..."

     And just like that, we have something to talk about for the next two hours until we reach a town.