Notes From the Road
October 30, 2024
Writer: Addie Siembieda
Editor: Haley Gagerman
The fastest route from Albuquerque to Ann Arbor runs through seven states. Kansas is not one of them. Yet, when my dad and I decided to take the 1600-mile trip from one end of the country to the other for college move-in, we had no intention of taking the fastest route. Sure, we probably could have made the trip in one overnight, but where would the fun in that be?
So on Saturday, August 17th, we loaded up our rented minivan with four Ikea bags, two suitcases, and enough snacks to make it over the Oklahoma state line, and set off on our three-day journey through middle America. Our trip began no differently than any other of the countless car rides we had taken in the last 18 years. We talked, we messed with the radio and, finally, we settled into a comfortable silence. I stared out the window, watching the desert where I was raised erode into the vast, empty plains of America’s Heartland. I’d flown over this part of the country many times, but this was my first time slowing down and taking it all in from the ground.
I saw the first grain silo in Texas, and the first dairy farm right as we passed into Oklahoma. We drove through abandoned ghost towns and towns that listed their high school football championships right under their population as we entered the city limits. We counted license plates and tracked the fluctuating gas prices. Every mile took me a little further from home, but with three days between me and my arrival in Ann Arbor, the full weight of moving so far away hadn’t hit me yet.
We spent the night of August 17th in Liberal, Kansas: a town of about 19,000 right on the Kansas-Oklahoma state line. The big county rodeo was in town that night, and the whole town was decked out in their best belt buckles and jeans for the occasion. The stands were packed, and we got to talking to a couple of little girls and their dad sitting behind us. The girls excitedly told me that they had been up since 6 AM that morning moving the horses into the stables. I told them that they were tougher than me. They told me that they never thought of it as work; it was how they were raised, and they loved every minute of it.
We left Liberal at about 10 AM on August 18th. We drove through more dusty, flat land and passed more grain silos. Around 1 PM, we got hungry and decided to stop for lunch in Hutchinson, Kansas. We got off the freeway and mapped ourselves to the highest-rated lunch in a 10-mile radius. Hutchinson was bigger than Liberal, with more churches, more strip malls, and more high schools.
A couple of canopies caught my eye as we pulled up to a stoplight next to a church. The parking spots had been painted over with black, and kids who couldn’t be much younger than I was reached for paint rollers and popsicles. I quickly realized it wasn’t just a church –it was a Catholic high school, and their seniors were out painting their senior parking spots.
These kids in a Kansas town, a fraction of the size of my home city, did the same thing I did almost exactly a year earlier. The same thing my senior friends back at home had done two days before. I watched these Hutchinson kids until the light turned green. On our way out of town after lunch, we made sure to pass back by them to see their progress on their parking lot murals.
These kids had grown up in a very different city in a very different part of the country than I did. For every regional difference, though, there was something that we shared. Some silly, human tradition. No matter what they call their carbonated drinks, how much their gas costs, or what music comes through their radios, we had participated in the same high school rites of passage. We all had the same impulse to leave our marks, no matter how small, on the spaces we lived in.
And suddenly, home didn’t feel quite as far. The Midwest didn’t feel quite as foreign.
Image: Erin Lee
