Opinion
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Way Out There: A trip across America reveals a lot of nowhere
Photo by Paul O'Connor
Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln on Mount Rushmore, South Dakota.
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Published: June 28, 2009
MIDDLE OF NOWHERE - A few years back, a family friend at Western Carolina University described his campus as sitting in "the middle of nowhere."
Although some WCU students may pride themselves in the remoteness of their school, in the sense of the American continent, Cullowhee is far from nowhere, let alone being at its middle.
Drive back and forth across this country and you might start playing a mind game with yourself: Where is the middle of America's nowhere?
Heading southwest, you might say it's in the Mississippi portion of the Natchez Trace parkway where, at a rest stop, you can climb a hill and see miles and miles of beautiful forest with nary a human-produced sound audible.
Then you'll get to the prairies of eastern Oklahoma and the endless miles of freshly planted farms along the northern tier of Kansas. There's Nebraska and that southwestern corner of North Dakota where there is almost nothing for 25 miles. Long stretches of Montana and South Dakota highway are interrupted only by the occasional billboard.
But my search for nowhere settled on eastern Utah, on I-70. From the Colorado border to the first rest and information stop, some 56 or 58 miles west, there is almost no sign of mammal activity. The desolate land is compromised of dry grazing land but no livestock in mid-May. Scruffy brush, some wire fences and an occasional pipe sticking out of the ground are it. The terrain is lumpy. The air is dry and cool. The sun is very hot. There are several exits, but they're just to access ranches that are far out of sight. Signs warn that no services are provided at these exits. Almost no other cars or trucks are on the road.
The rest stop tourist lady said the area is all owned by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and is used for grazing in the winter. She was not amused by the question, "Is this where the government hides the aliens?" Her icy look made me suspicious.
A trip across America is very much a trip to a lot of places that used to be in the middle of nowhere. Go to Europe, and you visit the great cities. Come to America -- and I saw a lot of Europeans visiting -- and you head to remote spots such as southern Utah, with its spectacular national parks at Zion and Bryce Canyon.
President Teddy Roosevelt's visage is chiseled into Mount Rushmore because he understood that our nowheres are our greatest natural resource. He started the national park system with Yellowstone, in Wyoming, and those investments are among the smartest our government has ever made. (PBS will air a 12-hour Ken Burns special on the parks this fall.)
Rushmore, itself, was conceived as a way to both honor American presidents and bring tourists to one of our most nowhere places -- western South Dakota. Now with the nearby Crazy Horse memorial, Sturgis motorcycle attractions and revived Deadwood, that region is looking like a junior version of Orlando.
Similarly, Yosemite was once a nowhere. But on my trip, only Chicago's rush-hour traffic was heavier than that in Yosemite National Park on Memorial Day.
So, maybe "nowhere" is a designation that can change. And who knows what will develop along I-70 when the government comes clean and admits it's been hiding the aliens under those eastern Utah mounds?
■ Paul O'Connor can be reached at ocolumn@mindspring.com.
Editor's note: Paul O'Connor, a free-lance editorial writer for the Journal who works from Raleigh, traveled across the country this spring by car. This is the last of his travelogues.
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