As I swung past Sioux Falls, the walls of the world dissolved.
There was just—there.
Extent.
Expanse.
My line of sight unbroken to the blurred horizon, I glimpsed the world as the ancients imagined, a circle beneath the domes of heaven. The perspective was unsettling at first, as if I had been indoors all my life and had ventured outside for the first time. Now I was truly on the prairie, not the Euclidean farmland plots of Minnesota, but the vast tundra of the Great Plains. There was nowhere to hide.
The ground around me was flatter than anywhere else I had been, but not perfectly flat as I expected. The plateau rolled, like an ocean of earth, with swells miles long between trough and crest, and tilted in a modified sine wave, the way a sparrow flies, briefly pumping its wings on the upswing, then tucking and coasting on the long downswing. In that motion, quick surge-slow descent, the earth swept imperceptibly, with geologic velocity, toward the invisible mountains of the west.
For hours that day, I ventured up and down the long, long, loooonnnngggggg swells of South Dakota, surfing the waves of turf for several hundred miles, breathing emancipation in with the prairie air. I did nothing, felt no need to do anything, but drive.
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