God bless America’s heartland… Where you can still drive straight for a hundred miles with nothing but golden fields on each side of you. I learned quickly that the land inside the state lines of places like Nebraska may be “fly-over”, but its people are anything but — a few minutes after locking myself out of that night’s lodging, a woman I met a few days before gave me a trip to Wal-Mart for clothes the next day and a couch to sleep on. I made the pilgrimage to its mecca, the Iowa State Fair, the pride of so many people whose lives are built and broken by the gifts and the curses of the cropland. I shielded my eyes from the sun radiating off the hoods of cars in the parking lot of the gas-station-diner-hybrid in Arcadia OK.

Western explorers may have razed much the frontier spirit of these lands, but the sense of community that comes from wide open space has largely been preserved. Plains Indians still stand tall alongside rural White America in deeply spiritual lands like the Black Hills, the Badlands, and the Osage Reservation. The feeling of small-town America has never been more alive than on the Main Streets of Howard KS, and Custer SD, its spirit exported by the truck beds out of America’s Largest Truck Stop along the pivotal I80 to the coastal metropolises than depend on them.