October 29, 2014 - 8:57 p.m.
I've been reading Dakota by Kathleen Norris. It makes my heart ache frequently, the kind of ache I feel inside when I hear Elvis. Or read a great ghost story. The kind of ache that comes from deep in my bones that tells me it has something to do with who I am at the core. It's the descriptions of harsh, howling Plains, wide blue skies, the desert, the ranches. I never lived there -- I don't think I've even driven through it or flown over it -- but I have idealized memories of Nebraska and fantasies of my grandfather's childhood on a Kansas farm. The Dakotas seem colder and dustier (and less settled up til the fracking boom) but as far as I know nobody ever wrote so poetic a book about Nebraska or Kansas, and there are similarities, I think. At the risk of saying all those states out there in the middle look the same.
I wasn't really sure where the Dakotas were when I started reading, so I pulled up a map. Reading all of the names of cities and mountains and rivers gave me little chills and I ended up going around the map, concentrating on all of the southern and western and plains states and reading names like Dodge City and the Ozarks and Death Valley and the Sand Hills and Broken Bow and Amarillo. There are so many places I want to know more about. Most of them I don't care if I ever see, I just want to know about them. The things that most interest me about them probably don't exist anymore, anyway.
