As Far as the Eye Can See...

Today I felt a strange feeling while driving along the road observing everything around me. I was nowhere I could identify and yet I felt like I had arrived somewhere.

I had arrived in the prairie. The prairie of stories like "The Wizard of Oz."

I could describe to you a spot on the earth near the Eiffel tower in Paris, France and you could travel there, follow my directions and arrive at the exact spot. But the idea represented by a place like Dorothy's home in "The Wizard of Oz" is as much a state of mind as a place.

It's flat and open surrounded only by fields of wheat or grass. There is a single road that connects this place to the world and allows it to be marked on a map so that it is not wilderness. There are few people, few cars and few buildings.

There is a tremendous sense of relaxing solitude and peace here.

The feeling here has a permanence to it: You can stay here as long as you like for this feeling as opposed to the peak of a mountain where the same feelings are tempered with an awareness that soon you must leave and return to somewhere else.

The feeling here has a persistence to it. Hours later, the place and the feeling is the same. It's different from the same quiet solitary awareness you achieve on the peak of a mountain: You know that soon you will have to leave and return to somewhere else. Here, you can stay and the solitude welcomes you as long as you like.

I wonder what it would have been like to live here fifty years ago with no cellphone, no long distance, no cable or satellite TV: just you, your family, your crops and a single speaker radio pulling in the staticy broadcasts from far away.