Notes from a Road Trip From Jersey to Nebraska

The Plainsman is one of the many excellent Nebraska smalltown restaurants and bars I visited this week

I am on spring break right now, and I took the opportunity to travel to Nebraska to spend time with my parents. (The vagaries of school scheduling mean my wife and children don’t have the same break as me.) I decided to drive, as that is the way of my Great Plains people. I also enjoy road trips and the observations I get to make while I take them. Beyond that, I love this country, and I love exploring it.

I only got to Pittsburgh my first day, just so I could spend time with a dear friend. After that I drove to Iowa City, setting foot in six states and crossing the Mississippi and Ohio all on the same day. In a bit of spontaneity I did not drive straight across, but dipped south a little so I could visit Champaign-Urbana, where I was a graduate student, for a couple of hours. The last day I finally made it to my hometown in central Nebraska.

I know these roads well from past travels, but over the years there have been some changes. This time I would see the occasional farm whose owner had put out a big Trump sign. When I was a grad student on the same roads, farmers were not so political. On that note, the number of anti-abortion billboards keeps growing. I see fewer and fewer commercial ones, which might be a reflection of the economic health of the rural Midwest. I did some road tripping with my parents up to the Nebraska Sandhills, and I was struck by how everything seemed to be crumbling. In other short trips we took the number of anti-abortion billboards struck me, especially one that said “All Lives Matter.” This confirmed my suspicions that these billboards were not just about abortion, which I do think the people putting them up actually do care about. Nevertheless, abortion is a kind of metonym for a politics of cultural despair, to use Fritz Stern’s phrase. This is a politics based in a feeling that the supposed fundamentals of the country have been betrayed, and must be returned and those responsible for the fall from grace punished.

I was also struck, more than usual, by the brutality of the built environment. Every new building in the rural towns constructed in the past thirty years is either a box store, fast food restaurant, or dollar store. In fact a Dollar General now occupies a corner of my uncle’s farmland next to the small town of Elm Creek. At the risk of sounding like a cultural reactionary myself, the ugliness of the surroundings and the corporate chain nature of their function seems to alienate people from their own towns. Many communities with the cancerous growths of commercial sprawl have crumbling brick downtowns that were quite beautiful in their day. My hometown thus seems oddly fortunate to have been bypassed by the interstate. The downtown has been revitalized, with hardly a chain business to be seen. This tended to be the exception, not the rule, however.

It all contributes to a politics where people resent the “elite” and outsiders yet displace their anger away from the capitalist processes responsible for hollowing out their communities. The larger forces are never far from the surface. For instance, when in the Sandhills we stopped in the small town of Bartlett, with less than 200 people. We went there due to a sculpture garden of works by local artist Herb Mignery, who had long lived in my hometown of Hastings. Despite its small size and crumbling main drag, Bartlett had the kind of down-home restaurant you can only find in rural Nebraska. We helped ourselves to a delicious roast beef buffet right in the heart of cattle country. While we were there we talked to an old timer rancher who let us know about a recent wildfire that had burned up a bunch of his pasture. The consequences of global warming could not be more visceral, but in the Sandhills you will see signs advocating against the building of wind farms there. The people who want windmills are coded as weirdo environmentalist outsiders, and this is why I am less willing to try to “understand” Trump’s base as a group of people who will respond well to economic uplift. No economic policy is capable of salving the wounds of cultural despair.

While this MAGA crowd gets a lot of media attention, less is lavished on the “blue dots” willing to be openly progressive in hostile territory. I have some among my friends and family back home who are fighting the good fight against long odds. I wish their concerns were listened to by the coastal reporters who parachute in on safari. The same goes for blue dot towns like Iowa City and Champaign surrounded by red seas. Those are big university towns, of course, but my own deep red hometown has its own little blue village downtown. You can feel a different spirit in the air at the coffee houses, bread bakery, local brewery, and independent bookstore. In that corner my Gulf of Mexico t-shirt got appreciative nods in a mini-bubble within the larger one. Folks in the blue village tend to stick together, and have a friendliness and openness more generous in spirit than among any other people I have encountered in this country.

This blue village is all likely down to the fact that my hometown has a large hospital and a small college that draw in educated people. My hometown also relies on small industry, which was revitalized during the Biden administration. With the recent Trumponomics policies, however, I do wonder how long the party will go on. The blue villages I mentioned are all populated by people in the knowledge economy (especially higher education), the same sector being targeted for attack by Trump and Vance. I get the feeling that the very presence of these blue pockets in red areas is what drives this policy, which is less about economics than the aforementioned politics of cultural despair. They want to make this a country where my hometown no longer produces the kinds of educated people who are able to see beyond the narrow horizons of their surroundings, i.e. people like me.

The new daily outrages perpetuated by the Trump administration cast a cloud over my trip, including my visits to ancestral cemeteries. While at a roadside cemetery near my father’s tiny hometown to visit my grandparents and great aunts and uncles in their final resting place, I had a strange epiphany. I walked around the graves towards the older markers, the ones of the Czech, Polish, and German immigrants born in the 1800. I scanned names like Celestine, Anton, and Vladislav. It reminded me of another nearby cemetery where my first ancestors in America are buried, all with graves inscribed in their German mother tongue, not English. Even the faintest traces of this cultural heritage did not make it to my parents’ generation, which was assimilated to the point of erasure.

These immigrants gave up the lands of their birth, their languages and cultures all to gain a foothold in a new country of great promise. It hit me in that moment that the idea of America that brought them to these shores no longer exists, and I am not sure if it will ever come back. When I was a boy visiting these graves would fill me with pride that my family had chosen to be Americans. This time I felt bitterness that they had given up so much for something that proved to be an illusion. I came away from the visit hoping that for their sake my descendants will not be buried in my land, but somewhere else where life is better. That, sadly, is the biggest insight I am taking back with me to New Jersey.