I've been listening to country music a lot lately. Not the sort of thing that plays on radio stations across the vast miles of the plains, with station names like The Hawk, or have slogans about being All Country All The Time. I've been listening to Hank Williams and Weylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, and basically anything that has some lapsteel pedal guitar twanging. That specific noise is important to people from plains. The twang of lap steel is the sound of distance. I firmly believe that lap steel is important because it encapsulates the loneliness of long miles.

If you grew up in a place like I grew up, an hours drive into town is not uncommon. Seventy-five miles to a suburb, or at least a town with a mall. The towns around you have a Walmart, and if they are lucky there's still some stores kicking and screaming the last of their lives on the town square. There's a bar along the state highway that gets more business than it should, and there seem to be an inordinate amount of car repair businesses, maybe a Fairway or a Hy-Vee.

I grew up in a world where thunderstorms swept across the sky like buffalo, and the wind would kick up clouds of dust before the snows came. The sky dominated everything. Your life and the lives of all your neighbors was dominated by that sky. You were beholden to this power above you. I am not religious anymore, I don't really believe in god, but I feel the sky and the wind in my bones. When it comes from the south you smell the scents of a thousand fields, and hedgerows of lilacs and I sense that somewhere there's a radio playing in a scrubbed down kitchen with an enameled stove and sink, and outside the kitchen window, which is directly above the sink is the yard that children play in, maybe they are picking dandelions trying to break the all-time world record for number of dandelions picked, or maybe chasing chickens around for the simple and deep pleasure of terrifying a chicken.

This is the life I reconnect with when I ride my bike through Iowa. The homes that I have lost, the climbing trees and the river bottoms, the snow, and the smell of ditches burning in autumn. In the country you feel that there is something bigger than yourself. I think the most sublime moments of my life have been spent on a bicycle feeling the plains roll underneath me, rolling past these small human existential dramas. A farm is an indirect answer to the question of "why am I here? What do I do with my life?" A farm answers that question with work, and it feels good to slice through that on a trail that was once a railroad. It feels good to slice through the farms of Iowa like the wind, like a piece of something that goes onto something bigger, something bigger than a person.