The Accidental Nebraskan - Transcript

[Meghan Daum:] "When I told my friends I was leaving New York, where I'd lived for almost ten years, and moving to Nebraska, a place where I knew virtually no one, they began placing bets as to how long I'd stay before crawling back home. Almost no one thought I'd make it past the one-year mark. I was, they pointed out, a writer and not a farmer. I'd also never owned a car.

" 'You'll have to drive at least an hour just to go to the store,' a friend warned me in total seriousness. 'You'll be forced to eat corn dogs,' a colleague said to me. I was also told I might not be able to get HBO and would surely have to get a cow.

"I don't have a cow, although I do have a pig. I have a seven-acre farm where people board horses, and we have pheasants in the pasture. And dogs and geese and barn swallows and probably lots of other critters I just haven't noticed yet.

"In one year I have gone from a person whose bedroom window faced a brick wall to a person who looks out on natural prairie grass, which is a far nicer way to work as a writer. But I am not yet in a position to write about the land.

Even though I now live in the country I am no more the naturalist than I was when I lived in Manhattan. And I'm beginning to wonder if writing about the land requires a sensibility that was shaped from an early age by the natural world rather than the social world. If that's the case I will surely never have it in me. Even now that I've removed myself from the city, the natural world seems in many ways like something I cannot fully process.

"I can see the land. I can see the sky. But I'm probably not seeing it the way a Nebraskan sees it. I will look at the clouds and miss the hawk. I will see the turkey vulture but not bother to think about where it's going. I can see the pieces of nature, but not the chain. Its as if all this space has given me so much room to think, allowed my thoughts to tumble towards me like items stuffed for too long in a crowded closet that the space itself becomes too much to fathom.

"But maybe I do have nature stories to tell. They're just about human nature. About the peculiar ways we as humans go about asserting our identities. As populations shift and possibilities broaden and definitions of ambition and personal fulfillment continue to deepen and expand and surprise us, I hope that we can stop thinking of ourselves as country people versus city people. I am neither a country person nor a city person now. I am a person who lives where she wants to live. A person who is learning a completely new way of looking at the world around her. If that's shocking, go ahead and be shocked. My friends back home still ask me if I get HBO. But I don't need cable. I've got red-tailed hawks. I may not spot of them but my vision is slowly improving.

"For me Nebraska will always be the place where I learned how to see."