Lost on the Great Plains - Essay by David Wishart

[William Stibor] "Hi David, William Stibor."

[David Wishart] "Good to meet you."

[Stibor] "Come on back and let's do this little thing.

"I want you to get comfortable. Are you comfortable there?"

[Wishart] "Sure."

[Stibor] "OK, you can see the pages all right?"

[Wishart] "Yea."

[Stibor] "Of course, you have this memorized, right?"

[Wishart] "Uh, no. I was told I didn't have to do that -- I was going to!"

[Stibor] (Laugh)

[Jeff Smith] "Anytime you're ready."

"[Wishart] It is strange, and as much by chance as by decision, that I have spent more than half my life in Nebraska right in the middle of North America. Strange, because I grew up near the sea, the North Sea, which roars on the coast of Northeast England.

"You can rely on the sea; it can be relied upon to rise and fall each day and when I was young and the industry was still thriving, it could be relied upon to take the lives of a good number of fishermen each year.

"Yet the sea is always changing, no wave exactly the same as the last. Most of all, the sea fixed my sense of direction - it was there just a few miles to the east, a constant co-ordinate.

"So as I say, it is strange that I live here in Nebraska, 900 miles from the Gulf of Mexico, the closest intersection with the sea.

"There are only three general areas in the world that are further from the sea: the deep interior of Siberia and adjacent Mongolia and China; the arid heart of the Sahara Desert; and the inner Amazon Basin. By comparison with Nebraska, Alice Springs, in the center of the Australian outback, is positively coastal.

"It still bothers me, if I dwell on it, the claustrophobic feeling of land pressing in on all sides.

"Of course, early settlers, and writers ever since, have compared the Plains to the sea, with prairie schooners gliding through tall grass prairies that bent and flowed like waves. But that was tall grass prairies; genetically strengthened corn stalks don't bend and flow.

"Despite the practice of honoring people with the title of Admiral in the Nebraska navy, the last time the sea was really here was in the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago.

"I have grown to admire, and appreciate, the expansive vistas of Nebraska.

"What I have not been able to do is regain my sense of direction. I need the sea to orientate my life.

"I know, we have the grid, that remorseless squareness which shapes our lives. Even in death we are laid out according to the grid. But the grid is a human invention, and it lacks the spiritual power of environmental landmarks.

"And the greatest of all environmental landmarks, the sun, is just too abstract for me and, after all it only sets exactly in the west - right along the needle of the compass - a couple of times a year.

"I've come to the tongue-in-cheek conclusion that my best chance to regain my sense of direction is global warming, which, experts tell us, can happen very quickly.

"Then, with the ice caps melting, the sea might extend all the way back into Nebraska. Until then, I'm adrift in the middle of terra firma."