The Beauty of the Midwest

The beautiful backroads of America.

I was born in Texas. Throughout my childhood, I primarily lived in the Midwest. There were stops in Missouri, Wisconsin, and North Dakota before we eventually settled in south-central Nebraska. My father’s family had lived in that region for generations, and once he retired from the Air Force, we moved there as well.

In that time, I got to experience a little bit of everything. There was the Texas heat. There were the frigid North Dakota winters. And when it wasn’t snowing in North Dakota, there were approximately seventeen billion mosquitoes waiting outside the door each morning, eager to remind you that nature always finds a way.

Then there was rural Nebraska. I remember being in Las Vegas once when someone asked where I was from. When I said Nebraska, they paused and asked, “Oh, do you guys have electricity?” Mind you, this was sometime in the 2000s, not 1920. I replied, “We sure don’t. We wake up at five every morning to pump water before heading off to school. We also carry a gun because you never know what trouble you’ll find on the way there.” The person nodded thoughtfully, as if I might be telling the truth.

Years later, while I worked for the State of Nebraska, the tourism department launched a new slogan: “Nebraska. Honestly, it’s not for everyone.” I loved it immediately.

The following summer, during a road trip from Washington, D.C., to Buffalo, I found myself repeating the slogan every time someone asked where I was from. I probably did more volunteer marketing for Nebraska than the state ever got from its advertising budget.

The truth is that there are things about the Midwest that people who didn’t grow up here will never quite understand.

One of them is distance. On the coasts, a thirty-minute drive can still leave you in the same city. In much of the Midwest, thirty minutes means you’re heading somewhere else entirely. Towns are spread apart, connected by long stretches of highway that roll across farmland and prairie. Depending on the season, there is always something different to see. In summer, endless fields stretch toward the horizon. In winter, snow transforms the landscape into something almost minimalist. At night, the stars put on a show that city dwellers pay good money to see in a planetarium.

Then there are the towns themselves. In a small Midwestern town, everybody knows everybody, or at least knows somebody who knows everybody. If you decided to cut off all your hair and dye it purple, the entire town would hear about it before the dye had finished setting. That kind of familiarity can occasionally be annoying. It can also be comforting. In an era when many Americans barely know their neighbors, there is something reassuring about living in a place where people still recognize one another.

There are also the creeks. Almost every Midwesterner knows of at least one hidden spot where they can spend an entire afternoon sitting by the water with a cooler, a lawn chair, and nowhere else to be. These locations are guarded with remarkable secrecy. The coordinates are rarely shared and are generally passed down through families with all the caution of a state secret.

And then there is the prairie. People who have never spent time in prairie country sometimes struggle to understand its appeal. They look out and see emptiness. I look out and see space. There is a quiet beauty in a landscape that has not been crowded by billboards, developments, and endless construction projects. The prairie has a way of making you feel small, but in a comforting way. It reminds you that the world existed long before you arrived and will hopefully continue long after you’re gone.

That beauty is one reason I worry about the future of places like these. Not because change is inherently bad. Every generation leaves its mark on the landscape. But increasingly, many places in America are starting to look the same. The same chain restaurants. The same stores. The same highway exits. The same developments.

Part of what makes the Midwest special is that it still feels distinct. You can still drive for miles and see open land. You can still find small towns with their own character. You can still stumble upon stretches of prairie that look much the same as they did decades ago. I hope we don’t lose that.

Every time I drive across the Midwest, I’m reminded of how fortunate I was to grow up here. The region may not have mountains, oceans, or world-famous landmarks. It may not even have electricity, depending on who you ask. But it has something increasingly rare: room to breathe.

And I hope future generations get the chance to experience that same feeling as they drive down a long Midwestern highway, watching the sun set over a landscape that still feels wild, open, and uniquely its own.