How It Will All End

July 30, 2007

Filed in: Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, North Dakota

So here’s the plan: Kansas. Alaska. Hawaii. The extreme ends and the smack middle of these our United States.

(Somewhere a little northwest of Lebanon, KS is the geographic center of the lower 48 states. The geographic center of all 50 United States is outside of Castle Rock, SD but I’ve already been to South Dakota. So in what can especially these days be described as the true American way, I’m ignoring cold hard fact in favor of something a little softer that better fits my purposes. For more on this, see S. Colbert on Truthiness, a concept I personally believe will be studied in school by our children’s children.)

And because the 50th State project isn’t about travel (not everybody is burning to go to Kansas, even though I am, and pretty much every syllable that needs to be written about travel to HI and AK has already been written and in a manner far abler than I could muster), here’s the meta-plan:

1) travel to eco-threatened Alaska with wacky, sitcom-ready family (nature-loving proto-hippie grade-schooler; grouchy, gorgeous, techno-addicted teenager; discomfort-averse, obscure-literature-quoting, Jesuit-educated, wine-swilling husband).

2) travel to Hawaii, a place in which neither of us has ever really had much interest, with aforementioned lit-king husband, sans children. Sort of what my now-European friend calls a “dirty weekend,” only flipped on its head (please please no puns intended) by my endemic New Englandness, which views any kind of year-round natural beauty and luxury-level hotel pricing (not to mention “dirty” and “weekend") as blasphemous and bad for your skin, and T’s homegrown polite Midwest skepticism, which manifests itself in public primarily as “hmm” or “huh” depending on the level of transgression, only to bust out full on into “How could they?” or “How dare they?” or “Please. Spare me.” in Pinot-fueled privacy.

3) Kansas. Alone. ‘Nuff said. Did you know Kansas will turn 150 the same year—2011—that I turn 50? We’re destined to be together, me and Kansas, I can just tell. Remember sweet Dorothy’s observation: Kansas, she says, is the name of the star.

But, you think. But. But what about North Dakota? North Dakota! Why, I’m glad you asked . . .