The Space Between

The double-exposure here was the odd result of an iPhone application that fuses two separate exposures to create a picture closer to what the natural eye sees.  That and seventy miles per hour.

When was the last time you considered the space between A and B?  Not the space between Wal-Mart and the nearest Chinese buffet, but the real spaces.  The space where there is space.  Where there are no people.  Where the cows graze.  In the middle of Kansas, there is an abundance, a proliferation, a bounty, a wealth, a profusion of space.  It is this fact that I sometimes forget. 

I moved to Concordia on August 5th, and haven't really left since.  While going about my daily life, it's easy to trick myself into thinking I'm in a larger place.  Compared to my old jobs, for instance, I know about seven hundred percent more people here in Concordia.  My social calendar is practically (comparatively) bursting, and that means my tank of human contact euphoria dwindles at a greatly depreciated rate.

There's also the town itself.  It's a pleasant, gently-rolling place.  Compared to central Illinois, it's practically mountainous.  The hills and the trees work as a team to blur the boundary between "town" and "country" better than any place back home, and besides, my path of travel between work, home, and the grocery store rarely takes me near the edge of town anyway.

That is, unless I travel a block past the college where the road abruptly shifts from asphalt to dirt, a sure sign of the death of civilization.  There are other times when the size of the town jolts my stomach.  Picture it:  The college I teach at is located on the south end of town on a hill that rises high enough to support three wind turbines (pronounced terbin by the natives).  The land sweeps downhill* towards the northern edge of town.  If you travel down this hill on Lincoln Street, where the trees are spaced far enough apart, this hilly vantage point affords an eye-level view of grain elevators that mark the opposite border of town.  The grain elevators, you realize, are fifteen blocks away.

When I hit that particular spot, my psyche tilts a bit.  It's strange to be jarred from my complacency about the place I call home.  But it's when I consider what is beyond the city limits that I really get uncomfortable.  In-between Concordia and the Missouri border, there are approximately five towns in two and a half hours of driving.  Five.  In Illinois I could hit five towns in a thirty-minute circuit of my dad's house.  I don't even need to dive in to the details of the Rockford area I just came from, or the suburbs of Chicago the time before that.

I thought that, when I moved here, my biggest adjustment would be the culture.  Turns out I don't "do" much culture--give me a bottle of wine and a circle of good people and I'm set.  My biggest adjustment has been the isolation.  I try to avoid thinking about it.

And was doing quite well until I got a semi-impromptu invitation to a restaurant in Salina.  It all happened Saturday night at the coffee shop / bar (because why not be both?).  I was listening to a band with the aforementioned "good people" when I revealed that I miss sushi.  And I do miss sushi.  I could probably eat it every day.  No problem!  As it turns out, there is a sushi place in Salina!  Plans were made and Monday evening I was in the back of a car headed south.

Then my throat got a tickle.  I get tickles.  I have always gotten tickles.  I distinctly remember getting a severe tickle while watching a movie during Mrs. Reilly's sixth grade class.  Blessed lady that she is, she quietly nodded me out of the classroom so I could douse my defective throat with water.   Since then, the tickles haven't gone anywhere, and I've done my fair share of thinking about them.  (I'm a bit of a hypochondriac and at one point was convinced I had throat cancer.)  The problem with these tickles is that they do not go away easily.  Usually I resort to methodically swishing water, but there I was, in the back of a car, no water.  And, because I was journeying through the vast space between A and B, there was no sign of a convenience store.  I don't believe I spotted a creek either, although I did plan for that contingency by informing my seatmate he would be in charge of holding my shoes if I had to leave pavement.

I panicked just a little bit.  If the throat tickle doesn't go away, then surely I will cough and cough and cough.  And if I cough and cough and cough, the amount of carbon dioxide I'm expelling will far exceed the rate at which I am able to take in oxygen so surely, slowly, I will suffocate.  In the back of this car.  In front of these lovely people.  How embarrassing.  Killed not by a cultish hillbilly but by a tickle, the things three-year-olds laugh at.

The tickle eventually subsided and was replaced by a barrage of the nose-runs, but the event had gotten me thinking about that open space, the sheer quantity of it.  And the idea that it encircles all of Concordia for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles.  It just keeps going.  And that's strange for me.  I'm a community person, so small towns are good for me--but only because there are welcoming people.  Take away the people and, in Kansas, you're just left with a vast, practically-treeless swath of land that rolls like the empty ocean.

Today, after I finished my last class of the day, I spent an hour writing a quiz for my Intermediate English students. Part of the quiz asks students to insert appropriate transitions--transitions for time, addition, reversing direction, spatial relationships, etc. To test them, I wrote a sample paragraph and, because I couldn't find any other inspiration, I wrote about studying abroad. Two separate points in that paragraph target better sense of culture and of self: "Another good thing about studying abroad is the exposure to culture. Every place has its own, unique culture, but it’s really difficult to know what yours is until you see how other people live!" and " Studying abroad helps you develop a strong sense of self. Never before had I been confronted with so many different choices and challenges in a place with which I was completely unfamiliar." It's true, you know. Before you see what you aren't living in, you have no way of knowing what you do live in. And that process helps ground you in what ultimately makes up the long, complicated history of "you." Apparently my long, complicated history of "me" involves a slightly higher-level of population density.

To be honest, I'm not yet entirely comfortable with the sense of isolation here. But I probably will be someday. And for now, I'll just be grateful that I have a good job doing what I love surrounded by great people--isolation or not. (I'll also be quietly thankful for the hills and the trees that blur the boundary between town and country.) Oh, and for friends who get you from point A to point sushi, across the barren, nearly-treeless (comparatively) plains of Kansas.

*I have a new friend who would object, strenuously, to the appellation "hill"