Flat Boring Lands

I lived in Florida. That was the place I ran to at twenty one when I wanted to escape Minnesota. Florida is flat, the coast is flat, sure, but it had the ocean, and the ocean is so far removed from boring that it just cannot in any shape or form fall into the category of “flat boring lands” as Minnesota does. This is all purely based on opinion, of course. It is also based on nostalgia, security, and the heart of what is home and what is not. I loved the beach, I did. When I lived in Florida, the ocean was what kept from feeling lonely and homeless. The ocean was this manifestation of something so far greater than my own being, and just being on the shore of this massive god-like impersonation kept me feeling as if I was most definitely, most infinitely not alone in the universe.

I’ve been to many places, Reader. I’ve lived here and there, and I’ve seen landscapes of all sorts. I try to figure out why Minnesota’s flatlands are so unsatisfactory, but they are. I try to figure out why it’s so empty of anything that should make me feel like I’m standing in the kingdom of God, but it is. Sometimes I feel that this is where God abandoned me, and looking out across the empty plains of long grass and hay fields and bareness is nothing but a bitter reminder that I am indeed, alone. I won’t deny that the vastness of the Minnesota sky, a horizon that stretches from one end of the earth to other, undisturbed by mountains or hills or sloping valleys, has a remarkable resemblance to the vastness, the infinite majesty and manifestation of God that the ocean had offered me so long ago. There are times I watch the sun set here behind the trees in our backyard and I think, “I know this place. I know it.” And for a brief moment of rejuvenated positivity, I feel nostalgic, secure, and home.

It’s the driving that depresses me, Reader. When I have someplace to go it takes a long time to get there. And it doesn’t matter where I go, the path is so painfully, reliably mundane and void of aesthetic scenery. It pours this vat of extinguishing serum of boringness all over my senses, and I’m sucked into watching mini-mall after mini-mall after mini-mall, all looking nearly identical, pass me by on every left and right turn I take. The same chain restaurants and stores are placed almost strategically in exactly the same places as the last town I passed through. Brand new neighborhoods with cookie-cutter houses and no trees are filling up the empty spaces between the mini-malls, and it’s surprising how lost you can get in a land that is so flat the streets are nearly grid-laid in perfect squares. You get lost because every right and left turn you make looks exactly like the last left or right turn you took. It’s not only infuriating, it’s soul sucking. For me it is, at least. There’s something lifeless about a place that is too new to have had any significant history.

Maybe this isn’t so fair to say.

Minnesota isn’t that much younger than the east, and it was founded by great people. Laura Ingles Wilder for example. But that’s just it. If you’ve ever read “Little House on the Prairie”, the hardships of locust plagues and winters that killed their livestock is enough to say, “Why the hell did you stay here!”

Flat – boring - lands. I have a love/hate relationship with them. As I said, sometimes the vastness reminds me of the ocean and I feel comforted by it. But sometimes the vastness reminds me of emptiness, a place that hasn’t survived the same evolutions and the same histories as other places in the country that I have fallen in love with. Even when I’ve been in states that I’m simply passing through, I notice that they have the elements of age that remind me of New York. I see trees, ancient and steadfast, hanging over old stone walls through a neighborhood that has hosted families dating back to the eighteenth century. There are sidewalks, broken ones with upturned squares from the roots of a defiant earth, the sort I used to skip down when my elementary school class would walk to Sugget Park. They may not be the same sidewalks, but it’s nice to know that other places have them too. But not Minnesota. I’m sure in some of the older neighborhoods they do, Reader; please don’t take me too literally. My point is, the “boring” part of the flat lands is entirely derived from the lack of character, the lack of familiar east coast architecture of homes that have survived two hundred years, the familiar stone walls that have been around long enough to suffer decay beneath the moss, the familiar beauty of hills changing from gold, to orange, to ruby red in the autumn, like a ripple of a wave that comes across the mountains from some unseen goddess. I don’t see any of these things here, and it gives me a sense of loss. Even after all these years, the environment, the architecture, the roads, the lefts and rights that seem like nothing but turns in a snow globe, break my heart and make me homesick. I think I’ll always be sick for home, for New York. Think about it, Reader: wouldn’t you? If you’re a Minnesotan, imagine having to move to New York in the middle of high school, and then finding yourself there yet again in your adulthood due to circumstances beyond your control…

Put yourself in my shoes.

This is home to you. If you had to live in New York, you’d hate it. And not because New York is a bad place, but because it’s a bad place for you. You wouldn’t fit in. It wouldn’t be home. You’d miss the things that you love about your own hometown, about Minnesota. No matter how long you live someplace else, you’d miss those flat prairies, you’d miss the water parks and the lakes, you’d miss the people that you had grown up with, the family that was always there for holidays, the church you grew up in, and everything else attached to your identity from the place you know as home. As true as it is that most people can’t wait to leave their hometown for bigger dreams and successes and new adventures, it is always, always true to say that there is no place anywhere in the world that can compare to the place that you knew yourself the best, the place in which you were most connected to your truest identity. There is, Reader, no place like home. And for those of us who’ve had to let go of it, this is to you:

Try to adapt. Don’t let go of who you are, don’t sacrifice or compromise your deepest most honest sense of self. However, change is okay. Attitude is everything. Embracing the new is vital, and bettering the environment that you’ve distasted can change everything for your soul. I am desperately trying to change my distasteful environment by hanging on to the things that matter most about it.

The sky here is beautiful. They sky, from one horizon to the next, one vast ocean of many changing lives from sun up until night fall, is my connection to the greater value of my environment. It is my connection to something that feels like home. It is, I can say, in the same category of grandness and majesty as the eastern hills and the southern ocean shore. The land may be flat and boring, but looking to the heavens isn’t such a bad alternative.