Central Nebraska.  Corn and tractors.  Tractors and corn.  At Homestead National Park, hopefulness and despair were on full display.  The settlers who came by the thousands to homestead persisted out of stubborn hope for a better life.  They came with almost nothing and built a life out of hostile soil.  Cutting sod for houses.  Using plows pulled by their children to plant crops that would struggle to grow.  Hope writ large.  The promise of land ownership and freedom. The real possibility of failure and heartache.

At the same time settlers were arriving with unbridled hope, the dozens of Indian tribes were feeling acute despair.  Treaties were broken.  Strangers told them they could no longer access land they had lived on forever.  Children were removed from their homes and “re-cultured”.  A way of life, wiped from the earth. There is sadness in the land.  I can feel it where my feet touch the tall grass prairie.  I hear it in the song of the wild turkey.

Progress.  That is what they called the dozens of railyards and cattle yards that dot the prairie.  Never mind that they are noisy and smelly.  The Lincoln highway, the first motor way to cross the country, brought a new era of pioneers west.  In their touring cars, travelers headed for adventure.  The RV is grateful that it is now a paved highway instead of the dirt track of yesterday.  Progress.

I stand at the intersection of past and present.  Hope for a new life and despair at the loss of a people.  I stand and know that I am both old and new.  My ancestors came from England and Ireland in hope of a better life.  They dug in the dirt and the mines and clawed their way forward to own land of their own and make sure that their children could have an education.  My life is something they could only dream of.  And yet, I also come from the people abandoned. Like a mist on a cold morning or a whisper in the wind, my Cherokee heritage makes itself known only occasionally.  The stirring of my soul in the forest, the oneness with the earth that can’t be severed. Lost, but oddly remembered.

And so, I drive through miles of corn fields with tractors and irrigation systems in my fancy RV.  I watch the sky and the river, where the hawks soar and call to me.  I am a stranger here.  I am at home.