Karrooo

Abstract

Karrooo Alex Mindt (bio) [Begin Page 39] I'm heading west on I-80 with my two teenagers, Paul and Allison. We've been in the car for almost six hours now, and we've settled into our own remote worlds—Allison with her Walkman, me with the radio, and Paul still playing that computer game in the back seat. Occasionally he blurts out, "Come on," or "Oh no," his thumbs smacking at the little plastic keys. Paul is a thirteen-year-old with blotchy skin and an extra thirty pounds that started accumulating when his father got an apartment in the city last year. He can't seem to bring a positive thought to completion. He may start with the sun shining in a bright blue [End Page 39] sky, but somehow he works his way down into a mosquito-ridden mud puddle. "Yeah, Trevor invited me to his party, but it's only because you're friends with his mom." That sort of thing. Allison, my too-good-to-be-true sixteen-year-old, is listening to Henry IV Part I on her Walkman. She says she's in love with Prince Hal. With every new play, she hurls herself into the great sea of passion for some impossibly heroic, romantic character who (she'll realize soon enough) will never exist on this planet. The Platte River moves lazily under us as we cross a bridge in the fading evening sun. The river doesn't care about where it's heading or when it gets there. Like the people of this state, the Platte is not against meandering and low expectations. That's why I escaped, I suppose. I was focused and ambitious, which of course led to a whole host of other problems. [End Page 40] I left Grand Island at seventeen with my National Merit Scholarship to attend Grinnell, before interning in D.C. for Senator Harkin and partying with so-called important people—policy makers, bribe-takers, martini shakers, in that order, and me, all twenty-two ambitious years of me. I didn't know then that I'd end up a frustrated nonprofit administrator unsuccessfully married to a college professor with whom I'd have two kids who sometimes call me by my first name. On the other side of the Platte, railroad tracks scoot under the freeway and wind along the riverside. I think of my father, who traveled along those tracks for almost forty years, all the time wishing he could be in the sky. When he was nineteen, he joined the Air Force, but his vision wasn't good enough to fly, so they stuck him in Sacramento for two years, running a maintenance shop. From there, he moved back home and got a job on the Burlington-Northern. He once told me that he spent all of his down time leaning out of the train, looking up at the sky and the hawks and eagles circling above. The idea of flight fascinated him. Walking on the wind, he called it. Before long he became an avid bird watcher, joining the Audubon Society, heading out on his days off with his friends Bernie and Len. I remember him once waking me in the middle of the night. "Linda, dear," he said, standing over me. It was the day after Thanksgiving, and he'd just received a phone call from someone at the North American Rare Bird Hotline. A yellow grosbeak had been spotted feeding at a corn silo outside Ottumwa. "I don't want to go, Daddy," I said. "Take Len." "He can't make it," he whispered. "Listen, this is extraordinary, honey. The yellow grosbeak is a tropical bird. It never makes it north of Houston, for God's sake." "Daddy," I said, "I'm tired." He was a dark blob, his large body silhouetted by the dim hall light. "I just didn't want you to miss something like this." He backed up and stopped at the door. "I'm sorry I woke you," he said before turning and heading out to central Iowa for what was to become one of the great bird outings of his life. He...