Cindy Lange-Kubick: Sandhills journey marks end of summer

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I mark the time by towns.

The minutes between Hyannis and Whitman and Mullen and Seneca. Brick and mortar landmarks that slow the sea of green enveloping this concrete ribbon in the middle of America.

That first summer, the young man now in my passenger seat wasn’t yet born. He rode down Highway 2 in my belly, his brother and sister strapped into the back seat of our old hippie van, the one I slept in on summer trips to California with my husband-to-be back when I was ...

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The Nebraska sandhills at 70 mph. (Cindy Lange-Kubick)

When I was 18? When I was 19?

Too young, that’s all I know, a younger version of the college kid on the seat beside me now, sleeping as we roll through the Sandhills at 70 mph.

I watch towns blink past. A post office. A gas station. A crumbling cafe.

I see the tourism signs proclaiming something I already know: Sandhills Journey Officially Scenic.

The road stretches empty before me. It seems the secret is safe.

It’s been 20 summers since we first made this trip across the state to a cabin in South Dakota, where the air is cool and dry and the pines wash their scent over the hills.

We don’t drive the hippie van anymore, although we have it, stored in a detached garage on a suburban street. A museum on wheels, its shag carpeting and built-in icebox a curiosity to the neighbor kids.

When our own kids were small we’d pile the suitcases behind the back seat and hoist the crib mattress on top, making a bed where a child could nap and read and daydream out the back windows on their way west.

My youngest son hasn’t missed a year of fishing with his uncle and hiking with his dad and playing cards with his grandma.

But this summer, his sister and brother didn’t make the trip. They’re nearly grown-up, working and busy.

And some summers the two of us, my baby and me, head back early, the way we did this summer, racing the miles east, out of pine-covered hills, to this rolling geological treasure, so unlike the flat cornfields of our corner of the state.

The Sandhills. A mixed-grass prairie, an eco-region, something studied by scientists and revered by environmentalists and loved by its people, few though they are.

It is a land of ranches and cowboys, of coal trains and windmills.

Oh, and turtles.

One year we dodged box turtles as they crossed the old highway on their way to what little water they could find.

A little boy stared out the window.

He’d had a turtle. Snappy. A box turtle, too, that wandered from our backyard on a sunny day and disappeared.

Maybe Snappy had headed west. Maybe we could bring Snappy home.

The boy stopped looking, older and wiser each July, but every summer I still think of Snappy, hoping he had found his way.

Knowing he didn’t.

I’ve seen pictures of the Sandhills from space. The earth seems to fold up and over itself, puckering like an old seersucker dress.

Many of the sand dunes are covered by grasses now, all these millions of years after the earth began to swell under this Honda I’m driving, finger leaving the wheel to wave to the occasional pickup.

It started with water, an ancient ocean, and then the seas pushed back, leaving behind streams and wind and the ashy rain of far-off volcanoes and finally this.

n  n  n

Once our car leaves the interstate, two hours and a McDonald’s breakfast from home, I can start to feel its pull. I scan the horizon, waiting for the ground to change and begin to rise up beside me, a cocoon of earth and sky.

It feels solid out here, lonesome and eternal, 200 miles of meditation on slowing down a life.

Yet every summer just rolls around faster than the one before and we find ourselves on this road coming, then going, first the pine trees and buffalo, then these grass-covered dunes eventually disappearing in our rearview mirror.

Another vacation over for another year.

When we cleaned out the garage a few weeks back, we found the old crib mattress, held together with duct tape, covered with grime and the spooled white eggs of dark-dwelling spiders.

The garbage man took it away.

The boy who slept through the Sandhills started another year of college. No matter what the calendar says, summer is over.

And through the long Nebraska winter, out west the Sandhills wait.

Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick at 473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com.