Into The West

Friday February 15th, US Airways Flight 510

Omaha used to the The West. Covered wagons, immigrant groups and groups of the Plains tribes all moved through, clashed, gave way, settled or moved on. Omaha, on the banks of the Missouri River, just west of Iowa, once was a major supply stop for migrants heading west, a place to stock up, rest the animals and then gather up courage as well as belongings for the journey ahead. We Americans have a legacy of going west, a vestigial curiosity bug, a desire to see what’s over the next hill or the next mountain range. Today I’m flying east- into what we used to called The West. Over there. Out there in wild country, uncharted territory and the great beyond. Funny how with time definitions change, ideas shift and frontiers re-position themselves.

There’s nothing like a plane ride to give you perspective. My dad (an engineer, maybe that explains it) always flies with a map, so he can trace the journey and anticipate landmarks. Myself, I just like to look out the window and let the view from 35,000 feet tell its own story.

Taking off from Sacramento, we overtake Lake Tahoe and the snowy Sierra Nevada, later on, the Grand Canyon, badlands, black canyons, the Mogollon Rim, and when you’re out of the Four Corners everything goes flat. A patchwork quilt of smooth farmland begins, alternating shades of grey and terracotta. Shadows of a grey cloud bank skulk to the north. We are now east of the un-farmable deserts and the parcels of private property begin, units of ownership, circles within squares within rectangles of straight roads, the rotary irrigation systems carving out pie charts on the landscape of America.

Interesting that most of this hardscape didn’t exist 100 years ago. There was a time when Omaha was the western edge of all that US society then called familiar. Now, even business leaders like Warren Buffett are looking east- and west- over great distances, as the world changes and as the frontiers, of countries and of ideas, start to redefine themselves.