Iowa On the Horizon

There was this stretch of road in Iowa, somewhere along Hwy. 71, where the whole world went white.

It was one of those mid-February days that makes everyone in the Upper Midwest forget summer exists. Snow covered everything except one lane of the highway, and the sky was a light-grey overcast. There was no way to tell where the sun hid behind the clouds.

Robbie was hunched over the steering wheel in a t-shirt and a stocking hat, adjusting the car heater from foot-vents to windshield defrost every few minutes. I was in the passenger seat, a book open on my lap. I wasn't reading.

I was staring out the window at the passing scenes of farmland in the dead, white chill of winter. Fence posts lined the highway, and in their endless line they seemed to keep pace with us as we zipped along at 60, 70, 75 miles per hour. Then, at the property line of one farm, the fence posts would turn suddenly and shrink into the distance, like some pencil sketch an art teacher would use to teach children the concept "perspective." Telephone lines made this same maneuver, turning away from the road and shrinking to little "T"s in the distance. Groves of trees, oaks and pines, did the same thing. And what I noticed, in the white world out there, was that there was no horizon. The fence posts and telephone poles and trees shrank until they disappeared, but there was never a clear point where this happened. A white hill rose up behind a farm house and then, with no clear moment of transition, it was sky.

The miles and miles we drove through this white graveyard, I never saw the horizon. I thought, This is what we're heading toward.

The horizon is mysterious thing, it is something we all know but can never reach, touch, get to, or go beyond. The horizon is often used to express ideas of the future, that which lays ahead. Driving across most of the country to start a new business in a new city a few thousand miles from home, the image of the horizon felt tremendously relevant. But here in Iowa, there was no horizon, just white ground turning seamlessly into white sky. And that's just it.

The horizon is a false sense of a known future. Really, the future is a lot more like what we saw in Iowa that day: grey-white haze that hangs all around offering no certainty. We are given only a few fence posts that disappear into nothing as we whiz past, and a few hundred feet of road ahead leading onward to more white, more grey, more unknown. There is nothing more exhilarating.