Big Springs Nebraska is the last place I want to stop. I know you like it. It's full of rock-star-truck-drivers that never turn their engines off. Rows and rows. You have to take stock, count lamp posts, to find your truck coming back from inside. The restaurant is Okay somedays. Other days the kids that wait know they are doing us a favor.

Here's the places we've stopped that I like: Rest areas, mile marker 195, 230, 315. Nebraaska has sprawling rest areas with odd big-block, pubic art. We've pulled into Fort Robinson, Tip and I suprised the antelope along the river. Ogallala, where we yelled about Garret Whatley's funeral, standing in the parking lot. There's a couple, I don't remember the towns, old 76s remodeled into old TAs, where the mechanics work as long as they can and then they shut down the shop until morning. We've stood in the wagon ruts at the state park with the sod houses. You and I have climbed hills in Nebraska that made us puff by the top.

I say we can make it to Odessa. You say probably not. Probably there won't be parking. I say let's try. You don't say anything.

Nebraska. It's the ground floor where the North Platte flows shallow right on top of a washed gravel bed. Walking across a field into a grove of cotton woods, my knees buckle at the sudden drumming of twenty pair of thick wings: wild turkeys. One sunset, I slow the truck, no lights ahead or behind on the whole interstate, so we can crawl past fifty Sandhill Cranes, gawky as ostrich, scarlet red caps. There really is a home extension woman on the public radio talking about tapioca. Sunrise deer bounce over round hay bales lined in a field as if it is a gym set up specifically for their entertainment.

We make it to Odessa, the Sapp Brothers, Red Neon, a coffee pot sign. Turning in, across the road is a series of ponds with picnic tables where Tip and I can nose. When you turn the truck off, miracle of miracles, not one other truck is idling. Nebraska fills up the space. Odessa, it's the kind of place where the buffet only has two choices, meat loaf and friend chicken and the neighbors come in to eat because there's homemade pie for desert.