The Sandhills: Pedaling a Sea of Hills
By: Guac Magazine Editors
Tags: Nebraska, Great Plains, Bicycling, Sandhills, Roadtrip

By Ari Dubow

In a gas station in Bartlett, Nebraska, I bought a grilled cheese sandwich, hot from the warming oven and wrapped in flaccid aluminum foil. After five weeks on the road, I managed to quit hesitating with food like this. Someone asked me what I was doing, and I said I was biking across the continent, that I had enjoyed Nebraska so far, and was feeling good because I was about halfway done. I was deep into the Great Plains, and the feeling of middle-ness was freeing.

“Bartlett’s halfway between a lot of stuff,” the man said. Isn’t everything? An odd truism to deploy at that moment.

“I’d even say it’s halfway between everything!” his wife said.

And there it was: a truism becoming a world view.

Photo credits to unsplash.com and Instagram: @mforsbergphoto

I was in the Sandhills, a region of northern Nebraska, and I’d be remiss if I tried to describe the area in any way other than this: it was a sea of hills. That was the phrase fixed in my mind as I pedaled across, and it’s the phrase that still felt most true. The hills were so fluid, so graceful, that you’d almost expect one to crest in white foam and tumble down over itself. The grasses were dense and green from the spring rains, so thickly packed that it only took a few feet of distance for the individual blades to mesh in an astro-turf looking mat.

It was the first really hot day of the year, and the ground felt steamy. The birds and insects in the Sandhills made a sheet of glistening, penetrating sounds. Every store, every motel, every church, had Sandhill in the name: the Sandhill Diner, Welcome to the Sandhills Motel, Sandhill Elementary, Sandhill Church of Christ.

I turned out of the gas station and bicycled east, rolling down a hill while eating my grilled cheese. By the time I was at the bottom, I had finished my grilled cheese and turned upward. Most people try to use their momentum going downhill to help them get uphill, cranking and cranking and shifting gears diligently so as to avoid lost energy. But halfway across the continent, I stopped doing this. Biking long distances exhausted me mentally far more than it did physically, and the franticness of up-hill strategy involved more mental effort than I cared to expend. So I just relaxed into the incline.

I heard a pick-up truck behind me slowing down — I learned to identify the size and type of vehicle by the sound it made behind me, a skill which came in handy — and then there it was just on my left. The window rolled down, and I saw the man I spoke to in the gas station with his wife in the passenger seat. She leaned out and handed me a bundle of dollar bills.

“Treat yourself to a nice dinner tonight,” she said. I smiled enormously, thanked them profusely, said I would get two burgers tonight, not just one, and they said God Bless, and I said the same.

At the top of the hill, I turned right. In this part of the country, turns were a much-anticipated event. I’d been waiting to make this right turn for around 3 days. Turns never failed to feel like the ending of an old era and the beginning of a new one. Goodbye, US highway 281, and hello NE 70!

And NE 70 was a particularly interesting one because from the map, it appeared to function as a sort of corridor between major roads and towns, which meant it was quiet. Something about a corridor was intriguing to me — it evoked a hidden reality and backdoor into something.

The asphalt was new, deeply black, and — perhaps an illusion from the glistening of the road combined with the extraordinary wet heat — felt soft. I pedaled, with a feeling a refreshment from the change of scene and a feeling of comfort from the grilled cheese slowly digesting.

Bicycling across the continent felt slow, though not slow in time, not simply slow in miles per hour. It felt slow because there were so few stimuli, not much really happened, and I realized, somewhere in the Sandhills, that often what we think of as “speed” is just a misconstrued distraction.

I heard a thundering behind me that definitely wasn’t a car. It was a massive, beastly horse, galloping alongside me, snorting, kicking its legs out from behind itself. I stopped, and it stopped with me, and we stared at each other for a little while. I started pedaling again, and he ran with me once again. He seemed angry, but playful. It felt like we were playing a game. I went faster and faster, using my the straps on my pedals to pull up with one leg while the other leg pushed down, and the horse galloped, looking forward, and then to his left at me and then back. Birds and insects called out in a chorus that had the emotional register of a mass-protest. The road dipped into a small valley while the embankment on which the horse ran turned upward. He stood on top of a small peak looking down at me while I rolled away.

I kept pedaling for some amount of time, which was always hard to tell when biking 100 miles in a day, looking left, looking right, looking straight. Thinking, remembering, observing, planning — ruminating. The sun was bright, the green hills both absorbing and reflecting that light at powerful levels. Street signs cropped up at unexpected locations, reading 512th avenue, or 970th street. They felt sarcastic.

I turned onto 630th avenue because I was hungry, and I had a few thousand calories of Planters peanuts in one of my bike bags. I liked to get off the main road sometimes, so I went to a mansard-roofed barn of grey wood. I didn’t want to land a nail in a tire, so I leaned my bike against a tree, took out my jar of peanuts, and with wobbly legs, went to the barn.

In the barn, I called out to confirm I was alone. I whistled, said “hey! hey!” No one responded but some sparrows nesting by a window. In the back of the main area was a red sofa, made of material hardly softer than burlap. I sat down and munched on peanuts. The sun came in through the main entrance like an overexposed photograph. Above the opening, beside which two massive wood sliding doors clung to the wall, a sign as tall as I hung. Painted in deeply saturated acrylic paints, mostly green, blue, and yellow, was a landscape of the sea of hills, with a straw-hatted farmer in the foreground. It read:

“The Sandhills: God Country.”