Chapter 25
My youngest brother, Bertie, drove up to North Platte in his beat-up, old Ford pickup to get me at the airport. It’s hard to believe that this flat stretch of nothing highway is part of the same interstate that runs through Oakland and across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco, because while we were driving home to Ogallala I felt like I was on another planet. Barreling along in Bertie’s big, white truck past the occasional farmhouse or post office, I ordinarily embrace the part of me that feels foreign here, the part of me that “outgrew” Nebraska when I studied abroad in France and then moved to Argentina at the start of my flying career. I live in a big city now, I travel the world, I usually think to myself. These small-town people have nothing to do with me. And while it’s tru
