Road Trips
By Jane Holwerda
Hello! I’m Jane Holwerda in Dodge City KS for Radio Readers Summer 2026 Read, a series wherein we seize the opportunity to go on a bit about which ever books we’d like to recommend.
I’ve just finished a collection of essays, titled Out Here in the Out There. Authored by Phillip Heldrich, a Midwesterner, growing up outside Chicago, later teaching for universities of eastern Kansas, his essays spin not through argument but towards epiphany. Heldrich notes the incredulity of family and friends at his choosing to live “out there” in Emporia, a place they believe bereft of urban commerce and cuisine.
In response, Heldrich describes being in the out-there, where, he writes “the prairie…brings you closer to the very pulse of the universe,” where the stars of a night are “too many to count” and the calls of crickets, wolf, and mosquito make for a resonant chorus. Heldrich contrasts this organic “out-there” with another, the one filling with what he calls the signs of prosperity, the neon lights of McDonalds, Golden Corral, Holiday Inn, Applebees and Walmart lining our highways, byways and Main Streets.InvokingEmerson, Thoreau, Cather, Stafford and Heat-Moon, Heldrich situates himself within an American literary tradition, the one that romanticizes and eulogizes the natural world.
Heldrich is not without humor-– in other essays, as a keynote for the Vista of Words conference, he can’t find parking due to a Sooners-Huskers play-off: don’t they know who he is, he wonders? In another, his in-laws aid his quest for the best green burrito available, as he calculates the percentage of thousands of eateries listed in San Diego’s directory he might have time to sample.For this, I can almost forgive and forget that for him the Flint Hills form the western boundary of Kansas.
Meanwhile, I’ve been making my way also through Brian Watson’s Headed into the Abyss: The Story of Our Time and the Future We’ll Face. Likely not for the lighthearted, Watson’s arguments are provocative if best taken in short doses, like to assuage being miffed by one’s geographic region being overlooked.
Watson’s chapter on transportation is where I slogged back in. He notes little is done to reduce congestion and delays on roadways, even in heavily populated areas. Our frustrations with gridlock are eased by our vehicles: enclosed in relative privacy with temperature control, comfortable seating, access to full social media and internet connectivity. This comfort makes us less likely to demand alternatives, like efficient public transportation.
Further, our vehicles’ sensors, radar and cameras, technologies that enable vehicles to brake and accelerate on their own, allow us to make use of screen time options.And as our reliance on navigation systems extends, we no longer need to look out to see where we are or where we are going.
And—yes, folks, I know, it’s a bit of a slippery slope here— eventually we will have become so attuned to various screen-time options, we will have no interest nor investment in the “out there” – whether city scape or landscape, prairie or plains, coast or forest. Not caring, we might no longer believe we need it.
Phillip Heldrich invites us to “Rejoice in this evanescent luminescence” of the great “out there.” It’s all around us. All we have to do is look.
After 21 years at Dodge City Community College, Dr. Jane Holwerda retired a couple of years ago and has since been reading her way through a home full of books she’s always meant to get to.Recently joined by two new felines – joebiden and Pelosi – Jane has recently learned that joe actually fetches. In addition to her academic career, Holwerda has shared her passion for reading with Radio Readers Book Club having served as a Book Leader in the inaugural 2016 Spring Read. A native of Lindsborg, Kan., Jane holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from Marymount College in Kansas, a Master of Arts in English, with high honors and a doctorate in American Studies with distinction both from Saint Louis University.
