Thank God for "Flyover Country"
By Gene Lalor
Posted On June 21, 2006

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not a world traveler. I’m one of those guys who hates to travel, but when I get to wherever, I’m usually glad I went -- the “I like being-there-but-hate getting-there” type. I’m also not a big fan of flying; in fact, I was twenty-seven before I took my first flight--in a single-engine, prop job Rustcraft, flying out of Watertown, New York, escaping the rigors of Army National Guard summer camp in Camp Drum for an idyllic weekend with my new bride. Ah, youth!

I’ve also long avoided those, “If It’s Tuesday, It Must Be Belgium” tours that force one to rise at ungodly hours for ten or so hours of exhausting sightseeing, followed by a quick dinner, re-packing, and a brief rest until the wake-up call again gets one on the road again. Too much regimentation and too reminiscent of Basic Training, minus the fifty pound backpack, of course.

But I succumbed to the entreaties of the bride and recently embarked on a week-long tour of selected sites in South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and Utah.

Fear not! This will not be a travelogue nor one of those airline magazine articles that appeal to blue-haired dowagers and/or the travel-addicted who would just as soon hop on Delta for a weekend exploring the childhood haunts of Millard Fillmore as they would eat their All-Bran. I will confess now, however, that what follows is indeed a sappy, hokey encomium in praise of the glories of the greatest nation on the planet. And, if it gets a tad travelogue-y, sorry.

We departed on a dismal, rainy, ugly Saturday morning, the weather reflecting the mood of this non-morning person rising at the perverse hour of 4 A.M! (I’m told some people regularly rise before dawn. I don’t believe it but, if indeed that is factual, I really think they’re engaging in an unnatural act.) After an uneventful flight, we met our tour guide and forty-two fellow travelers at an orientation meeting in beautiful downtown Rapid City, S.D. and the next morning after a hearty Radisson buffet breakfast headed off for the Black Hills in our spiffy, new “kneeling bus,” which literally, thanks to the miracle of hydraulics, bows down to facilitate entry by the old, the infirm, and the just plain lazy.

Now, they say traveling is broadening and all that, and I guess it is, if by “broadening” they mean expanding one’s conscious awareness of the diversity of our world and nation, and the people that populate them. (Seven consecutive mornings of scrambled eggs, sausage, bacon, taters, fruit, toast, juice, and coffee followed by a few hours on a bus have a different broadening effect.) But, still, the whole trip was a great experience for this Reluctant Traveler and it led me to a new appreciation of why Americans are the most fortunate people on Earth!

We saw and learned the history of such popular tourist spots as the truly impressive Mount Rushmore, two decades in the sculpting and celebrating four of our greatest presidents. We visited Billings, Deadwood, Cody, and other Old West towns. The highlight for most of us was the truly magnificent Yellowstone National Park, with its 3,468 square miles, and spied many of its prime flora and fauna–its American bison, its deer, its brown, black and grizzly bear, its coyotes, its prairie dogs, its multitude of winged creatures--even pelicans!--its endless meadows and dense forests and some of the millions of acres devastated by fire in 1988. It was good to see the latter recovering nicely. We saw the truly pretentious Crazy Horse monument--a tribute more to its sculptor than to Native Americans-- and the North American Indian Museum. We saw the now-bucolic but truly pathetic Little Big Horn where General George Armstrong Custer’s ego, combined with poor intel, led two hundred twenty ill-trained cavalrymen to their deaths. We saw the truly impressive mountain ranges of the Black Hills, the Rockies, the Tetons–many of their peaks still snow-covered in June. And we saw the truly amazing bubbling mudpots and the seemingly-reluctant Old Faithful, just one of thousands of geysers in the Park, finally gush forth its frothy steam and boiling water. Lots of superlatives, I know, but to a poor boy originally from the South Bronx, they were truly superlative sights.

The states we had the good fortune to visit are a few of those states that our elitist- liberal friends disparagingly refer to as “flyover country,” disparaging them because they lack “sophistication,” disparaging them as well because they are on the huge side in terms of square miles though they lack huge populations, disparaging them mainly because they are for the most part conservative “red-states,” inhabited by “red-neck” Republicans. Gasp!! We were traveling with friends, (“thinking liberals” I like to call them,) and Ed turned to me and said early on after meeting a number of locals, that, “These all seem like such nice people!” I tried to be as gentle as I could when I responded, with only a hint of sarcasm, “Ed, they’re called conservatives!”

We were blessed with a pleasant tour guide and forty- two other generally affable souls, plus an initially taciturn Mormon driver, who later fessed up to having four wives--though "not at the same time," he said. Among the travelers were some “singletons,” including an aging flower child who didn’t quite get the idea of inside versus an outside voice and who proudly proclaimed that she demonstrates “all the time...even though half the time I don’t know what I’m demonstrating for or against;” a sixty-ish divorced New Yorker who dressed, and acted, as if she were sixteen; an elderly gent who had announced at the orientation that he was a retired judge, and later conceded he wasn’t a “real” judge. We also had two congenial female co-workers from Massachusetts, a true Southern gentleman and his wife who were embarrassed to admit they hailed from Arkansas, and a group of inveterate travelers from Ohio who were soon labeled “rowdies” for protesting that Devil’s Rock was not on the itinerary. All in all, a good mix of itinerants.

The single most enlightening event of the excursion was a dinner-show at The Chuck Wagon, a ranch/ entertainment-eatery in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, which I wasn’t especially anticipating. I mean, Cowboys? The meal, which they serve nightly on metal plates to five hundred people in less than nineteen minutes, was mediocre at best and the show of song, banter, and jokes was a bit too long. Still, it was the brief moment of silent prayer before dinner and the crowd’s reaction to some songs that struck me as remarkable and heartening. After the usual cowboy-songs, (Remember Roy Rogers and Gene Autry?) with little introduction the quartet launched into God Bless America. With no prompting, the entire place was on its feet, singing along, before the first three words were finished. Thunderous applause and more such patriotic songs followed and I looked around during what–to a New Yorker–was a very unusual event: People were actually cheering the United States! People were actually proudly demonstrating their unabashed love of country. In many parts of the Left Coast and the Northeast, the ACLU would have filed suit to stop such a blatant show of patriotism.

I was brought back to reality the following day as we headed for our last stop, Salt Lake City. The driver began playing the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s version of God Bless America. From the back of the bus came a loud complaint from the sixty-ish New York “teenager.” She nasally whined, “Would you lower that, please!” A few of us responded with, “Could you raise that, please!” To his credit, the driver kept the volume at the same peak level.

The point of all this is that other nations may have their Alps, their savannahs, their steppes, their pampas, their sandy beaches, their forests, and their Taj Mahals, their Eiffel Towers, their Great Walls, their monuments, their bustling, teeming cities. We, however, have it all! In poker terms, we could see their attractions and raise them a bundle! The good news is that we're a very fortunate people who live in a very special land! The bad news is that many don't appreciate what we are, who we are, and what we have, both materially and spiritually.

But there's hope for these United States, folks! Flyover country--whatever the naysayers spout-- proves it. Go West, young, old, and in-between, and stop over, don't just fly over!

Gene Lalor is a retired teaching living deep in the blue state of New York, on Long Island.

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