We broke down at least three times this day. The engine in the van shuts off, the power steering follows shortly after, and we drift to the shoulder where we shudder with the passing trucks and wait for the ignition to take again. As we neared the Nebraska border the flatness of the land temporarily broke into fast courses of grassy low-lying hills and craggy sunken toothmarked rinds of earth, red orange brown and dotted in sage. A semitruck had flipped here and been abandoned to rust. The trailer, capsized on a flat stretch of desolate interstate, was covered with graffiti.
