In the Middle of Somewhere

Where are you?

Two friends texted, separately, within an hour of each other.

Western Nebraska, I said.

So you're in the middle of nowhere, both of them wrote back.

I really paused.

I had flown into Denver and taken a nine-seater plane to Alliance: a tiny plane, a tiny airport, a tiny place. And just before the texts came in, I had been looking at the Atlas Obscura map and counted eight other places within a ninety-minute drive that I wanted to go to. I was bummed that I didn't have time to stay.

So I texted my friends back: No, I'm in the middle of somewhere.

One week later I was in the northwest corner of Alabama, where the Tennessee River bends, and I told that story to my Atlas Obscura colleagues on the first morning of our company offsite in Florence. Most of them had never been to Alabama before.

We had built the trip around a corner of the state most travelers don't have on their default map. Helen Keller's birthplace at Ivy Green in Tuscumbia. FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, where Aretha Franklin recorded "I Never Loved a Man" in a single day in 1967. Lunch under a literal rock overhang at the Rattlesnake Saloon. And after dark, in the rain, Dismals Canyon — one of the few places on earth where you can see Dismalites, the bioluminescent larvae that turn cave walls into a green-starred sky. Almost every place on the itinerary was already on the AO map.

What happened is hard to put into a recap, so I'll skip the recap. What I want to tell you is what kept happening around the places.

At Ivy Green, our guide Keller Johnson-Thompson — Helen Keller's great-grand-niece — talked about Helen for thirty straight minutes, and Alecia Dalessio told me afterward she could have listened for another thirty. Dan Sobo bought bookmarks for his daughters with a Helen Keller quote printed on them — the best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart — and quoted the line back to all of us the next morning, on a long bus ride, with no apparent self-consciousness.

At Dismals Canyon, our guide Kevin Cheek — Dismals Canyon's chief operating officer — led us through the woods in total darkness, to a slot in the rock so narrow we squeezed through one at a time, holding hands. Above us, the glowworms hung like a green galaxy. Before we entered, Kevin asked the fairies for permission. I'm not sure if he was joking. I don't think it matters.

Jacquelyn Blackwell is from Florence. She has been there a hundred times. She saw her own town through fourteen pairs of new eyes and discovered things she'd never done before. Holyn Thigpen called her parents from the airport on the way home and told them everything. Her parents are now planning the same itinerary. Sam O'Brien started thinking out loud about her own quest. Daniel McDermon left, in his words, "almost giddy." Sara Ewell pointed out that the conversations we had on the buses and over slow lunches couldn't have happened on Zoom — and probably wouldn't have happened at all.

Rachel Carson, in her 1965 book, The Sense of Wonder , argued that children meet the world with a freshness adults train themselves out of, and that the way to recover it is to find a companion. Not a teacher. A companion — someone who hasn't lost the habit of asking what's that? The companion, she said, only needs to keep asking.

That's what we do at Atlas Obscura. That's what Kevin did with us at Dismals Canyon. That's what Keller did. That's what Jacquelyn did for all of us in her own hometown. And that is what kept happening on the bus rides, where someone who had stood next to you ten minutes ago at a glowworm cave was now telling you a story about their own family. An infectious passion for wonder.

Two friends told me, separately, that I was in the middle of nowhere. They were operating on the ordinary map. We reject the ordinary map. There is no middle of nowhere — there is only the middle of somewhere. If you think otherwise, you just need to put on your wonder lens. The 50-state quest is, at its heart, an argument for using that lens. So is the Atlas Obscura map. So was Florence, Alabama, last week, with fourteen people who had never been there.

Forty-six states down. Four to go. Idaho, Iowa, Washington, Alaska.

• Louise

The full Carhenge dispatch from Nebraska is coming in my next post. Sign up for our daily newsletter here to be sure you don't miss it.