Zubican
Upstairs at the Villa Farnese in Caprarola you find the Sala di Mappamondo, with a suite of fresco maps depicting the world known to Rome in the 1570s. One wall has a particularly rash set of guesses at the geography of the Americas, and there what would become the interior of the United States is labeled as the desert of Zubican.
How could it be, long after the settler mind had conceded the value of prairie soil, that there would still seem to be some truth in this stupid lie? But yet, I go every so often back and forth across the Midwest via I‑70, in the stretch between Columbus and Denver, and bathe in the condition that most anyone sees when they say Midwest; not the Badlands, not the Ozarks, not the Driftless, but the plains. And I feel, more than I ever did around Tucson or Palm Springs, the feeling I recognize from stories of making your way through desert.
Etymologically, before a desert was something dry, it was something forsaken; just as a deserter forsakes their duty. A desert is where you are liable to be forgotten; a place from the outside but not on the inside. What seems forsaken here is the duty that seems to hang to the more irregular parts of the world, for each acre and square foot to be its own place, its own proposition. The cornfields are no more abandoned than the hills of Lazio are, but they do seem to bear a sinister suggestion that one acre is about as good as another; that there is no particular reason to be on one plot or another; that the odd hedgerow or wooded stream is a hiccup, a flicker of static.
What should be sinister about this democratic state of affairs – no less for nomadic hunters than for farming settlers? It seems to me that a flat plain seems to render everything on top of it as an instance, something that does not have a home but has been left at random, like the instances of evenly weathered stone scattered indifferently across a hamada. The base upon which any instance stands is mentally discarded; it is immaterial; it blurs into a vague color.
I visited a cemetery near here once that had never been farmed, and so still had the seed bank of the prairie. Bee balm, coneflower, and royal catchfly, mixed in with gravestones, had an odd way of not adding up to anything; you walked in, found yourself face to face with flowers, looked at their stamens, forgot where you were standing. You may as well have been in the aisle of a Meijer. As Iowan landscape architect Ken Smith put it: big, little, skip the middle.