The Hatman by Rebecca Lee Wesson.

South of Julesburg is a stretch of vacant and unspoiled American frontier.

Unique to this place is the way it subtly displays the untapped potential we so often read

about in the journals of the pioneers who crossed it.

There are no bright flowers chirping insects or gentle rains, flagrantly boasting these

promises.

There are no great rivers or snow-capped mountains in the distance to serve as a finish line.

Instead, one gets the distinct impression that underneath the deceiving layer of melancholic

emptiness, draped across its unremarkable terrain, is an indescribable richness.

This hand is remiss in attempting to describe it with words, knowing that a proper explanation

could only ever be accomplished by a skilled paintbrush or Eldritch Birdsong.

There is something innately mysterious and wonderful about it all, and in this terrain,

permanently washed by diluted blues and grays, no matter the season or position of the sun in the sky, we know deeply in our hearts that the land has a voice and we desperately beg of it to tell us the

thousands of colorful stories it hides just under the surface. Signed, Claude Eugene Shaw, 1940.

My teacher made me stand up and read that article for smarting off, and I humiliated myself in front of the rest of the sixth grade, trying to say words like Eldridge and melancholic.

I had no idea what it meant, but I liked the photograph that it came with.

It wasn't anything remarkable, just a dead tree looking out over the low rolling hills

of open land as big and wide as the eye could see.

But there was something special about it to me.

It felt familiar.

It felt like I had belonged there all this time and only by some divine accident ended up in the

dumpy little town of Price, Missouri.

...