In my teens I read Of Mice and Men, which led me to Grapes of Wrath and Cannery Row. It was in Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, though, that the seed of my interest in America took root. Some thirty years later that compulsion has matured. Now, I intend to venture onto the American byways crossing Nebraska, into its communities and into conversational engagement with its people, my statewide neighbors.