"Can you drive stick?"

That cowboy Binion Cervi asked me this out of the blue wasn't an issue. That he posed the question after driving deep into his ranch while grabbing the reins on his horse, clearly intending that I bring the old Dodge Ram and its attached trailer back to the corral…

"It's been about 20 years, but yeah," I finally responded.

Now everyone has their own points of reference when describing awe-inspiring moments. For me, I've seen the Grand Canyon, the Eiffel Tower and Stonehenge, walked the Old Course at St. Andrews and the front stretch at Darlington, huddled inside a B-17 and listened to an old Lithuanian woman describe the sound of Stuka dive bombers--while sitting on a bullet chipped chair--and watched Penn State knock off Nebraska in a not-at-all-controversial manner (sorry). But I've rarely seen anything as exhilarating as what unfolded through the cracked windshield of that bouncing old truck.

Yeah, I was just looking at grassland, with a wind farm off to the west. If I ignored the modern intrusion, however, I was also catching a glimpse of the mythic old west, peering back to the time of trails and pioneers, cowboys and native tribes.

The sight of it caused me to miss a shift or two. Really.

It had nothing to do with the many years I've spent behind the wheel of cushy automatics with no need of a clutch pedal.

Later I emailed a few pictures to a friend in Switzerland, home of the Alps at their most majestic and ski chalets drawing tourists from all over the world. "Wow," she replied. "That's like something out of the movies!"

The exclamation point was hers.

Sometimes we forget that the appeal of cowboy country is every bit as powerful to some as that of the Swiss Alps or the avenues of Paris. Yet just the other day I spoke with a neighbor, busy packing for more urban climes because, as she put it, there's not much going on in Kimball.

Americans are probably no different than any other nationality in the "grass is always greener" department. But a sense of restless dissatisfaction is wedged deep within our collective psyche.

When James Fenimore Cooper introduced the character Natty Bumppo in The Pioneers, he also created the first purely American literary figure--rough and pragmatic, confident of his equality with others and always looking toward new lands whenever crowded or unhappy. Bumppo became reality in the cowboy.

In an odd twist, this character wound its way back into our culture, our national sense of self, through wild west shows, dime novels, Waylon and Willie and the films of John Ford.

With Cooper's creation, it was the thought of being squeezed out that convinced him to look for new woods to tame. Same with Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn: conforming and settling just isn't part of our nature, even as we conform and settle.

Maybe because we now expect fun to be packaged and presented to us, we can't seem to find it in our own neighborhoods. Maybe because so many of us live in a regimented world we tend to romanticize the past--the old west in particular.

Escape is part of our culture, I guess. But so is the stark landscape, broken only by the mythic figure on horseback--an image as powerful as anything else on earth.

As a result, some people yearn to break from its grasp, others are drawn back into it, hoping it will never change.

Obviously I fall somewhat into the latter category. The routine of Dairy Queen, The Longhorn and Sportsman's (maybe that's just me) eventually becomes a little, well, routine. But then you catch a glimpse of this area's soul, pounding down a draw on the open range, or perhaps roaring along the Lincoln Highway in the form of an old Dodge Charger.

Either way it causes people like me to leave bits of second gear scattered over the ground.