Freedom in the Flatlands Freedom in the Flatlands ...

The spring of my senior year in high school was the spring of psychotic Russian teachers. I had other teachers and other woes, but my calculus and ballet teachers were insane.

At ballet school, we were preparing dances for competitions the teacher wanted us to enter, while at the same time rehearsing for our spring recital, performing at local events and taking regular classes. Though many of us did not intend to become professional dancers, in my teacher's one-track mind, ballet was everything.

I was concerned with other things, among them a struggle against long odds to do well in calculus, with yet another teacher who thought their subject was everything. His family was filled with mathematicians and physicists, and he wanted us to see the beauty of all those equations. I only found reasons to tear my hair out.

I might have dealt with the two demanding Russians if their classes were the entirety of my spring load, but I was also taking five other classes and editing the school literary magazine. Then there was the matter of SATs and the college application process. Parents and friends gave me what moral and emotional support they could, but by the time the mortarboard came off, I was on the verge of melting into a puddle of hazardous waste.

I was saved from that fate by my family in Iowa. My uncle owns a sheep farm in a tiny town in a galaxy of similar farming towns in the western part of the state where my parents grew up. I am close friends with one of his daughters and had spent a relaxing week there with her the year before, watching daytime television and feasting on homegrown food. So, with my parents' blessing, I packed my grungiest clothes and left for a summer in Iowa.

This time, I wanted to earn my keep. My mother's friend from high school owned a bakery, and she was willing to take me on as a cashier, which suited me. The store was "in town," ten miles away, and my uncle, who worked as a lawyer to supplement the farm income, drove me in every morning. It was an informal community meeting place. A group of old-timers had coffee and danishes on the benches outside every morning, and most women dropped in to gossip, exchange invitations and just generally to see what everyone else was up to.

During my second week there, I picked up the weekly newspaper and found that my work at the bakery was an item of local interest. I was right below the news that the Millers dined with the Uhls on the previous Friday evening. I had no idea that anyone even noticed me?and most people didn't care anything about my background beyond who my parents were. It was a welcome change from the endless competition and sniping that went on at high school and dance, and it was a chance to be someone other than the valedictorian, the magazine editor, the responsible group leader. The oblivion was sheer bliss.

Ours was a small but demanding clientele, and the bread was made by hand. Most were sweet breads and heavy German loaves, far from the healthy, odd-grain types found in city coffee shops. The cashier work wasn't taking up too much of my time, so I asked to learn to bake.

It was a perfect job for relieving stress. Kneading dough gets at every pressure point in the hands. Since I knew nothing about baking bread at the outset, I had my share of flops, but the mindless, rhythmic work eased the stress out of my brain and body. I forgot every calculus equation and developed muscles in my shoulders that would have appalled my dance teacher. I even stopped caring about my SAT scores and college rejections. It was hell around the ovens in the afternoon heat, but when I returned to the farm at night, coated in flour, I was rejuvenated.

On the weekends and off days, I worked on the farm with my cousin, gathering eggs and picking vegetables for the night's dinner. We also trained sheep for the county fair, walking along the highway with them harnessed like fluffy, truculent ponies. When we wanted to get her parents to let us do something, like drive thirty miles to the movie theater, we scraped the fence to get it ready for painting or washed the car inside and out or weeded the flowerbeds. If bored, we donned our old bathing suits and headed to the creek where we splashed around for hours, soothing our mosquito-bitten skin in the cold water, sliding down the spillway from the pond, skipping rocks, salvaging junk that had lain there forever.

The most excitement that summer was a family trip to a threshing bee, where men took turns pitching hay into the thresher while others looked on for a while before drifting away to peruse the handicrafts and vintage cars for sale, cooling their throats with ice cream made on the spot in a machine in someone's truck bed.

It's possible that I would have been fine had I just taken a deep breath and stayed home after my high school graduation, maybe escaping into a few good novels and then getting back on my feet. I'm glad I didn't try it, though. Going to Iowa and immersing myself in the monotonous cornfields and herds of sheep, in the warm smell of yeast and soft sound of easy chatter, it all reminded me that, no matter what my dance teacher or calculus teacher thought, there is a world out there, and it was still possible to get lost in it.