Driving Iowa

Lance drives across Iowa at the end of July. Laura, his friend, sits in the passenger seat beside him. She waxes rhapsodically about the lush green countryside filled with corn and bean fields and prosaic farm houses and barns.

“Isn’t it marvelous going through God’s country and seeing what he has created for our enjoyment,” she says.

Lance feels her words like fingernails scraping along blackboard.

He wants to tell her this was all prairie before the white man came and made farm country from it.

Fires periodically burnt wildly through the tall prairie grass and burnt all the sapling trees except those whose good fortune it was to inhabit a moist river bank which periodically flooded. He wants to mention the buffalo that no longer roam here.

He bites his tongue. He’s insensitive, but he is not gratuitous.

Lance has grown tired of well educated people such as Laura who blindly say anything about God and his ways. They blaspheme and they are too ignorant to understand that is exactly what they are doing.

Lance thinks about the vast amount of incoherent and inconsistent gibberish that Laura has spoken about God the past couple of years.

Lance drives without saying a word to Laura. He wonders if the real argument against the existence of God is the large number of people walking the face of the earth who say stupid shit about Him.