Nebraska has a food that lives almost nowhere else.
I asked a man named Dale why they never took it national.
He shrugged. "Why would we."
I thought about those two words for a month.
Then I did what any reasonable man would do.
I bought twenty, packed them in a cooler with ice, and drove them across the state line myself.
Fourteen survived.
That was the first run. Now there is a route.
I keep a logbook. I have named the crossings.
I own a cooler I use for nothing else, because a courier does not carry cargo in the same box as his lunch.
The night before a run I text a man in Kansas like a smuggler.
He replies "cool see u then" and has no idea he is a checkpoint.
Last month I drove nine hours to hand one to a friend in Colorado.
I watched his face change on the first bite.
"Oh dang," he said, quietly, the way you say something you were not ready for.
I wrote the date down.
My wife asked where I keep disappearing to.
I told her I was making deliveries. She said "of what."
I said it was safer she did not know.
I am not a tourist anymore.
I am a courier for a country that does not know it exists yet.
I have missed two dentist appointments for the route.
A nation does not build itself.