The West has this love affair with big skies - I think it has to do with land that is kind of uninteresting vs. a sky that is massively interesting. In the mid-west you have these flowing fields of crops ("amber waves of grain") and in the West Coast you have the ocean. Even the Rockies and Sierra Nevadas break up the vastness of the sky.
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But in parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, and the Great Basin you have a relatively bleak landscape, deathly quiet and this HUGE sky. It is quite romantic.
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And I wonder if it is romantic for a reason - or simply because - well, the human mind craves a little beauty and romance - and there isn't much else in these areas? Either way it's beautiful.
