Day Four: Part the Second

Having fallen behind on my Facebooking and blogging, with storm clouds swirling over central Utah, and with Nanda's encouragement, I've pulled into a Super 8 motel for the evening. Let me see if I can catch up on my homework. First, let's finish my thoughts from yesterday.

Interstate 80 immediately west of Lincoln is laser beam straight and, with a speed limit of 75 m.p.h, almost as fast. The radio still offered plenty of hope and salvation, and I began hearing some Christian rock songs for the third or fourth time. I've come to the conclusion that Christian rock is pretty much as bad as any overdone pop rock. Whether its Jars of Clay or Nickelback, I've heard enough, thank you.

After seeing Wheeling, West Virginia and Springfield, Ohio on my first full day of driving, I thought that a theme of this trip was going to be how depressingly dead small town mid-America is. Then cheerful and busy Columbia, Missouri and Lincoln, Nebraska made me think again, until I decided that they were the homes of major universities, so of course they are going to be healthier. The norm for Main Street, U.S.A. is a Walmart-ravaged wasteland, right?

So far, wrong. I stopped in Grand Island to look around and buy some groceries, Gothenburg to look around and see a genuine Pony Express station, and North Platte to look around and go to the bathroom. All of these places were green, pleasant, and happy. Their downtowns were bustling, and the people were smiling and friendly. I'm not ready to move to the Cornhusker State, but I think I would have put Nebraska near the bottom of a ranking of all fifty, and now it's solidly in the middle someplace.

That is unless we are talking about western Nebraska; I don't want to live there at all. I think that if the Sea of Tranquility could grow grass, it might look like western Nebraska. The land is smoothly lumpy and almost completely without trees or crops. The wind never lets up. In My Antonia, Willa Cather described the prairie this way: "As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is the sea....And there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be running." The grass now isn't high enough to appear to be running, but the woman at the Pony Express station told me that a hundred years ago it was as tall as an adult and that almost all of the trees in central and western Nebraska were planted in the last century. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it.












There's a statue of Esther Morris in front of Wyoming's capitol building. Ms. Morris is credited with being the reason women were granted suffrage in Wyoming, although there is a good deal of dispute about how important Morris actually was. Still, it is true that Wyoming's government was the first on earth to give women the right to vote. That's kind of cool, isn't it?

I spent a nice night camping in Curt Gowdy State Park, which is off a fantastic little road that runs between Cheyenne and Laramie. I set up before the sun went down, cooked two packages of Maruchan Ramen Noodles, and played a bit of guitar before turning in. I slept well. No rain, no bugs, no coyotes.