Casper to Sutherland, Nebraska

Shook the rain off the tent fly, packed up and drove into downtown Casper, leaving behind a sad campsite

 thinking I would find a strip of small, slightly hip shops and a coffeehouse with WiFi. No such luck. Casper is a mess of 1970's and 80's building, and it looks like time pretty much stopped and the 90's and on passed it by. Perhaps there is something more there, but I didn't find it. And it is a town without beauty, again, at least I didn't see it, but it all seems so hard, dry, dirty, careless, utilitarian, little grass, no flowers, nothing to suggest anything other than functional life. This is so of many western towns, maybe a function of the high, cold, harsh, dry climate, perhaps beauty is just too hard to come by. Or it may be that beauty is something learned, like color, and if you grow up without having it around, the absence of beauty is something you just don't notice. Many people in Casper are probably second if not third generation, from this or similar towns, and that is why they are the way they are. Geography matters, but so does society, we are as we lived as children.

Outside of Casper on I 25 rolling over still beautiful high prairie once clear of town, the contrast between the more or less natural and the manmade dramatic, 

scattered oil wells and then many wind turbines on the horizon to the north, the old and the new, with any luck. And then almost immediately, a big coal fired generating plant, huge twin plumes of brown smoke forming a long slash of brown clouds blowing east that I drove under for thirty miles. The old, still with us.

Mostly above the valley of the North Platte, larger and greener below me, I turned off the Interstate down across the river to Guernsey and in a small town of not much going on, green lawns and flowers and attempts at beauty. Maybe it is just climate, just water.

And suddenly – corn, big fields of corn under irrigation, corn everywhere in the quickly widening bottomland along the river. 

 A few miles further down the river a traffic jam of trucks and trailers at a livestock auction and right outside of town, the first of many feedlots all down the river, hundreds to maybe a thousand cattle, tightly penned on a sloping hillside – always on a slope – look like automatic feeders, cattle eating and waiting. This is the part of industrial beef we don't see in Oregon, this and slaughterhouses. I wonder where the slaughterhouses are for all those cattle, probably not far.

And at the same time, the first of many very, very long coal trains, full trains going east down the river, empty ones coming back west, probably to big coal fields in Wyoming. Coal trains all day long, a fact of life for towns all down the North Platte.

Corn, cows and coal, there you go.

Into Nebraska and up to Scottsbluff National Monument, nice small visitor's center with some exhibits, but the landscape is the star and easy to see why it was such an important landmark for westering pioneers, 500 feet of 50 million year old sand and siltstone still standing after everything around was worn away, visible for miles east and west. The badlands between the bluff and river were impassable so the Oregon trail ran over a low pass between the bluffs and up into the sagebrush prairie beyond. For pioneers, this was the place - the "land of monuments" -  a third of the way to Oregon, where the west really began.

I climbed a paved trail winding up the bluff and through a tunnel a mile and a half to the top (of course, I could have driven . . .) a very nice place on a beautiful sunny, breezy day.

Into downtown Scottsbluff, hoping again for a coffeeshop or something, no luck, I found nothing. Maybe it's there, but I saw another town still in the 80's. Again, we are as the place we live.

Down the river on Hwy 26, the route of traders bringing furs back from the Wyoming rendezvous for those few golden years, after that the path of settlers heading west through the 1860's until the railroad went through. Now more feedlots and so much corn, hard to believe the North Platte can water all that, even with the several smallish reservoirs above. After 6, long light behind driving into my shadow through towns that once were something, now no much at all,  more corn and grain bins

and the place where tractors go to die.

 I stopped at Ogallala and it occurred to me this is Ogalalla aquifer country and many of these crops are drinking water millions of years old, and Nebraska still on top of the best of it. All the numbers about the Ogallala aquifer are staggering ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer) but one thing is certain: sooner or later it will be gone - is already going fast in the Texas panhandle - and everything will change, in Nebraska and across the country.

South over the interstate near Sutherland and a welcome campsite near a Bureau of Rec reservoir among empty RVs waiting for the weekend.