For a little while, sir, me and her we had us some fun.
– Bruce Springsteen, “Nebraska”
In late 2006 I came across an interesting article on the annual spring sandhill crane migration from its winter habitat in Florida and Texas to its summer haunts in Wisconsin and Michigan and further north into the Canadian taiga. I have long enjoyed these majestic birds during my many visits to central Florida, but usually there are only a few birds in any one location. The idea of watching formations of hundreds of these birds with seven foot wing spans in flight, or huge flocks covering winter fields and marshlands along Nebraska’s South Platte River, immediately captured my imagination.
I am sure my friends and colleagues were not a little dumbfounded and curious why, in early 2007, I announced that my wife and I were planning a two week late winter vacation to the Great Plains. When others were dreaming of getaways to Florida, Mexico and the Caribbean, I booked round trip tickets from Baltimore to Omaha. Yes . . . Omaha. I had passed through the city a couple of time on cross-country road trips, but I had never considered the city, or the State of Nebraska for that matter, as a vacation destination. And certainly not in winter.
Once concrete travel plans had been laid, I began to read up on the regions and places we planned to visit. I considered as requisite the writings of Willa Cather (1873-1947) who moved to Nebraska from Virginia as a young girl and later wrote about the immigrant experience on the Great Plains. I read The Song of the Lark (1915) and My Antonia (1918). So, too, the poetry and essays of Ted Kooser (1939 -) whose Delights and Shadows (2004) was awarded the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He served as US Poet Laureate / Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress in 2004 - 2006, the first from the Great Plains, and he still resides in Garland, Nebraska in the heart of the Bohemian Alps. But most of all, I deferred to Jim Harrison (1937-2016), one of my favorite writers who has had a long and deep love affair with Nebraska where two of his best known novels, Dalva (1988) and The Road Home (1998), are set. “I need to know what the Great Plains were like in the winter,” wrote Harrison. “And the kind of information I wanted could not be extrapolated from 37,000 feet or from a trip to the library.” I myself had overflown Nebraska many times and I also wanted to have a closer look.
Harrison claimed that the best place to begin an exploration of the Great Plains is Des Moines, the capital of Iowa; “In order to experience the transition from the immensely fertile heartland to the prairies, and the Great Plains.” I already had a good sense of the heartland having grown up there, and I have driven the stretch between Des Moines and the Nebraska border at the Missouri River. I was anxious to get started and I set my sights for Nebraska, one of the few places Harrison believed “actually reminds you of what America thinks she is like.” There one will discover “wonderful country with rolling prairie stretched endlessly before you, a dulcet greening brown folding in on itself, surely a sea of grass . . . where Sanity herself is never more than an inch away . . . . “ The air is “like an odorless perfume.” How could I not start there?
It was a sunny but chilly March morning when we arrived in Omaha. We picked up our rental car and drove along the city’s Missouri River waterfront, stopping for a light lunch at Billy Frogg’s Saloon in the Old Market district. Hitting the road relaxed and refreshed, we headed west on State Route 92, eventually crossing the North Branch of the Platte River into the rolling glacial hill country known as the Bohemian Alps. Prior to our trip I had read Ted Kooser’s Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps (2002) and was convinced I wanted to visit this region.
Turning north onto State Route 79 we entered this pleasant hill country just south of the North Platte, much of it between 1500 and 2000 feet in elevation. This is open farm country – fields of corn and soybeans and evergreen wind breaks – with a smattering of tiny hamlets, most with fewer than 300 souls, northwest of Lincoln, the state capital. These were established in the late 19th century by immigrants from Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic) and to lesser extent Germany. Some older residents still speak Czech which has remained a language of commerce; primarily cattle, corn and soybeans. Perhaps here I would find what Harrison was talking about . . . what America might really be like. “We have about run out of secrets of a good sort in this country and more space might do the trick,” Harrison wrote in 1992. “More hidden corners, more empty areas that the cartographers refer to as sleeping beauties.”
We passed through Prague [pronounced Prāg] named for the capital of Bohemia. It is home to the Beer Barrel Days festival and the world’s largest kolác (a Bohemian fruit pastry). Most of these tiny villages are nothing more than a couple shops, a Catholic church and cemetery, and perhaps a post office and all interconnected by a network of unimproved roads. Not much seems to go on here other than church on Sunday and the Friday night polka dances and fish fries at the local sokol cultural club. Gone is the heyday when the Chicago & Northwestern and the Midland Pacific railroads served the area and carried commerce east to Omaha and Chicago. We continue through Nimburg, Abie and Bruno (for Brno, the capital of Moravia) before heading south again, passing through Garland where Kooser continues to live and write. Formerly known as Germantown celebrating its founders, the names was changed to something less Germanic in the aftermath of World War I.
We were up early the next morning and drove down to the river to the former site of historic Fort Kearney to get a closer look at the sandhill cranes presently in residence. This fort was established in 1848 as a way station for settlers headed farther west along the California-Oregon Trail, as well as housing for workers constructing the Union Pacific Railroad. The nearby fields and riverside marshes were thick with thousands of cranes raising their cacophony of union calls (to keep mating pairs . . . they are strictly monogamous . . . and families together) on an otherwise quiet and peaceful morning. Frequently traveling as far as 450 miles along the Central Flyway in a single day, they begin to arrive in the vicinity of Kearney in mid-February, and the peak migration occurs in late March or early April. Most all will have continued north by late April.
Leaving Kearney we drove north by northwest on state routes 10 and 2 as we studied the lay of the land, the immense expanse of prairie grasses interrupted only by the occasional farms with their wind breaks and shelter belts. Situated near the geographic center of the lower 48 contiguous states, Broken Arrow, with its pretty little gazebo on the town square, represents the eastern gateway to the Nebraska Sandhills, a region measuring roughly 150 x 100 miles between Broken Arrow and Alliance, in the west, and the South Platte River north to the South Dakota border. This vast area of mixed prairie grass-stabilized sand dunes is prime cattle country and a roof to the northern extensions of the Ogallala aquifer below. “Real secrets will emerge from the land that isn’t veering toward being used up,” Harrison wrote when he first arrived in the Sandhills. “This was the actual reason I was headed toward Valentine, Nebraska . . . The Sand Hills [sic] are a splendid mood wrench . . . it is one of my secret places to go.” We were following Harrison’s journey as we entered the Sandhills for the first time “with the fervor of a hermit headed back to an island remote from our collective madness . . . chatting it up with meadowlarks and the heifers.”
Continuing northwest from Broken Arrow on Route 2 we passed through the dwindling former railroad towns of Anselmo, Dunning and Thetford as we paralleled the Middle Branch of the Loup River, a major tributary of the South Platte River draining much of central Nebraska. From Thetford we turned north again planning to follow US Route 83 through the Valentine National Wildlife Refuge with its many shallow lakes and one of the last sanctuaries of tall prairie grasses. The town of Valentine was our final destination of the day.
One of the more frequent questions I ask myself over the course of a road trip is “I wonder what might be down that road? I agree with Harrison that “obsession with the landscape is a healthy diversion;” what Juan Garcia Hortelano called “gramatica panda” [the earth’s grammar]. We crossed the North Branch of the Loup River where we spotted a road disappearing toward the far western horizon. A single telephone pole was festooned with signs for cattle ranches somewhere down that lonely road. We decided to make a short detour to see what we might find.
A few miles down this road we arrived in Brownlee, the only town which also lends it’s name to the road. It was nothing more than two or three farm houses and a scattering of out buildings situated along the banks of the North Branch. Otherwise the road passed through mile after mile of rolling pasture land and ponds dotted with trumpeter swans. Pheasants and prairie grouse skittered across the road in front of us, the only sound the crunch of the road, a meadowlark calling from a nearby fence post, and the wind coursing through the prairie grasses. We briefly crossed into the Mountain Time Zone before we eventually reached State Route 97 which we followed northeast to Valentine, losing the hour of daylight we had just gained. This detour was sandhill country at its best. Harrison claimed he would like to live at the end of a long road. He would have liked this one. He was correct. Whose mood would not improve ensconced in this quietude?
Valentine, Nebraska was my next trip target after observing the sandhill crane migration around Kearney and our exploration of the Sandhills themselves. It is the center of a major beef producing area in the state. “Beef is a pleasure food,” Harrison writes. “And we desire pleasure because we live nasty, brutish lives.” Valentine is also home to the Peppermill Restaurant which according to Harrison serves the best steak found west of Chicago and “the best porterhouse of my life.” This is pretty high praise in my book coming from such a roving gourmand.
Back at the motel I read what Harrison had written about his time in and around Valentine. He had spent months doing local research for two of my favorite of his novels – Dalva and The Road Home – both of which are set in the area. Dalva tells the story of a middle-aged woman returning to her native Sandhills after years living in California. She discovers the truth about her homesteading ancestors who had stood up to the US government in an attempt to assist the Lakota Sioux trying to protect their lands, their traditions, their future. The Road Home continues the story of Dalva and the epic history of her Northridge family living in accordance with the traditions of the land. “Along Route 20 the almost unpardonable beauty of desolation. I could live along a creek in the Sandhills,” Harrison writes in his research journals. “I’ve established no strong ties outside the field of imagination.”
The next morning we ambled along the banks of the Niobrara River outside of town. We watched a band of wild turkeys foraging as the males strutted and fanned their feathers for the ladies. We visited the site of former Fort Niobrara east of town, a garrison post established in the late 19th century and converted into a wildlife refuge in 1912. Today it is home to small herds of bison and elk, a vast prairie dog city burrowed below, and over 200 bird varieties.
Departing Valentine we drove west on US Route 20 through the northern fringes of the Sandhills retracing the same route Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull, Little Big Man (not the one portrayed in the 1970 film with Dustin Hoffman), and American Horse led their bands of Lakota Sioux. At Merriman we turned north and soon crossed into South Dakota where we visited Wounded Knee and the Pine Ridge Reservation on our way into the Dakota Badlands and the Black Hills. As chance would have it we would return to Valentine two weeks later as we made our way back to Omaha and I had one more opportunity to enjoy that two-pound porterhouse at the Peppermill. It was no fluke; it was just as good if not better than the first. That night I dreamed fearlessly.
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