I slept soundly in the Grinnell rest area and woke up as the sun began to stream in through the sheer dishtowels that served as my privacy curtains. My shoulders ached from 11 miles of schlepping around a backpack while hiking the day before. My forearms were covered in Indiana bug bites, one of which had swollen up just enough to be mildly concerning but not enough to make me think anything was seriously wrong. I had a quick breakfast of peanut butter on bread and hopped back on the road.
Western Iowa rolled on by much as eastern Iowa had the day before. Near Stuart, hundreds of wind turbines sprouted up from the fields and towered over the highway. If tractor-trailers felt like giants compared to my SUV, they were more like ants scuttling by the bases of the massive turbines. To drive the point home even further, the Adair County rest stop had a turbine blade planted nose-down next to the bathrooms. It seemed to tower at least a dozen stories high. As I marveled at the wonders of clean energy generation, a dark cloud to the west began to generate energy of its own. The storm set in quickly, the temperature dropped, and the lighting bolts were so numerous and consistent that they looked like marionette strings tugging at the earth itself. The storm subsided as quickly as it had started.
An eastbound convoy passed on the other side of the highway. It consisted of three comically long trucks, each carrying a single turbine blade and each followed by a pickup truck with flashing orange lights that seemed to say “Believe it or not, the end of that truck really is all the way back here.”
At Council Bluffs, I-80 crossed the Missouri River. A pair of retired Union Pacific locomotives was perched above the interstate with “NEBRASKA” painted on the side. In Omaha, I headed downtown. My sister had sent me a list of the best ice cream parlors in every state and I was determined to try Nebraska’s. I parked in front of the creamery in Omaha’s Blackstone District but was unimpressed by the mask usage – or lack thereof – of the employees wiping down the outdoor tables. I eschewed ice cream for coffee from a masked barista across the street.
From Omaha, I-80 snaked southwest towards Lincoln but stayed on the fringes the northern fringes of the city. The vertically imposing Nebraska State Capitol, the second tallest after Louisiana’s, stood stoically in the distance. On the eastbound side of the highway, two police vehicles were surveying the scene of an accident who’s only casualty seemed to be the shiny new backhoe that had fallen off the back of a flatbed and now lay on its side on the highway shoulder, the windshield broken into thousands of shards littering the operator seat. Later, I passed a minivan pulled off on the westbound shoulder with its hood propped open. Its owner, a septuagenarian with short gray hair and a salmon-colored tank top, stood by the rear bumper staring into oncoming traffic and held a small hand written sign. I squinted to make out what it said, and by the time I was able to read, it was too late to pull over: “HELP.”
Nebraska continued as a blur of water towers proudly bearing the names of passing towns. Center-pivot irrigators, essentially giant glorified sprinklers that rotate around a fixed center point to water a field, stretched out towards the highway. Near Milford, something resembling a massive covered wagon sat just off the highway. Instinctively, I took the upcoming exit and found myself at the world’s largest covered wagon. Formerly a tourist trap gas station, it was now an abandoned monument to rural decay.
The world's largest covered wagon, Milford, NE
Near Grand Island, a harvester plodded its way through a field. A double-trailer FedEx truck with Indiana plates passed me. Someone had tried to erase the “FUCK TRUMP” that had been traced into the dust on the rear trailer, but it was still completely legible. An SUV with a New Hampshire license plate tucked in behind a bike rack passed me, a tiny vestige of New England in the immense Midwest. At Kearney, a massive archway housing a museum stretched several hundred feet across the highway, by far the largest structure I’d seen since the Nebraska State Capitol. Two statues vaguely resembling winged horses – or maybe they were turkeys – sat on either end of the archway bridge. At a gas stop in Paxton, a family of five spilled out of their SUV to head into the minimart. They wouldn’t have been terribly remarkable if it weren’t for the airplane that they were dragging along in a trailer like a lawnmower. The plane was painted to look roughly like the Red Baron’s. The wings had been removed, presumably to make road travel possible, and were tucked in between the landing wheels like the tail of a sad dog.
The Red Baron, spotted in Paxton, NE
Bound for Chimney Rock, I left the interstate at Ogallala, a dusty town full of boxy western architecture along broad avenues. A freight train headed up by five Union Pacific engines was chugging through downtown and past the grain elevator. A teenager was grazing a horse on the side of the road. From Ogallala, US-30 headed up into wrinkled hills covered in yellowed prairie grass. The comfort of highway exits lined with gas stations, motels, and fast food was traded for tranquility and solitude on an empty back road. The road rose up through the hills and, as it reached the top, offered an expansive view of Lake McConaughy sparkling below. Every few miles, a lone house was nestled into a stand of trees providing respite from the otherwise featureless landscape. The road was an undivided highway, with one lane to carry traffic in each direction. Each time I passed a tractor-trailer, its 18 wheels screeching by just inches from my four, my car was buffeted by the truck’s wake. It felt like an invisible hand was wrapping its fingers around the spare tire I carried tied to my roof and giving it a good yank upwards. Soon, sliding over to the far side of my lane to pass oncoming trucks had become second nature.
A side road meanders towards cabins and campgrounds on the shores of Lake McConaughy, Nebraska.
The highway led me through a chain of tiny towns. In Lewellen, an austere early 20th-century brick school building now housed an auto body shop. Somehow it still appeared to be in better shape than the disheveled modern school building that sat next to it. Oshkosh and Broadwater followed, strung together by both the road and the train tracks. A truck attempted to overtake me despite an oncoming pickup truck hauling a horse trailer. The pickup was forced to veer onto the shoulder. The semi had to pull back into my lane before it had finished passing me. I quickly overrode cruise control to slam the brakes and narrowly avoid the 53-foot trailer as it swung back into my lane.
When I arrived at Chimney Rock, the signage indicated that the visitor center would be closed until Spring 2020. The fact that it was already Summer 2020 didn’t change the fact that it was still very much closed. Following a tip I’d seen online, I continued down the road past the visitor center. The paved road ended at a T-shaped junction with a dirt road. Kicking up enough dust to reduce my rear visibility to zero, I took the short dirt road to its end at the Chimney Rock Cemetery. Situated roughly a mile from the base of the rock itself, the cemetery was dedicated to those who had lost their lives on the Oregon Trail in the 19th century. In just a few days and without placing my life in peril, I had covered far more ground than those early wagon trains were able to over the course of months. It was a fascinating albeit morbid reminder of the marvel that is the US highway system.
I hiked about half a mile towards the base of the monument in search of a spot from which to photograph the sunset. The trail was well-trodden but incredibly narrow. Low-lying scrubby plants tugged at my ankles and seemed to grow sharper with every step. Grasshoppers leapt out of my way, landing with faint thumps. Initially, they sounded like the first few kernels popping in a bag of microwave popcorn. At one point, however, so many were leaping from side to side that it sounded more like a rainstorm battering a car windshield. I’d arrived a few hours too early for the sunset and found myself waiting for the sun to drop further towards the prairie. The wind picked up, nearly blowing over my camera tripod. Eventually, I got the picture I was hoping for and headed back to the car. I left a few minutes before the sun disappeared completely below the horizon and found myself driving due west into the glowing orb. Even with sunglasses on and sun visor down, visibility was minimal until the last rays of the day had finally disappeared. Far from any town, I pulled into a gravel parking lot that was part of the Kiowa Wildlife Management Area and provided access to a large bird-watching deck. Worried that some poor field mouse might get a whiff of my food stash and try to grab a bite, I sprayed a protective perimeter of fox urine around outside the car. Uninhibited prairie winds rocked the car every so slightly, as if willing me to fall asleep.
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