Downtown Denver was subdued when I left it mid-morning. It had a distinct Sunday air about it despite the calendar saying Tuesday. From the hotel, I drove through the shadow of Coors Field and was soon on a 180-mile trajectory to the northeast corner of the state, where Colorado snuggles in under the outstretched wing of western Nebraska. With the Rockies in the rearview mirror, I passed two prairie dogs standing on their hind legs in the breakdown lane, saluting the passing cars.
Although Kansas and Nebraska are usually the go-to examples of boring places to drive through, northeastern Colorado didn’t exactly offer much either. For large stretches, there were no man-made structures in view. The sky was overcast and monochrome and the landscape was brownish grass studded with low gray-green shrubs.
Without much to look at, I focused on the other vehicles on the road. A pickup truck passed me, looking like a tree stump covered in fungus. The doors had a railroad-themed logo and read “Track Inspection Services.” The truck itself was a standard Ford F-150 but had been outfitted with so many bizarre attachments that it was barely recognizable. In addition to the grille guard that protected the truck in case of collision with large wildlife, there were massive iron contraptions on the front and back bearing special wheels that would allow the truck to travel on railroad tracks as if it were a train. There were red and white reflectors placed without regard for symmetry on the body of the truck itself, as well as on the metal bars comprising the cattle guard and railroad adapters. Finally, the rear of the truck was covered with several dozen small floodlights facing every which way and sprouting off like parasitic growths.
A delivery truck that looked to be an old UPS truck painted over with the Amazon logo was sitting on the shoulder of the road with its hazard lights blinking. “Gone for gas,” read the handwritten sign taped in the window. A pickup truck trying to haul a heavy trailer uphill had overheated in the 87° sun. A fire truck and two police cars provided a protective perimeter of flashing lights. The engine was still smoking.
As the imposing industrial complex of the Western Sugar Co-op came into view, I gagged a little. Even a mile away, the rotten-egg smell of the sulfur used to remove impurities from raw sugarcane was inescapable.
Nebraska welcomed me with a large green sign written in a pseudo-futuristic font that looked like something out of a bad 80s sci-fi movie. Near Brule, the highway passed a muddy cattle feedlot. Hundreds of Herefords were crowded into it, likely awaiting a grisly fate. If the sugar co-op in Colorado had smelled bad, it nonetheless ran a very far second behind the stench of the feedlot. It took a full ten minutes of driving with the windows down to get the rancid odor of manure, filthy cattle, and who-knows-what-else out of my nose.
A weigh station in North Platte had become so backed up that state police had moved the line of waiting trucks onto the grassy shoulder next to the highway, like overflow parking for a high school football game. 100 miles later in Kearney, I sailed under the huge archway museum constructed over the interstate. Oddly, the truck in front of me was shedding feathers. I almost had to use the windshield wipers to keep them from building up. To my horror, I realized it was a chicken transporter. The truck’s trailer had the same dimensions of a normal 53’ trailer but consisted only of a metal frame with no actual walls. Inside the frame were cages holding hundreds of live chickens packed in wing to wing. With nothing to protect them from the intense drag experienced at highway speeds, they were literally being plucked alive by the wind.
When crossing the Great Plains, I always feel a sense of camaraderie with the other passenger cars on the road. Local vehicles seem to make a very small proportion of the total traffic, which means most drivers are in it for the long haul and you see the same vehicles over and over again during the course of several hours. A car might pass you, only to make a pit stop at a rest area, rejoin the highway behind you, and pass you again. With nothing else to do or think about during the 350-mile stretch of Nebraska that spans from the Colorado border to the Missouri River, I began to pay more attention to the cars around me.
After a while, the cars I kept seeing over and over felt like old friends, each with their own quirks and personality. The Subaru with Maryland plates was carrying a long metal pole strapped to the roof, as if it were ready for some kind of motorized joust. The hatchback with New York plates had a Cavalier King Charles that stared me down from the front passenger seat every time we passed. The dusty New Jersey SUV with suitcases tied precariously to the roof was carrying a family of four, their two little kids literally bouncing off the walls in the back seat. The beat-up Crown Vic with Ohio plates looked like a prop from a 90s cop action movie.
After Omaha, it was Iowa. The sun was setting as I approached the wind farm in Adair County and its more than 300 turbines. At nearly every rest stop, at least one of the parked trucks had a ridiculously long extended bed and was carrying a 120’ wind turbine blade. As the turbines along the road and on the horizon churned away, the sky was mixing bubblegum pinks with cotton candy blues. A few streaks of orange added extra flair. Once daylight had faded completely, red lights pulsed on and off in unison atop the turbines, warning any low-flying aircraft of the army of giants below.
Downtown Des Moines greeted me much as downtown Denver had the night before. Glass office buildings, broad one-way streets, empty sidewalks. Comfortable, yet deserted.
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