Spring                                                                Bee Hiving Moon

Fog over the Platte, now being disbursed by a rising yellow star, one invisible all day yesterday as we drove in the gray and drear. Breakfast here overlooking the sloping front lawn, watching the birds come and go.  Mahoney is not very lively on an April midweek, which is just fine as far we’re concerned. That meant we ate breakfast in an empty dining room, a big one, reminiscent of our first breakfast at the Station Hotel in Inverness 24 years ago. Their tables were set up in an old ballroom and we were the only diners. I had blood pudding that morning.

It’s good to be traveling with Kate. We travel well together.

Today on to Denver. On my first trip out to Denver, over 10 years ago, I took Jon to his new home on High Street near Cheesman Park. He had just obtained a position teaching art in the Aurora School District, in fact in the very school where he still teaches today. On that trip I realized the Rocky Mountains were the boundary to my homeland, for me the Midwest ends at the Front Range.  The Upper Midwest ends somewhere in or at the Iowa border, but Colorado feels like it fits in with it, Colorado, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan.

Well, the bus is leaving.  See you in Denver.

Spring                                                                               Bee Hiving Moon

Night on the plains. The Platte River, wide and shallow even now, runs not a quarter of a mile from here. I’ve seen it much higher, filling out its broad bed, roiling with the muddy redness of its banks and bottom. The big noise here comes from the trains, coal trains, I imagine, headed from the Powder River Basin coalfields in Wyoming to the hungry generating plants in the east.

Even with the whistles and the low rumble of cars moving over metal rails the night manages a sense of isolation.  We are after all in a state park, well off the highway and out of metropolitan Omaha.

The big restaurant here has huge plate glass windows that overlook the Platte. Bird feeders dot the wooden walkway just outside the windows. Kate and I watched redwing blackbirds, grackles, rose-breasted grosbeaks, sparrows and goldfinches swoop down, dine together for a moment, then fly off. We dined on the inside, the birds on the outside. Just creatures, needing to eat.

After breakfast tomorrow, Kate and I will pack up and head out for Denver, arriving sometime in the afternoon. More later.

Spring                                           New Bee Hiving Moon

Last report from the road.  Acova, Iowa.  Acova Motor Inn.

Long ago read a travel writer commenting on America.  He said one of our great boons to travelers is cheap, good lodging.  He’s right.  I’m in the Acova Inn, $45 a night.  It’s a clean, independent motel with working heat, internet connection, cable tv, coffee maker, microwave and refrigerator.

And in this he reveals a component of the American character.  We go.  Ever since the days of the pioneers (and, yes, I stipulate the dark side of the frontier, but also recognize the bravery of those folks on foot, horseback or covered wagon.), we have wandered across this great land, sometimes with a purpose:  new job, visit family, find land, get away from crowds, but just as often with a large dash of whimsy, journey for the sake of journey.

In many other parts of the world, for thousands of years, people have been born and died close to their village, often without going very far from home.  Nomads are not an exception because they followed food, either for themselves or their live stock.  Over the last 100 years or so there has been a giant sucking sound as cities hoover up those former villages into themselves, but there the travel, if there is much, is between village and city and back again.

And, yes, I stipulate the deadly effect of the internal combustion engine and the predatory nature of the railroad builders.  It occurred to me often on this trip that our travel urges have burned a lot of gasoline.

Maybe the road is a siren, her beautiful voice luring us to our doom, but I find her a book opening page after page of wonders, a picture book for adults.  There the pump jack bobbing up and down, up and down.  There a jack rabbit with those big heat radiating ears.  A sunset against the saguaro that calls to mind dime novels by Zane Grey.  Pine covered mountains that remind us of the land that will be in a million years.  Waters running from state to state, from ocean to ocean as snowmelt crosses continental divides. Even the highway signs warning of dangerous sand storms, no visibility, pull out of the traffic lane to stop.

Too, there are the depths of Carlsbad Caverns, the tall saguaro gathered in assembly along the valley floor and the abandoned architecture of the Chaco Canyon culture.  The low flat houses of Tucson and the adobe houses of Santa Fe show up as do the octagonal hogans of the dine people and the swallow like residences of the pueblos.

Later in the year thunderheads will build over the plains and splash down water on fields of wheat where the arid west gives way to the humid east.  All this and never leaving the nation.

I will have traveled almost 4,000 miles and missed the whole deep south, the eastern seaboard and the western one.  I will miss most of the midwest, too, only brushing it in Iowa before I enter the upper midwest, my home.  That happens today.

Goodbye from Acova, Iowa where all the motels are above average.