I got to see 2,000 miles of America from quite different perspectives. First from 30,000 feet above in four hours. Then from ground level. That took three days.
Daughter Abby was moving home for a few weeks before starting grad school. She was driving her ’96 Mercury Sable from San Jose, California to Sleepy Eye with as much of her stuff as it would hold plus Leo the cat. I flew out on Sunday and drove back with her on Monday to Wednesday. This was a journey that took settlers months, so coming or going was remarkable if you think about it.
This is half of a continent, the emptier half as far as human beings go. But in the emptiness, it is often beautiful, sometimes breathtaking.
On the flight out, I got a window seat just ahead of the wing. The fellow next to me looked like he would rather stick pins under his finger nails than have a conversation. It was mostly a clear day, so I spent the trip with my face pressed against the glass looking down.
As you ascend from MSP heading west-southwest, below is green. Even from that height one can distinguish between corn and soybeans which dominate the landscape below. I found myself guessing which town that was down there, wishing towns had giant “Hello my name is” labels stuck to them.
Shades of lush green stretch to the horizon for about an hour, with swatches of blue in lakes and rivers. Much of it is divided into perfect mile squares, like some sort of game board. Remember that carving this up into 640-acre parcels happened before GPS and electronics which makes it more astounding. I assume I flew near my farm, and that a few of those little squares down there are mine to cultivate.
In my part time job inspecting fields, I use plat books to find my way. I’m used to thinking in terms of section squares. Roads being exactly a mile apart seem natural when you’re driving in the country. Looking down on it from on high is another matter.
There were puffy cumulous clouds. For each there was a shadow cast on the ground below it. Oddly, it felt sort of upside down being on the other side of the clouds looking at the shadow.
Just the day before I had been working around and under wind generators out in western Minnesota. I shot video of them “whoosh, whooshing” above me. When the plane went over the Buffalo Ridge, suddenly these huge machines were little toy models, spinning silently below me.
Somewhere in South Dakota, the green dries up and is replaced by hues of brown and gray. Probably more so this year since the west has been in a drought. There are ribbons of green in river valleys. Then there are irrigation circles that look like round remnants of artificial turf.
There are less roads and cities. When the hills turn into mountains, there are even fewer. It is difficult to discern the heights and depths of the mountains and valleys from that distance, but I assume it was rugged landscape I was going over.
A day later, we began the trek home, reversing my four-hour flight. Out of California, we drove through the Sierra Nevadas. You cross the Donner Pass near Donner Lake and Donner Memorial State Park. It’s odd that this small piece of history is so prominently memorialized. I told Abby that if things turned bad for us, we were eating the cat first.
After those mountains come a lot of open spaces. Most of the drive across northern Nevada is through the Great Basin. This is called a “cold desert,” hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It was over 100 degrees outside the car, and a little less inside our old car with iffy air conditioning. Nevada was endless brown hills, interspersed with casinos. Every small town had a casino or two. It seemed there are more casinos than people.
That was followed by the Salt Flats of Utah, shimmering white, looking deceptively like water in the distance. Past the Great Salt Lake, Salt Lake City sets between mountain ranges. We had lunch there and would have liked more time. I marked it as a city to go back to.
On the border of Utah and Wyoming, we had car trouble. We spent a morning In Wendover, Utah trying to get that resolved. We described that as a cross between being in an episode of the Twilight Zone and a Monty Python skit, but we were going by noon.
Wyoming is buttes and plateaus, with badlands coloring parts of it. Here and there are herds of cattle when slight amounts of green would appear. We turned off the interstate and took two lane road up toward South Dakota, spending an evening driving through ranch country watching an entrancing thunderstorm off in the distance.
A lot of the West is defined much by what it doesn’t have: rainfall. Green doesn’t reappear until well into South Dakota. We take growing things for granted. I remember when my father who never got off the farm much for his first 60 years came back from a bus tour out west. He was struck by how much land there was that didn’t grow anything. We teased him about that, but gosh, he was right.
There are not a lot of cities on the way: Reno, Salt Lake City, Sioux Falls. We went through the least populated county (Niobrara) in the least populated state (Wyoming).
What towns there were had long distances between them. They were not unlike the small towns of Minnesota with a lot of things that used to be. We saw closed gas stations and empty schools. One town had five closed motels. Out in the country, there were old farm and ranch buildings scattered along the road, well preserved in the dry climate for decades. These were rural places, and rural places everywhere are changing and adapting in the best cases and simply declining in the worst.
As I said, much of it was beautiful, an evolving watercolor painting out our car window. I thought of the Woody Guthrie song, This Land Is Your Land. We saw half of “from California, to the New York Island.” And if it is so that “this land is made for you and me,” America is truly blessed.