Into the West (Vacation Part 1)

The obligatory vacation post. Because I feel like I had to do it, to memorialize it and get it the hell out of my head! Not that the vacation was some kind of life-changing experience. But it was memorable in the way all vacations are, because they're out of the norm, they're somewhere new, and this time, I actually got my mother to listen to nearly my entire music collection as well as my justifications as to how my playlists relate to my books. And we managed to stay off the interstate (or the internet, as mom kept accidentally calling it) and drive the scenic country roads. That's probably about as "backroads" or "off the beaten path" as mother and I will get.

Thursday: Set off. Dropped off Brownie and the red daisy with Uncle Norm, packed up the car (it was quite a marvel, how we were going on a trip that was supposed to be totally relaxing and unplanned, spur-of-the-moment... and we still end up totally packing the car, taking everything but the kitchen sink) and drove to Grand Island. I fell asleep because I let mom listen to some damn NPR show... probably the market show, the one that became an apologist extravaganza for Ken Lay after the trial. Pretty uneventful because we only left at five in the afternoon and didn't drive more than three hours, tops. I got mom to go to a Comfort Inn instead of the Holiday Inn Express because the Comfort Inn had wireless highspeed internet, not just highspeed internet - I forgot to bring my ethernet cable. Ate dinner at Applebee's, surrounded by locals... but of course the locals weren't so different from Lincoln locals, since Grand Island is still a hub of Nebraska.

Friday: The Westward drive through Nebraska, from Grand Island to Alliance. There are absolutely no cities on this drive, scenic as it may be, just tiny villages that are more like pioneer settlements than anything else - houses falling down on their own walls, pick-up trucks with grass creeping up all around, inbred-looking people, little white churches with gigantic crosses. Some have signs pointing toward a "Business District" - kind of laughable when you think about a town of 96 people having a "business district". We first stopped at a section of the Nebraska National Forest, which is the largest handplanted forest in the nation, and shelled out the first of our many contributions to the underfunded Park Service. The forest is reminescent of the lower Rocky Mountains - temperate, American, vaguely cool, full of buzzing insects, standard camping area.

A forest in Nebraska

Apparently people use the place as a racetrack for their ATVs, which my mother of course began to vehemently detest, as she is wont to do. Then we had lunch at the worst place we ever ate at - Stubbs Cafe, one of those warehouse-sized cafes for both the villagers and the truckers/travelers. Its vicinity was so treeless and barren, the building itself so bare except for the little bell that rang with the door. I had a fish sandwich, Mom had a cheeseburger. While my fish sandwich was perfectly ordinary, Mom's cheeseburger was hilarious - it was obviously a hoagie bun ripped in half (not cut, mind you - ripped, as in with bare hands), a thin, small, dry slab of hamburger snuggled between... and that was all. No vegetables whatsoever. Perhaps Stubbs figured ketchup was a vegetable. Despite the large dining room there were only two other groups of patrons - one a standard three-generation family of blonde airhead women, the other one lonely village man in overalls who talked to himself. Wonderfully, however, Stubbs does offer gift certificates. I still think that would have been the best oleh-oleh for Uncle Norm. We drove the rest of the afternoon, passing Alliance and settling in Chadron. By then the scenery had become radically different than that of southern Nebraska - buttes interrupted the landscape, which had become elevated and sloping, rolling even... hilly, vaguely Western, green. Like it could become Brokeback Mountain scenery given a few more hikes in latitude.

Brokeback Country

The sky was also no longer a simple bright blue - it was a curdled blue, and of a darker shade than normal, much more dramatic and textured, sort of the way one thinks Celtic skies should be. Chadron's a pleasant enough little town, big enough to have gas pumps and a nearby college. We stayed at a Best Western and had a fairly crappy and generic dinner at the nextdoor Country Village. As well as a stop in the whirlpool of the hotel.

Saturday: We drove out to the Agate National Monument, taking a slight detour. The Agate National Monument is a nice addition to Nebraska's scientific resume. A long time ago a farmer discovered a rhino fossil jutting out of some little buttes in his property. Then he found these large formations in other rocks on the property that became named "Devil's Corkscrews" - they looked like gigantic corkscrews. I mean, gigantic. Taller than men. The guy from UNL he invited thought they were the roots of prehistoric plants. Wrong, of course. The guy from Pittsburgh University got it right - they were the burrows of cat-sized prehistoric prairie dogs. Anyway, after what must have been a funding fight, Agate became a national monument with a visitor's center and trails leading out to the buttes, which are home to the bonebeds that had been covered by loads of volcanic ash - though the animals here did not die of ash.

Always wanted to be a paleontologist...

They died of malnutrition brought about by a drought - as they ate up all the remaining vegetation, it became too long of a trek between the shrinking waterhole and the grasses. So they stayed at the waterhole and died there - the little herbivores first, the big herbivores next, and then the scavenging carnivores. Meat-eaters always, always die last. This is, of course, post-dinosaurs by a long stretch. Nebraska at this point is no longer an inland sea, but a savanna, filled with sheep-like oreodonts, saber-tooth cats, bear-dogs, monstrous hogs, long-necked camels, large rhinos, vultures, svelte little horses.

It's a marsh, during rains

The trails all said beware of rattlesnakes, and we laughed at first, but then I almost stepped on one up near the visitors' center, as I was walking back to the car. It was a prairie rattlesnake and was not pissed, just went slinking on its way, hugging the curve between the grass and the pebble-path. We had lunch near the border with Wyoming, at a tiny little cafe that was the other half of a kitschy souvenir shop. The food was slightly better than Stubbs, but it was a better experience overall because there were authentic cowboys there - with cowboy hats, stirrups and all. This is cattle country, after all. Although on the road to Agate I really could imagine dinosaurs coming over the rolling hills at any moment. Again, we drove the rest of the afternoon, crossing into Wyoming and finally stopping in Sundance, Wyo., a vaguely tourist-y city just because it's the closest settlement to Devils' Tower. We stayed at a Best Western again, this one manned by one lanky twenty-something in glasses who when we asked where the Buffalo Jump was said something like, "I have no idea". I swear this lad was the manager. We found the Buffalo Jump on our own, but the sinkhole itself was closed, a lid locked on - the site was quite undeveloped due to insufficient funding.

"proceed at your own risk," the signs said

A buffalo jump is a place where Indians used to drive buffaloes over a cliff to kill them. The creatures would die from either the fall or the crush of other buffaloes falling on them. This was apparently the first way of killing buffaloes, before spears or guns. They're all over the Northwestern plains. I was a little disappointed that the sinkhole with all the buffalo bones was closed... but what can you do. The National Park Service isn't perfect and certainly isn't rich, and it wasn't even prime vacation season. We went for rib-eye steaks at a Sundance restaurant, but soon after we ordered all the lights went out. It killed the country music, which was nice, but the lights did not come back on for the rest of dinner. We paid with cash because the credit card machine was broken. We ate by candlelight. People had to change their orders because the deep-frier was electric. And certainly no ice cream. It was the whole region, we were told. So we drove back to the hotel by cloudy twilight - it was threatening to rain, and it did start by the time we drove up to the Best Western, where all the lights were out. But there was little nerdy hotel-manager-guy at the backdoor, with a spelunking light strapped to his forehead, waiting to guide us down the pitch-black hallway to our room. "Dude, it's like in The Shining," I said. The hotel manager chuckled. My mom didn't think it was amusing. We asked for candles or a flashlight, but when they didn't come, decided to go down to the lobby to fetch them ourselves. I cannot tell you how fucking dark the hallway was, but I led the way. I mused that I could do this sort of thing, the dark-into-the-unknown sort of thing, as long as I didn't think there were ghosts. As long as I hadn't heard any stories beforehand. They gave us a flashlight and a candle and we went back to the room. I had been wanting to start Night Shift, but that was before the lights went out. Mom did Sudoku by flashlight - I listened to my playlist of Chathura, which takes place during the downfall of science and the rise of a vengeful nature. Night had settled then. We went to sleep. Of course, the lights came back on about an hour and a half later.