On the last, long day of driving, La Tortue hauled me up and over Montana’s slice of the Continental Divide between Bozeman and Butte. There, I found a raw yet mystical beauty: rolling dry-scrub mountains dusted with new snow. A rising sun casting an etherial glow. Puffs of low cloud scoured loose to unveil something […]
Finding the headwaters
I cross into Montana and head west, drawn by the allure of Headwaters State Park, about 30 miles west of Bozeman, Montana. The second-longest river in North America begins here, tucked into a wetland east of the Rocky Mountain divide. Every river begins differently. The Missouri’s alpha is actually the confluence of two rivers, the […]
Expansion into Sky
Nebraska shares a boundary with the state of my dreams: Wyoming. I say this not because of the side-by-side signs I saw in a town called Grey Bull (“Obama is a pile of excrement” said one. “Trump hats for sale,” said the other.) Wyoming is the state of my dreams because of its expansive, exhilarating […]
The Keepers of History
A seemingly innocent question posed by my sister led me to spend a day at the county records office in Stockville, Nebraska. “Do you think our grandfather was born in Frontier County, like his older brother?” Our maternal great-grandfather met his wife, married and started a family on a farm near Stockville in 1899. As […]
Missouri River Marshlands
The name Van Meter State Park in northwestern Missouri predicts nothing about the park’s remarkable gifts. I approached it on state road 122, rolling La Tortue through undulating farm fields that were broken only by occasional brush and trees gathered in wet draws. Mostly, this was engineered habitat for soybeans and corn. We had our […]
The Accidental Rooster
Tuesday March 1 was a four-state day. I ate breakfast at dawn in a campground in eastern New Mexico. Lunch found me sitting cross-legged on the ground at the weedy edges of a rest area outside of Dalhart Texas. In the mid-afternoon, Dellie and I shared a soft ice cream in Hooker, Oklahoma. By dinner, […]