As I was driving the Yellowstone Trail, I wanted to stop just outside of Selby, SD to take a picture of the 100th meridian marker, where, as all discerning music listeners know, the Great Plains begin. The marker has disappeared, and this photo, taken in 2012, doesn’t match my childhood memory of the marker: I remember a large circle which helped me imagine the longitude line that passed through that otherwise empty and unremarkable location.
The Yellowstone Trail was a coast-to-coast highway first proposed by J.W. Parmley of Ipswitch, SD, about 50 miles east of the 100th meridian. Parmley’s initial goal was simply to get a decent highway between Ipswitch and Aberdeen, a distance of 25 miles. How that morphed into a cross-country road is a tribute to the boosterism of Parmley and others. The Yellowstone Trail Society exists to keep the history of the road alive, and there’s still a 650-mile stretch of U.S. Highway 12 from just outside Minneapolis to Miles City, MT that is mostly two-lane road, not hugely different from what a tourist in the 50’s or 60’s would have seen.
Everything between the Rocky Mountains and, say, Pittsburgh, is lumped into the “Midwest” by coastal media, but the Great Plains are far different from both the Midwest and the Rocky Mountain West. They’re flat and dry, colder than a well digger’s ass in the Winter, and hotter than broiled fuck in the Summer. It is not good land. As you travel west from this marker, you soon enter land that is best suited for cattle or sheep, maybe wheat, and certainly not corn. Around 230 miles west, near Marmath, ND or Terry, MT, you are squarely in the inhospitable land documented in Jonathan Raban’s excellent book Bad Land: An American Romance. Raban chronicles the plight of settlers who started homesteads there during a couple of wet years, and who did not prosper (to put it mildly) when the inevitable and more usual dry years came.
The events of Raban’s book are roughly contemporaneous with Parmley’s effort to start the Yellowstone Trail. Parmley is the type of good government, growth-oriented politician who helped settle and grow the Great Plains. Parmley’s great passion was road building, but he also advocated for the International Peace Garden, soil conservation, hydroelectric power and Mount Rushmore.
Parmley’s home and land office in Ipswitch are now museums, and certainly the attitudes he embodied are as little seen as most of the artifacts in those two buildings. When I was growing up in a small town on the Yellowstone Trail, there were many efforts to boost the community’s economic development, most of them instigated by local independent business owners. Most of that is gone. When I was a teenager, I attended a Rotary meeting with almost a hundred members. Forty years later, the same meeting is lucky to get more than a dozen to show up. Those hundred business owners from my forty-year-old memory were mostly white, male Republicans, and certainly their boosterism was for their benefit, but it was a hell of a lot more positive than the current white, male Republican efforts to ban CRT and vaccination mandates.
My point, if I have one, is that it takes a lot of positive energy to live on marginal land and make a living. Most towns along the Highway 12 portion of the Yellowstone Trail once had a group of local businessmen and allied boosters who got funding for hospitals, roads, festivals, rodeos, museums, rest areas and historical markers in their towns, to make them places where people wanted to settle, or at least visit and spend their money. Now all that’s left is a critical access hospital — if you’re lucky — a Dollar General and a grocery store.
PJ
Your description raises the question of whether people should be living on marginal land that cannot support them.
Kent
We lived for over a decade in Waco TX which is close to the 100th meridian. I think the actual longitude is about 97 W. And I-35 which runs N-S though Texas more or less approximates it. It is remarkable how it really does slice the state in half. East of I-35 is black earth farmland and continuing east you quickly get into the humid pine woods of east Texas. Drive west of I-35 and it’s semi-arid hill country that quickly merges into semi-arid open rangeland that is too dry for most crops. The only real exceptions are around the Lubbock area where due to the Ogallala Aquifer they do irrigated agriculture of mostly cotton.
In Texas that line divides everything. East was cotton and plantation country and so the towns of east and central TX all have historic black communities and are really much more culturally part of the south than west. If you go west of the line it is ranch country where there was little or no slave plantation agriculture and so no Black community today. And the sentiment is much more western than southern. East Texas is more like Alabama. West Texas is more like Wyoming. Both are Republican, but in different ways.
WhatsMyNym
Any rural area needs constant reinvestment. We’ve been lucky on the N Olympic Peninsula that enough folks have been willing to put in time and effort to consistently reinvent our economy.
Kent
@PJ: You mean like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles, none of which can support much life without stealing water from others.
BC in Illinois
Not far from my brother-in-law’s farm in Marathon County, Wisconsin, is a Geographical Marker for the “Center of the Northwestern World.”
45° North, 90° West. A site of no significance whatsoever.
A Geographical Marker that has elicited the same reaction from every new son-in-law, daughter-in-law, and grandchild: “Why are we getting our picture taken here?“
marklar
A sincere thank you. Now I have that terrific song by the Tragically Hip (At the 100th Meridian) running through my head.
Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix
@Kent: In South Dakota, the 100th Meridian is about 20-30 miles east of the Missouri River, which divides the state similarly. “West River” is more conservative (that’s a relative statement) and mostly ranches. East River is farm country.
guachi
I lived in Billings, MT from the age of 9-25 (1983-1999). The economy wasn’t doing well from 1983-1992. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great. The civic boosterism (the good kind) you talk about was strong. People made it the kind of place you wanted to live.
Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix
@BC in Illinois: I could do a whole series on “center of” markers. For example, Rugby, ND and Belle Fourche, SD both claim to be the “Geographic Center of North America”. I don’t know what the “Northwestern World” is, but good for them.
sab
I cannot wait for the BJ fight over what is Midwest. I’m from part of the old northwest territories, which I consider to be the real midwest. But the Census Bureau also includes states as far west as the Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas.
Kent
@BC in Illinois: They have the same 45th Parallel sign on a big green freeway sign on I-5 just north of Salem, OR. It is my marker to take the next exit when I’m driving down to visit my parents.
Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix
@marklar: Gord et. al. sure got it right with “A generation so much dumber than it’s parents”.
WhatsMyNym
@Kent: That’s true of any major city and many minor ones. San Francisco, Rome, New York, Seattle, and on.
Gin & Tonic
Here at about 30 degrees east of you, I can report that the ocean is not yet too cold for swimming.
Omnes Omnibus
@BC in Illinois: Don’t mock. It’s just west of my hometown.
PJ
@WhatsMyNym: NYC gets its water from upstate, and the fact that it needs to pipe in water is solely down to the size of the city, not its location. There is no lack of water in the state.
hotshoe
Just returned home from a long week adventuring in western KS, eastern CO, WY, never got east of 100 meridian. Several counties we noticed that there is no crop growing, although it looks like there is hay making. I believe the best use of that land would be solar/wind farm with bison grazing around the base of the equipment.
Once installed, equipment maintenance doesn’t provide a lot of jobs but the revenue could still flow into families and support some of those old towns. I think that we need government investment to get it going … small ranch operations don’t have the capital to switch over, and agribiz doesn’t have enough incentive to do so …
Just One More Canuck
@marklar: Driving down a corduroy road
Ken
This is fairly common; it just means you’ve stumbled through a rift into a parallel universe. There may be other differences, for example in this continuum, Nelson Mandela didn’t die in prison in the 1980s.
Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix
@hotshoe:
As long as the solar panels or windmills don’t need any maintenance — bison are incredibly tough and they will kill you. You couldn’t pay me enough to enter a field with bison grazing in it.
Ken
Sounds like it’s the quarter-planet slice north of the equator and west of the prime meridian.
SpaceUnit
As someone who actually grew up in Pittsburgh and who now resides in Colorado, I can attest that there is a reason they call it fly-over country. Heck, I even lived in Kansas for a brief period. But it’s been a decade or more since I had occasion to drive east of the Denver airport. There just ain’t much out there.
And yet there is a certain grandeur to those plains. They can seem so geographically, culturally and economically barren as to be considered exotic. Mind-blowing even. Everyone should drive across the Great Plains at least once in their lifetime, just to experience the feeling of those vast and empty spaces.
EricNNY
Love the Hip lyric……
TheOtherHank
When I was in grad school at the University of Minnesota, my advisor lived closer to the North Pole than the equator and worked closer to the equator than the North Pole. He his drive to work crossed the 45th parallel.
Roger Moore
This gets at what is my biggest criticism of contemporary conservatism: its can’t do attitude. The conservatives from 40 years ago may have been unhappy with change, but that included being opposed to decay. They were willing to put in the effort to keep things functioning. Contemporary conservatives don’t even manage that. They’re incredibly pessimistic, finding the cloud behind every silver lining and the reason why every proposal is doomed to failure. Their one consistent position seems to be that nothing we might try to do will ever work, so we might as well just give up.
Ohio Mom
@Kent: Thank you, I just learned a thousand times more about Texas than I ever knew I didn’t know.
I’ve never been there, not interested in going, never gave much thought to it. But your explanation gives me a scaffold for the various bits about Texas that have long rattled around my head — for one, how cowboys and the Old West fit in with cotton farms.
So much of what we are comes down to geography.
BC in Illinois
@Omnes Omnibus:
Although the center of the northwestern world is claimed by both Athens WI and Wausau WI as a “local attraction,” it is closer to Poniatowski WI. (Gesicki’s Tavern in Poniatowski used to keep the record book.) If you’re coming from Wausau, you go west on 39, then turn right, where Socha’s Bar used to be . .
ETA: Athens WI, in Marathon County has always intrigued me. They should run a race from Marathon City to Athens. 18.2 miles – – and it would take you right through Poniatowski.
Old School
@BC in Illinois:
Wow! Visit the site and you can get a two-sided coin! Just think of that – two sides!
Another Scott
@sab: +1
I think we’ve discussed here before that Ohio used to be the West, so it got complicated when people kept going out to bigger longitudes.
“I’m goin’ out to the West in Ohio!”
“You mean East!”
“No …”
Cheers,
Scott.
Don K
Forty years ago I set off on my own on a vacation to the west. I didn’t have an objective, I just headed westward. I followed the Interstates through Iowa, then took US 20 across northern Nebraska. Eastern Nebraska was indistinguishable from western Iowa, mostly corn fields with healthy-looking crops. As I continued, the cornstalks became progressively shorter until some place in central Nebraska, where the farmers said, “Fuck it”, and turned to raising cattle. I decided that place was where the West began.
I was so enamored of driving the two-lanes (so similar to vacations with my parents in per-Interstate days, when I first encountered the west), that every future road trip west with buddies for backpacking avoided the Interstates from KS and NE onward. US-highway culture is so different from the homogenized culture of the Interstates, and I wanted to pick a place for breakfast based on the number of pickups (i.e., locals) parked outside, rather than just go the McDonald’s/Country Kitchen/Perkins sameness. Once, travelling east on Ne Route 2 through the Sand Hills, the waitress said, “what are you doing in Broken Bow?” My buddy immediately answered, “Taking the scenic route.” She looked at us as though we were nuts or else putting her on, but it was true. Seeing the signs for end-of-summer county fairs, seeing the small downtowns (some of which were crumbling even back in the 80s), was a reminder that there are people living their lives in this region, which is something you miss out on driving the Interstates.
I haven’t done a cross-country road trip since about 1995, and it seems the culture in these areas has become crabbed and vindictive, inhospitable to people like me. At my age, I won’t attempt another big road trip, and it’s probably just as well.
This is just a comment, so I’ll stop here.
Roger Moore
@PJ:
There is plenty of water in California to keep the cities going. The cities actually use a small fraction of the water used in the state; something like 4 times as much goes to agriculture as to cities. On a per-capita basis, the difference is even bigger. I’m not trying to say that we should shut down the farms, but the story of water hogging cities is one told by farmers who don’t want to look at their own water use.
UttBugly
I can relate to your comparisons of old and new conservatives. I was raised by a Catholic banker who refused to tell me his political affiliation. It is obvious to me now he was a conservative Republican. But he knew if I knew then it would influence me, and he thought that was something I needed to decide for myself. And here I am.
Ksmiami
@Roger Moore: they are just grifters and nihilists at this point. That’s really why I don’t understand anyone who votes for Republicans- like do you have a societal death wish? And I’ve been extremely lucky on the financial side so I really really don’t get the appeal of the GOP at all, doubly so when I actually see their supporters…
Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix
@Ken: If I knock twice, rap with my cane, will it feel nice and will I be out of the rain? Or is that only in the western world?
Ken
That’s the thesis of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, though I prefer the way Catherynne Valente put it in Space Opera:
Some cultures find themselves on a small island where the only resource is a root that has to be soaked for three days so it doesn’t poison you. Others end up on a large continent with easily-domesticated animals that provide meat, milk, and wool.
The Moar You Know
@sab: any place located between the West Coast and the East Coast, i.e. most of the Disunited States, says this coastie.
MoCaAce
Geography is cool!
I drive across the 45th parallel many times in a typical week. On a calm day with a good rest I could shoot a deer south of the 45th from my home north of the line.
UncleEbeneezer
@Roger Moore: Thank you. Also too, most of those little heartland towns along 395 would be totally screwed without tax revenue and tourism from LA/SF residents.
opiejeanne
That book could have been written about my mom’s family. Terry Montane is about 100 miles from where my idiot great grandfather decided to farmstead in 1913, and got all of his adult children and families to move ther, because FREE LAND! They all had farms in the Ozarks that they owned, and I’ve seen the beautiful farmland he left behind
After my grandparents went bust they moved back to Missouri, but most of them stayed until they couldn’t farm, then they worked on a dam nearby for a couple of years, until that was finished. They all ended up around Jordan, MT, and today they live on Indian land and curse the Lieberals.
I have photos of the tarpaper shack they all lived in with my great grandparents until they built their own hovels, and the tractor they bought as a group had nicer quarters. I have a photo of my grandfather riding on the McCormack machinery (reaper?) being drawn by a mixed team of horses and mules.
dm
@hotshoe: As Mistermix said, bison probably aren’t the right companions to solar farms (wind farms, maybe).
Sheep, on the other hand, work great. They eat the plants below the solar panels, so the energy company doesn’t have to mow. They aerate and fertilize the soil, so the plant-life is more diverse and healthier. Plus, you know, wool, cheese, and lambs.
From the sheep’s point of view, they have nice shady places to get out of the hot sun.
Goats are out — they eat anything, including the wiring in the solar panels.
The Moar You Know
@Roger Moore: CA lifer here. Every word you said: TRUTH. I’m beginning to come around to the idea of shutting down the farms. Having just driven through the Central Valley this last weekend for the first time in 20 years, you can’t help but notice: the Central Valley is desert. Additionally, it is as blood-red as it gets. Some samples of the signage I saw posted in the fields:
Clear #1: Recall Newsom
2. Make California SAFE Again! (there’s a dogwhistle for you)
3. Larry Elder for Governor
4. Build More Dams
5. Stop Dumping OUR Water In The Ocean (seriously)
There were some pictures of Mr. Elder, conspicuously lightened in skin tone. Unbelievably so. Not kidding.
But my point: it’s a desert. Farmers have no business planting crops out there. It’s absolutely unsustainable. We need to start a conversation, at least at the state level, about returning that land to nature.
Han
I don’t understand what that sign is trying to tell me. It seems to be saying that those usurous elites believed some lying scientist type about how poor the land was, sight-unseen, even thought it is actually a most bountiful land. So we were forced to set up a loan system through our government, which lost so much money on loans it only goes to show you how government shouldn’t be doing that kind of thing. But we paid all our debts, dammit.
Oh, and this is all just a bad memory, that we’re going to make sure to remind you about.
Betty
@Don K: Mary Chapin Carpenter has a very good song about the interstate bypassing small towns.
opiejeanne
@Kent: Add San Francisco to the list. They filled up the other, bigger Yosemite called Hetch-Hetchy, for a reservoir for the city of SF.
Omnes Omnibus
@BC in Illinois: I have been there. I do not have a photo though.
Anoniminous
@Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix:
And they don’t want you walking through the field they are grazing.
So you don’t walk through the field and they won’t dance the Hoochy-Koo on your little body. See? Everybody is happy.
Betty
I found the song by Mary Chapin Carpenter. “I Am a Town”.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Kent:
Look bud, we stole the water fair and square.
(Just spent the past two weekends in the Owens Valley and saw more DWP vehicles that I see in LA.)
Omnes Omnibus
@The Moar You Know: No.
Anoniminous
Obligatory
The short grass prairie should never have been farmed. It never should have been ranched either as the Winter of 1886–1887 proved. Buffalo know enough to get out of the wind and snow, cattle just stand there until they freeze. Buffalo can live on the scrub grasses in hard times, cattle starve. The only sensible long-term use is the Buffalo Commons but the dumb asses whites who infest the area are … well, see Obligatory above.
trollhattan
@PJ:
Nearly the entirety of the occupied West has been through one or several boom-and-bust cycle and the post-bustees are always looking for that bailout that keeps their little slice viable to live on.
I do not need to point out the Bundys and their State of Jefferson soulmates to a one think they are independent, “real Americans” who ironically hate big gummint while insisting big gummint bail their asses out by handing over what meager resources are left with the belief that spared the liberal tree-huggers, those closed mines and stripped-bare forests and severely overgrazed spaces will suddenly become fecund and they, rich-rich-rich.
Paul T
Wallace Stegner’s book “Beyond The 100th Meridian” is both a highly entertaining story of John Wesley Powell’s trip along the Colorado River in 1869, and Powell’s later advocacy of an intelligent water policy for the West, beyond the 100th Meridian. He recognized the limiting factor of water supply in the west, and fought the dreamers and developers and hucksters who promoted a “horn of plenty” that…turned to dust regularly. Published in 1954, so it might be a bit old, but the story of Powell is pretty amazing.
https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Hundredth-Meridian-Wesley-Opening/dp/0140159940
Roger Moore
@The Moar You Know:
At least some of that land should be turned into solar farms. Unlike the Mojave, it’s already been torn up and had its native ecosystem replaced with an artificial one. Besides, there are people living there who might benefit from the jobs.
Another Scott
@Han: I had a similar reaction. AFAIK, roadside markers aren’t usually so, er, blatant in their propaganda. It almost made me think it was a Federalist Photoshop or something…
Cheers,
Scott.
prostratedragon
I think 19th century railroad technology together with the land concessions granted to the railway companies had a lot to do with the existence of many such towns, since steam locomotives required refreshing of supplies along the way. In their wiki articles, Ipswich was described as founded for the Milwaukee Road, and Aberdeen as solidified and greatly expanded by it. Most of the rail companies made a large portion of their wealth from land sales to homesteaders, aided to be sure by that atypical stretch of good growing weather. At least one, JJ Hill of the Great Northern, made it a point to attract northern European immigrants to settle and farm along his route, in some competition with the Milwaukee Road and Northern Pacific. So that’s a big reason why there are so many towns in the Plains.
Two interesting things about Aberdeen: one, L. Frank Baum lived there with his family for several years in the 1890s, running a general store which failed and publishing a newspaper; and two, because Aberdeen tended to flood, it became known as The Town in the Frog Pond (key quote from the article begins, “The engineers realized the previous flaws of the artesian well plan”).
trollhattan
@Paul T:
It’s a wonderful book and second the recommendation. Powell was something else.
I read it after reading “Cadillac Desert,” which excerpts “100th Meridian” extensively. Also details the loonyness of the “rain follows the plow” theory.
Stegner’s book about the Mormon immigration “The Gathering of Zion” is likewise fascinating, and helpful in figuring those critters out.
Ken
@Paul T: Before Powell’s trip, Joseph Ives in 1857 was equally discouraged by the land: “It seems intended by nature that the Colorado, along the greater part of its lonely and majestic way, shall be forever unvisited and undisturbed.”
Roger Moore
@Betty:
I don’t have much sympathy for the towns that were bypassed by the Interstate. A lot of those towns had been slowly dying since the 1800s, more or less when they were founded. The sad truth is that the number of people required to farm an acre growing crops like corn, wheat, or soy has halved every generation or so. That has been killing farming towns more than anything. The US highways gave some towns a temporary reprieve, but better cars have been shrinking the need for those places more or less since the roads went in. Even if we hadn’t built the Interstates, those towns would still be dying.
the pollyanna from hell
I lived in Columbus, NE as a child, then Omaha. I did not realize how much distortion of perception and of ecology came from the Ogallala aquifer until decades later.
L85NJGT
@prostratedragon:
Midwestern towns were built to get finished goods off of, and farm production on to, trains.
The road network, and the ever increasing efficiency of internal combustion and electric motors allowed machines to run longer, pull more, with less labor. This allowed transportation nodes to get spread further apart, and then one day there isn’t a town left.
sab
@Paul T: @trollhattan: I think I am going to look into reading everything of Stegner’s that I can find. I have read some, but just in the last two days various jackals have recommended at least three that I haven’t read.
Cermet
LOL; when you say: “who helped settle and grow the Great Plains.” The reality was drive off native Amerikans and kill any that might object despite any agreements/treaty’s promising these people their rights.
trollhattan
@The Moar You Know:
I got hold of decades of federal ag status reports for California and learned quite a bit, especially how vastly the almond acreage has expanded since last century (also grapes, pistachios and others, but mostly almonds). Plant an orchard where there were once row or cover crops and you suddenly find yourself with a long-term commitment to having a minimum amount of water for those trees each year thereafter. Driest year in history? Water the trees or watch your investment die.
That, in my book, is a risky business decision and the bidnezpeople who made that decision are 100% on the hook for those risks.
GSV Sleeper Service
I can die happy, now that my hometown of Miles City has been mentioned on the bj frontpage. It’s certainly more enjoyable than watching the direction of covid infections (spoiler: up) in Custer county and eastern Montana.
Cermet
Certainly lets not forget “Mount Rushmore” – the giant finger white people permanently craved into the Lakota’s sacred hills – yes, lets recall that wonderful feat.
Kent
@Ohio Mom: It is really true. And I-35 also bisects the DFW area. Well…technically there is I-35 west which goes through Fort Worth, and I-35 East which goes through Dallas. But you can see the East-West distinction just between Fort Worth and Dallas. Forth Worth is much more western feeling with a lot of Cowboy kitsch, the stockyards, big rodeo, etc. Dallas is more eastern bankers and finance. And they are only 3 miles apart.
Kent
@Kent: 30 miles apart!
Xavier
Larry McMurtry wrote a book called In A Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas, where he writes something like “It was obvious to me even growing up in the 1950s that the energy was no longer in the small towns and on the home place. The cities needed those energies, and the cities bought them.”
misterpuff
@Han: It seems to me that the the historical marker is trying to say Govmint in place of Business is wrong. But the results say otherwise. The state stepped in and guaranteed loans so that ranchers could get started or ride through the rough times and now all is well. To me that says Govmint works but perhaps a tinge of Socialism offends those fine Dakota burghers.
MoCaAce
@L85NJGT:
Again we need to parse “Midwest”. Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin are not the same as the Dakotas or Wyoming… lets get this fight going folks! ;)
Kent
@Xavier: Larry McMurtry also wrote “The Last Picture Show” in 1971, which is about the best novel/movie of the stagnancy of small town life as any written.
Jager
@The Moar You Know:
Where’s the dividing line between the mid-east and the mid-west, huh?
I grew up in ND, when you cross the Missouri heading west, that’s when you see cowboys, pickups, hats, and boots.
Steve in the ATL
@Jager:
I grew up in Memphis, when you cross the Nashville city limit heading east, that’s when you see cowboys, pickups, hats, and boots.
Geminid
@Anoniminous: James Michener wrote about the tragedy of eastern Colorado dry land farming in Centennial.
Burnspbesq
@SpaceUnit:
I love eastern Colorado.
I remember the first time I drove from the East Coast to Denver. Having grown up in the crowded and incessantly loud New York area, the stillness was a completely new experience. I pulled off I-76 somewhere out beyond Sterling and just sat on the tailgate of my car for an hour, drinking it in.
eclare
@Paul T: The Worst Hard Time is an excellent book about the Dust Bowl. The photographs are stunning and disturbing, huge waves of dirt moving on houses, cars, livestock, people, like a tsunami. Tests showed the dirt made it as far as DC
The author is Timothy Egan.
Burnspbesq
@Don K:
On our recent road trip from Austin to Asheville and back, we spent the first day of the return trip on back roads except for about 100 miles into and around Atlanta. It’s so much more relaxing. US 23 from Asheville through the western NC mountains is breathtakingly beautiful. US 78, Alabama 21, and US 231 took us through rolling hills from just west of Atlanta down to Montgomery.
If you plan your route carefully, you can do it in an EV. Most Electrify America stations and Tesla Superchargers are adjacent to Interstates, but typically there is a U.S. highway that roughly parallels the Interstate, so the chargers are only a few miles from your route.
Burnspbesq
@Roger Moore:
Almonds are the enemy!
Geminid
@eclare: In Centennial Michener describes farmers mounting plows on their rooftops, mordant comments on the airborne soil.
JAFD
At the Burlington County Lyceum of History and Natural Science (in Mount Holly, New Jersey), the 40th parallel of latitude runs thru the back garden. When they were renovating the place, about six years ago, tried to arouse some enthusiasm for marking it with bricks or plants or… Onovdezedaze will have to go back, see what they did.
There go two miscreants
@eclare: Seconding the recommendation of The Worst Hard Time. Very readable.
burnt
Last night Ms. Burnt and I returned from a more than three-week mountain biking trip. On the way out we drove through Hyattville, Manderson, Basin, and Burlington Wyoming. It was grim. On the way back we passed from Idaho into Montana via Lemhi Pass (exciting in a front-wheel drive econobox) and a day later at Billings we hopped on old 87 to Hardin. We had never driven that stretch before. There is a prairie dog town that runs for more than five miles bordering the highway. It is–by far–the biggest one I’ve ever seen. Then we drove 212 to Alzada before turning north on 323 and then Crook (Camp Crook) and on to Buffalo where we hung out for three days. Beautiful country (and I love it), but honestly I don’t know how anyone manages to stay there.
Interesting thing we observed in Idaho in the Stanley/Challis/Salmon area is the local telecomm coop is putting fiber in the tiniest towns. Gigabit service appears to be $300/month which I assume the locals are not paying. If I weren’t retired and wanted easy access to one of the world’s premier outdoor playgrounds I’d consider heading west.
mvr
@Don K: When I was a kid in Illinois Highway 20, which ran through my city, meant a lot to me. I planned bike trips both east and west and eventually did follow it at least as far west as Pecatonica (continued to the Mississipi on smaller roads from there) and east as Elgin on my bike.
More recently this summer I have driven a good bit of it West through Nebraska into the panhandle and also Highway 2 which you mention to get to Ft. Robinson. Lived in this state 30 years and only now getting to know those parts of it.
mvr
@GSV Sleeper Service: Once spent the night and then half a day trying to hitch hike out of Miles City. It is actually a fond memory. On my way to Glacier Park with no idea what I was doing and a home sewn backpack and tent and a new pair of hiking boots.
Also FWIW, the Great Plains edge is moving East. I put it where the tallgrass prairie turns to shortgrass. Climate change is changing that line.
And finally, I seem to have closed out another thread. There is something about my timing that the ones that really interest me are way over by the time I show up.
Another Scott
@mvr: I appreciate your input.
Cheers,
Scott.
gbear
Somewhere in a box at home I have a bumper sticker that says “I hate Highway 12” for the very inner-suburban stretch heading out of Minneapolis to the west. In the 70’s & 80′, it was just a glorified parkway that carried more suburbanites than the road could stand into Mpls. & back for work.
Mike G
@Ksmiami:
Republicans really are just running on a platform of “we will kill all of you for money” and millions of people love it, because they think “all of you” doesn’t include them, and they think they’ll get a cut.