Circling the Prairie

When I was in Colorado, I didn't want to go into the mountains right away, as the altitudes are unkind to me, so I decided to spend the better part of a day driving east. Why I chose to do this is an excellent question. As anyone who has been to Colorado knows, there is nothing of apparent interest between the Nebraska border and the Front Range cities; it's just a mess of sagebrush and scattered, half-empty towns. As a journalist, however, I was trained to find the most interesting angle on a subject by looking "beneath the surface." Here, the mountains were the surface; you could see them right there! And I was tempted to look for something in the flatland that nobody had noticed.

My route first took me across the Platte River valley near Greeley, a region that one might want to call "the real Colorado," or at the very least, "the Colorado where they make your hamburgers." It was a land of ranches, feedlots and grain elevators and the slow vehicles moving between them, and the place is defined by its smell. Here's how Eric Schlosser described it in Fast Food Nation (2001):

The smell is hard to forget but not easy to describe, a combination of live animals, manure, and dead animals being rendered into dog food. The smell is worst during the summer months, blanketing Greeley day and night like an invisible fog. Many people who live there no longer notice the smell; it recedes into the background, present but not present, like the sound of traffic for New Yorkers. Others can't stop thinking about the smell, even after years; it permeates everything, gives them headaches, makes them nauseous, interferes with their sleep.

I didn't stop there. It could be that all of America is now divided into the places where we work and the places where we play; or perhaps, as Schlosser's Dickensian language might suggest, we are creating Victorian distinctions in which only the people with wealth and advantages get to live in places that don't smell bad. My original destination was the Pawnee National Grassland, an intriguing pair of rectangles in the northeast corner of my map, where nothing seems to exist except for (presumably) grass. It's supposed to be a haven for birds, and I did begin to see birds that were unfamiliar to me fluttering at ground level beside the road. Contrary to what the map indicated, the roads into the grassland were unpaved, and even as an intrepid explorer, I wasn't bold enough to pull onto a dirt road and wait for the next snowstorm. So I contented myself with driving a little ways down the main highway. For about fifteen minutes, I found the poetry: Just hills, gently breaking up and down one steep rise after another, clothed with brush and caked with old snow. But soon, development appeared on the horizon: isolated oil rigs and a colony of wind turbines. I circled back toward the mountains after stopping in a town where there's a miniature Statue of Liberty dedicated either by the Boy Scouts or to the Boy Scouts, and across the street, a pleasant strain of country music escapes out of a record store into the town square.