Dazed and photofatigued in Sioux Falls, South Dakota and a few other odds and ends deposited here for the time being......

We finished our route 12 adventure and made a mad dash to Sioux Falls to spend the night before the last leg of our 10 day journey back to Minneapolis where we would spend a day or two resting up and seeing what there was to see before heading home.  Wasn't intending to take anymore pictures, but driving along 12th street, how could I help myself...

Took my life in my hands to get the last one now that the DeLux has been turned into an SRO for homeless, druggie desperados who seemed to just be waking and working on their first cup of coffee while I was at work.  Lots of questions about what I was doing.  "Taking pictures" didn't really seem like the greatest answer to a bunch of guys who probably didn't want their pictures or whereabouts made public knowledge.  Snapped a few quick ones and left pronto.  Was worth it, though.  Don't see many or any motels advertising "salesman stop" at a time and place when having a phone and/or TV in the room was still a luxury.  The things we now take for granted!!!

The next few photos were kind of orphaned and homeless, so while they were NOT taken in Sioux Falls, they did seem at home here and and since they needed a place to be, here they are...

Don't know when this motel was built.  Looks like the mid 60s,  when certain people began to aspire to become a member of the mile high club.  Not sure that figured into their thinking at the time this place was built, but once they did become aware of what they had I'm sure they had a laugh and saw no reason to change things.  So if you are ever passing through Prescott, Arizona and entertained thoughts of becoming a member of the mile high club, here is your big chance, and it will be our little secret.  Before you check in, don't forget to stop at Lefty's (not literally, however, since it is not in Prescott).

St. Augustine, Florida

This tangent appears to provide a good segue into some Route 66 stuff, the first of which was taken in a very little town called Amboy, California which is in the southern Mojave where we picked up the 66, heading into L.A. to meet Devora for the long awaited Hollywood trip.

The gas station and cafe were open, the motel to the rear left looked like it had been closed for years.  To the right is Route 66.  It was late in the day, and Jackie wanted to see the Bagdad Cafe about 10 miles down the road before it got too late, so we didn't have time to hang around.  As it turned out, the Bagdad Cafe was nothing to look at, the lighting was bad, and I did not take a picture.  You'se not missing anything, according to m, anyway.  When we got home, we rented the movie (Bagdad Cafe) and the building looked just about the same.  The movie was quite good, and it is recommended.

                                                                  Pablo

                                               

                                                                            

Highway 12, Nebraska's so called Outlaw Highway...

Left Valentine, Nebraska after breakfast on 8/22 for the last leg of our Nebraska journey for the year, Highway 12...

dubbed the Outlaw Trail by the Nebraska Division of Parks and Tourism for some reason that eludes me.  The brochure and web sites about the trail talk a lot about kayaking, eating, bison and prairie dogs, B&Bs and biking, but barely a word about outlaws.  It is a narrow and desolate stretch of road running from Valentine to the Iowa border and skirting the border with South Dakota the whole way.   It is desolate and foreboding much of the way, an easy place to get lost and "hole up" when needed, and if the posse was closing in, it was a quick run to the border.

And anyway, The state of Nebraska has posted signs all along the way to remind you where you are.  

Our first stop, and the first town we encountered was Sparks, a short blip off the Highway.  There was only one commercial building in Sparks, but it was all purpose, and a beauty.

The post office, general store, coffee shop and meeting place, all in one.  You wouldn't expect traffic problems in a town this size, but just as I was lining up this shot, a tough looking hombre in a pick up pulled up.  I mustered up the courage to ask him to move.  He grumbled a bit, but did.  Somehow I got the feeling this happens often.  The next town about 20 miles down the way was Norton.  All the buildings in town with the exception of one or two has burned to the ground.  There was this blonde, great looking linewoman for the phone company doing something amid the rubble.  She told me there was a forest fire due to the drought near by and all the buildings caught fire.  

Not sure why I didn't take pictures of any of the 3 towns between Norden and Naper.  And just a few of the highway that all basically look like this...

and the corn, that all basically looked like this or worse...Bone dry and stunted, not what it should be for late August.

As I mentioned, Naper was the next town that caught my eye.  Probably the sun was just right and the desolation and decay stood out.

That was Naper....On to Main Street in Butte...

There was a lot to see on Highway 12 and many more photos along the way, but I am getting ready to head out to Nevada  and Arizona for the next few weeks, and am leaving tomorrow, so I'll have to pick up where I left off when I get back.  Till then...

                                                                       Pablo

Still on Highway 20 west, for another few hours...

Saw Johnstown.  Happened upon Long Pine at the most interesting of times...

If you look toward the right of the picture near the flag, you will see that an older woman drove her blue pick up truck onto the sidewalk and mildly dented the building in front of her.  Clicking on the picture to enlarge it might help to clarify the situation.  Other than than not much to see.

Back onto highway 20 and feeling like it was time for lunch, I was intrigued by Big John Full Service Cafe and stopped in to see what was on the menu...

There were three or four pick ups in the lot and a whole bunch of farmer looking types eating, laughing and making small talk with the waitress.  The specials were a meat loaf or roast beef sandwich, mashed potatoes and the salad bar for $5.99, a pretty good deal.  Being a vegetarian, my options were limited, but the salad bar looked pretty good and I sort of decided on that till the waitress/female bouncer type told me the salad bar was $5.99.  I tried to point out the inequity of the situation, but she either didn't get it. didn't want to get it, didn't like my looks, couldn't care less, or all of the above.  By now the farmers had stopped eating and laughing and were focused on the outcome of this losing battle, so I said thanks, tried to leave as unobtrusively as possible and got a Vegi-Delight at the Subway about a half mile down the way.  And they only charged me $2.00, which didn't make ay sense either, although in the opposite direction.  This was on the outskirts of Ainsworth, which I drove through after, but must have been so rattled by this culinary quagmire that I couldn't really see anything to take a picture of.  But I always need some kind of marker of where I was (look over the door), so there was this on the 20, kinda faux, but better than nothing...

Looking at the map, I decided that Bassett, Nebraska, 20 miles down the road, would be my end point for the day, given that I did have to make it back to Valentine to meet Jackie at Milo and Max for dinner.

Bassett was a quiet and mostly eviscerated like most others along the 20, but did have the most spectacular Post Office, which made the journey worth while.

Looking down Clark Street, the main drag,

it would appear that about the only place to buy anything is the R.F. Gotke Variety Store...

The soda fountain next door was closed down, as was Allen's Pizza...

But if you head back to Highway 20, there is no shortage of fast food places, and Walmarts, which probably explains why there is nothing left to sell on main street, except for what they've got at Hometown Variety.

Looking back on my photo log, I realized that I did forget to mention the Range Cafe...

next to the Second Chance Thrift Shop on Clark Street, established in the early 1950's, and by all accounts, the menu and the decor haven't changed one bit, which appears to be a good thing in this case.  Farm fresh food well prepared and predictably good, served up by the owners, who are said to take great pride in their restaurant.  A good recommendation which I will have to follow up on next time I pass through.  

                                                                   Pablo

Johnstown, Nebraska

So a little further along Highway 20, I had my second serendipitous encounter with Willa Cather, sort of.  Somewhere back in the blog archives you may remember the humorous little story of how we met up with Willa Cather's great nephew, George (it's just as well that I couldn't remember his last name or I would probably have been stalking him by now), who also lived in New York and who was the only other adult on our 3:00 tour of the capitol building in Lincoln, and about our dinner at Billy's and his Cather related stories, and how I left feeling somehow related and needing to make a pilgrimage to Red Cloud, which we have done more than once, and a lot more.  Your assignment, due next Monday, is to find that blog entry, and any others related to my Willa Cather/Red Cloud experiences, and anything else you might find on Wikipedia or wherever and write a 10 page essay that will bore all of us to death,  suck  the life and joy out of her literature and provide the perfect academic experience that will make you never want to hear her name again.  I jest, of course, but isn't that the job of a high school English teacher, to make you never want to read serious literature again.

So my second Cather encounter was in Johnstown, the town in which they filmed the CBS movie version of O' Pioneers.

As you can tell from the sign, the star has faded on this claim to fame, and the town has receded back into its former anonymity, although there are still signs of its former brush with fame.  Due to the vagaries and vicissitudes that define the circumstances provided to a photographer, I passed the town in the morning and was lucky enough to find the sun shining on the more interesting side of the street, of which this was all of it.

There was a bit more, but I wasn't there for it, but you get the idea.  Unfortunately, the only operating business other than the post office was a bar on the shaded side of the street that didn't look like part of a movie set.  But for closure, I do need to get back.  Interestingly, there no longer seemed to be any effort to capitalize on their fame in terms of tee shirt shops, etc.

                                                                    Pablo

Wood Lake, Nebraska

My welcome to Wood Lake was anything but warm or inviting.  As I turned off Highway 29 and onto Main Street, I was met by two older women in a Cadillac who started to follow me around , staring.  They left after a while, but returned for more of the same, and then there was the guy in the gray pick up truck who was uncharacteristically unfriendly for a Nebraskan and stopped to ask what I was up to. Just taking pictures I said, why he asked, because that's what I do I said.  He said ok and pulled off.  Other people stared too, but I went about my business otherwise unmolested, but unsettled, wondering why people would be so protective of this beat up old town that was mostly boarded up anyway.

What I found out talking to the postmaster in the post office which is the two story building to the right in the first photo, is that three nights ago, at about one in the morning, this hidden, peaceful little ghostly town, whose only operating business (that I could see) is the post office, was attacked by a band of vandals who drove through town, broke most of the windows, and then drove off.  You think of this kind of senseless violence happening elsewhere, but here in this almost non-existent place.  I'm sure that the residents were more than unsettled by this impossible occurrence, hence their vigilance when I entered town.

The postmaster told me that windows were broken in cars and stores in Valentine as well, 70 he said, and that all of this occurred on the last night of the county fair.  Drunks, he figured.  But we all get drunk now and then and don't do mean, senseless stuff like this, I said.  He just shrugged.

He told me the present post office building used to be the railroad administrative office for the area, when there was still a railroad.  When they left, the PO moved in and until recently the old postmaster lived upstairs.  No longer.

This is the old hotel.   The windows were broken here too, but not all boarded up.  The plate glass from the broken window to the left was exceptionally thick.  Had never seen such thick glass, and standing by the now exposed interior, I felt very cold air pushing out of the building, very cold.  It had no electricity, and the it had been quite warm, unseasonably hot even, during this summer of the drought, so why so cold?

These are pretty much all of the buildings on Main street in Wood Lake.  A small town that may never be the same now that such senseless violence has touched their community.

   

                            

                                                                            Pablo

Highway 20 east from Valentine, Nebraska...

Back on Highway 20, heading east toward the north east corner of Nebraska we haven't seen.  Below is one of my "stock" photos of Highway 20 that I'm sure you've seen before.  But if come up with anything better, and it ain't baroque, why fix it...

The day started out optimistically enough.  We were in the Daktoas and hadn't been thinking about the drought that has come down hard on the middle great plains.  Our trip down from the Dakotas offered no sense of the devastation ahead that we would find in Nebraska.  The corn, sunflowers and wheat up north were rampant...aggressively verdant;  full and green and ripe as you would expect for this time of the year, late summer.  The wheat was tall and gold and being harvested, the sunflowers explosive, and the corn tall and full as you would expect.  No drought there.  But just below the Dakota border however, the situation in Nebraska was different...drought of Biblical proportions,  beyond despair, beyond redemption, beyond belief for this late in the summer.  Here in "God's own cow country" from Cherry County east,  it was a nightmare...

it was late August and the corn was not as high as an elephant's eye.  It was withered and dead!!!

Sparse, stunted shoots that should be 5 or 6 feet high and full of corn... barren, abandoned, wilted...left for dead...

 just plain dead.   Millions of acres lost...Farmers already living on the edge, lost and hurting.  It is impossible for a few photos to begin to document the devastation but hopefully you get the idea...  This is late August and there is nothing but desolation as far as the eye can see.  No matter how much it rains there is no hope...no harvest...a tenuous future at best for our heartland.  They say it may be global warming and that this is the beginning of something bigger and ongoing.  Who knows, but...

God help the midwestern farmers!!!!!!!!

Traveling along Route 20 were these old telegraph poles, some empty, just like this, some with scraps of wire still hanging from them.  This is number 250 of maybe 500 or 1000 or more poles that ran along side of the railroad that is no longer there, but ran to the left of the poles.   There are still remnants of the railroad bed in various places to confirm its former existence.  There are still hundreds or thousands of these poles along the 20 and along other stretches where the different rail lines ran till the 1950's according to the locals, when they were ripped up to provide the rational for the necessity of the trucks that would be replacing them as a means of hauling the crops.  Short sighted and counterproductive as are most of the corporate/politically driven decisions that have laid the groundwork for our decline into a nation grappling for meaning and headed for eventual oblivion, just like the agricultural villages along the tracks that are now empty, irrelevant,  tumbled down reminders of what once was, when there was a reason for being.  If I am repeating myself regarding this issue, its because it can't be said enough.  One thing that puzzles me is why they never tore down the poles.  Their continued existence might cause people to ask questions.  Too many questions.  These need to be studied further.

                                                                      Pablo