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