Odds and Ends

Today is March 23, Easter Sunday, and it is also my oldest daughter's birthday. She says she is 29. Yeah. Right. I asked her how she explained that to her oldest daughter who lives in Sacramento and is 30 years old herself. She just smirked and turned her head away. Since I am her daddy, I know exactly how old she is, but I'm not going to print it here. We're all having Easter dinner at her house tonight.

The weather just keeps getting better but is still inconsistent. Old man Winter simply wants to hang around as long as he can. Today it's going to be about 55 degrees, then dip down into the twenties tonight and then go up close to 75 tomorrow afternoon. to take advantage of that warmth, I'm going fishing in the Republican River with my friend Steve tomorrow. The walleyes, white and largemouth bass, and some others have moved out of the lake and into the river to spawn. We're going to see if we can relieve the fish congestion in the river and add to the congestion in our freezers. I went fishing at Cedar Point on the lake two days ago and caught a 3 to 4 pound carp, which I sent back to its momma. The lake is still a bit too cold for most of the true game fish to move into the shallows.

My daughter, Eva, and I will start walking the trail by the lake again tomorrow morning. During the winter the auditorium downtown is open for those of who like to walk in the morning and Friday was the last day until next winter. I can only describe it as "round and round we go". Circling the inside of the auditorium 26 times equals one mile of walking. Fella here named Don opens up and brings his boom box with a great blend of CDs to keep us from getting too bored. Most of us who walk are senior citizens trying to stay healthy. Eva, having been born in 1957, has no liking for Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman, but Don does play a set of their music, which suits me just fine. One of the walking couples in their mid to late seventies will occasionally forgo the walking and swing into a dance in the middle of the auditorium when a piece of music really takes them back. I'm not talking gentle waltzing here. I'm talking lively dancing that gets awfully close to the old jitterbug stuff of WWII. Friday they bounced out there when Bill Haley and the Comets started in on "Rock Around The Clock". I do not foresee "rockin' chairs" in the near future for them.



































The top picture is a photo I took last summer of one of the clearings along the lake walkway.
At the bottom is what that same general area looks like today. Summer is prettier without a doubt and the process of changing into summer is well along the way. Many of the trees limbs have the little growth nubs that will become leaf and branch with time. Here and there little of spots of green grass are pushing their way into the light. I will be able to watch the change of the season on a daily basis. It's a new experience for this old Angeleno and it's fascinating.

Oh, and by the way, in the state finals for the high school speech teams, my granddaughter's team took fifth place. Not bad for a school with a grade 7 to 12 population of approximately 250 competing against schools from Omaha and Lincoln with populations of 1500 and up. They did a good job.

The migrations of geese and duck are just about finished. For most of this month anybody looking skyward would have seen multiple vee shaped formations of waterfowl heading north. Often the sky was filled with thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of geese and ducks. I have never before in my life seen such a thing and I don't mind telling you that it was spectacular. They call this area part of the "flyway", and I can certainly see why. I thought I could appreciate the few such formations I would occasionally see in California, but the sights here are often flabbergasting. It makes me appreciative of the need to preserve our wetlands so that these migratory populations will always be able to find a temporary haven. I like to think of myself as a pragmatic conservationist, and by that I mean that while I am an environmentalist, I also think hunting organizations like Ducks Unlimited deserve tons of praise for their efforts to promote wetland preservation. They recognized long ago that without places for the ducks and geese to exist, they would have nothing to hunt. Everybody has benefited. I have no selfish interest in saying good things about a hunting organization. I don't own a firearm of any kind and haven't in over forty years, but plain old practicality tells me people with what may appear to be conflicting interests can find common ground that is helpful to all.

A Lot Going On, Part One

Each of the high schools in the area, including Alma High, has a speech team, and my grand-daughter, Enchantra, is on the Alma team. She is a Junior and is very articulate when she speaks, which is not necessarily that often since she seems permanently attached to her MP3 player and always has those ear buds plugged in to her ears.

The speech teams compete in various competitions against other schools. They have various categories that must be covered, such as Oral Interpretive Dissertation, Informative Speaking, Duet Acting and Humorous Prose.

Having done the rounds of schools, the teams prepared for the district finals, which this year were held in Alma. For a final dress rehearsal, the team put on its full performance a week ago last Thursday night at Joe Camera in downtown Alma. Joe Camera is a combination coffee house, one hour photo and bicycle shop with a sort of community recreation room in the back. The parents gathered in the rec room at the appointed hour and packed the place. It was great to see that many of the town's residents take an interest in what the kids are doing. Face it, speech team is not as popular as football or basketball, so to see 45 to 50 people jammed into that room was terrific.

Enchantra did a solo performance in Informative Speaking on the history of Daylight Saving Time. She did some good research and came up with a lot of facts that raised the eyebrows, not the least of which (as you may have noticed) is that it is "Saving" time , not "Savings". Singular, not plural. Hmmm.

The Oral Interpretive Dissertation was a team effort involving five people, one of whom was my granddaughter. Her best friend, a young lady named Riane, was the featured performer and did a presentation on "The Insanity of Mary Girard". Girard was the wife of the one of the wealthiest men in the U.S. shortly after the American Revolution. He had his wife, Mary, declared insane and placed in an asylum, where she spent the last 25 years of her life. History is not that clear as to whether she was truly deranged or if her husband just wanted her out of the way so he could have a parade of mistresses in his life without criticism at home. It was a terrific presentation.

A senior, a young lady named Allison, did a humorous prose piece by performing what was a magazine article by Nora Ephron titled, "A Few Words About Breasts". It really spoke about what it's like in this Playboy oriented society for a girl to grow into maturity "undeveloped". It was indeed humorous, and sometimes downright funny.
If the reader is not familiar with the name Nora Ephron, she is a writer who specializes in romantic humor, writing things like "Sleepless in Seattle", "When Harry Met Sally" and adapting an old Jimmy Stewart film called, "The Shop Around Corner" into a new movie she called, "You've Got Mail". Nora Ephron's work has given Meg Ryan a career.

The evening was terrific, and the following Monday the real district finals took place at Alma High. There were four judges in four different rooms, and each performance had to take place in front of each judge. That meant that Enchantra took her visual displays on Daylight Saving Time to four different rooms and went through her routine four different times. So did each of the other groups.

Unfortunately, her Informative Speaking performance did not place her among the winners. The presentation on Mary Girard, however, took first place in its category, and those five kids, including Enchantra, will travel to Lincoln next week to the state finals competition. Allison's presentation on a young woman's growing up pains also won first place, and she will take her act to the state capital for the finals.

I certainly wish them well, and I hope you do too. I'll let you know how they do.

A Lot Going On, Part 2

Yesterday I drove to McCook, NE, which is about 65 to 70 miles east of here and is about 50 miles from the Colorado border. It was an easy drive on good two lane roads with 60 and 65 mph speed limits. I passed through seven or eight small towns and never had to come to a full stop. Highway signs give fair warning that there will be reduced speed ahead, so there is ample time to slow down to the usual 35mph through the towns. The town sizes varied from 136 to 1044, and McCook itself is just over 7,000. Wow, it even has traffic lights. That's a big city in our book.

It has become obvious to me that a car's license plate can be a real liability on that kind of a drive if a person likes to drive over the speed limit. My license number is 51-C887, and the 51 indicates that I live in Harlan County. The law will usually give some leeway to drivers from their county, but those from outside that county had best toe the line to as near driving perfection as possible. Every county has a different number based on how many cars are registered there, and of course Omaha cars, from Douglas County, have license plates that begin 1-. You definitely do not want to push your luck in other counties if your license plate begins 1-. It may prove costly.

I noticed as I got nearer to McCook that the "rolls" in the rolling countryside began to have deeper valleys and higher peaks. I can only assume that the terrain was beginning its change to the higher plains of Colorado. I want to come back in the later spring when things are green and see it again. It's pretty even in the early spring drab brown, but later it ought to be very, very pretty.

Driving these country roads is an eerie feeling for an ex-Californian, because there is almost no traffic. It's really weird after spending my life in L.A. The danger that all drivers must prepare for on those drives is deer. I have been told by almost everyone that at some time, somewhere in Nebraska, a deer will jump in front of me and the front of my car will bring it to an untimely death. If I am lucky, they say, the damage to my car will be less than $5,000.00. I am not looking forward to that eventuality.

I have a sister who has lived in Missouri for 40 years and she tells me I can buy a small device that attaches to my bumper and emits a high pitch whistle that only deer can hear. It frightens them as the car approaches and they will not jump in front of the car in panic. She says she has had one on her car for many years and has never even had a close call with a deer. She did tell me, however, that the whistle didn't help very much the night she hit the cow. That's another story, though.

A Lot Going On, Part 3

Every region of this country has its peculiarities in the naming of places and Nebraska is no different. Example: Norfolk, NE, is pronounced as though it were spelled Norfork, which makes this the second state I've been in where a town of that name is not pronounced as it is spelled. While in the army, six centuries ago, I was stationed near Norfolk, VA. It was made clear to me early on that pronouncing it as it was spelled marked me as an alien creature. The citizens of that state pronounce it "Nawflk", no exceptions allowed.

I regularly visit a local "village" here named Orleans. Please articulate it as "Orleens". However, if you are in Louisiana, be advised that the battered city on the delta is not pronounced "New Orleens". It is "N'awlins" to the true natives, a few of whom I have met along the years. To the ears of the westerner, the southern pronunciation of ordinary sounding words can take some strange turns. The same is true of some towns here in Nebraska.

Nebraska has the town of Beatrice, and it is pronounced "be-at-ris", with the accent on "at". It's almost directly south of Lincoln, so someday I'm sure I will be there for a visit.

A couple of familiar names to my friends in Southern California would be the towns of Arcadia, NE. and Fullerton, NE, which are pronounced exactly as they are back in the far west. I also notice that just across the Nebraska border in Colorado are the towns of Akron and Yuma.

There are many towns in Nebraska that reflect its direct involvement in the opening of the west and its Native American homelands. Place names like Red Cloud, Broken Bow, Tekemah, Medicine Creek, Red Arrow County, Omaha and Ogallala all give testimony to the Indian past of Nebraska. And, of course, Red Cloud was the home of Willa Cather, who wrote so many classic stories about life in pioneer Nebraska. I recommend everyone rent the movie "O' Pioneers" with Jessica Lange, which is a faithful re-telling of Cather's greatest novel.

Even the name "Nebraska" comes from an Otoe Indian word for "flat", but it's misleading because Kansas sets new standards for the definition of flat. Pool tables dream about being that flat. Nebraska farmland is primarily gently rolling countryside, but the sandhills in north-central Nebraska and the canyons of the badlands in the east belie the belief that Nebraska is absolutely flat.

Currently, I am reading a book by Roger Welsch, who is to Nebraska what Garrison Keillor is to Wisconsin and Minnesota with his tales of Lake Woebegon. For years, Welsch appeared on the "CBS Sunday Morning" show with his "Postcard From Nebraska". His love for this state is up front to the point that he describes his disgust when he lived briefly in Colorado and found that the scenery was obscured by all the trees and mountains. He loves these plains and I can see why.

This Is For The Birds

Yesterday was Thursday, March 6, and I drove my daughter, Eva Marie, to Grand Island, NE, (just over 100 miles away, population 50,000) for an appointment with an epilepsy specialist. Much of that drive on I-80 runs parallel to the Platte River and we were treated to views of endless flocks of migratory birds as they traveled to and from the river.

The Platte River is not typical of what most of us see in our mind's eye when we hear the word "river". It meanders gently across the landscape from its origins in Colorado to its merger with the Missouri River. It is broad and shallow with literally hundreds of small islets dotting its course. Those islets, which a westerner would refer to as sandbars, provide the reason for the Sandhill Crane to rest and "refuel" in Nebraska.

The vast numbers of the Sandhill Cranes that visit here are of the subspecies referred to as the "Lesser Sandhill Crane", lesser denoting that this is a fairly small crane and weighs 7 to 9 pounds at most. Yesterday we saw literally thousands of them in different flocks moving to and from the river. It took a conscious effort on my part to keep my eyes on the road while driving instead of trying to watch the show up in the air. Just to keep things interesting, there were also large flocks of geese and ducks moving from the feeding areas to water sanctuaries. For the Cranes, the Platte offers nighttime protection from coyotes, foxes, bobcats, badgers, black bears and the occasional cougar. Bald eagles have been known to go after some of the smaller cranes, and we have plenty of those eagles in the area (Fish and Game officials counted 63 bald eagles at Harlan County Lake this winter).

Many of the farmers in the area are less than thrilled to see their fields covered with cranes during the daylight hours. Cranes, of course, love to eat grains and if some of those grains are newly planted seeds, so much the better. The winter wheat, of which I wrote in an earlier posting, is starting to sprout and cranes love the green leaves. If it were just a few cranes, the farmers wouldn't be concerned at all, but a total migratory population of 600,000 seed eating waterfowl can do a lot of damage. There is not much the farmers can do, since Nebraska is the only state in the U.S. that does not allow the hunting or taking of cranes. Most of the birds will stay on the Platte for about a month, leaving in early April for Northern Canada, Alaska and Northeastern Siberia, where they will nest and lay their eggs.

This is a Whooping Crane, of the rarest and most endangered birds in the world, and if luck is with me I will see one or two of these magnificent creatures when I visit the Rowe Sanctuary on my crane watching day.

In 1941 there were only 21 Whooping Cranes alive in the wild. Today, that number is close to 600, but its continued existence is still very much in doubt. It is much larger than the Sandhill Crane, standing 5 feet tall and weighing 18 to 22 pounds on the average. I have read about the efforts to save this bird since I was 12 years old, and if I am sufficiently blessed to see one living in the wild as nature intended, I will consider that one of the highlights of my 73 years.

Brrrrr!

This is a picture of the northern lights, or aurora borealis, as seen from Sondrestromfjord, Greenland. It's important to me because I spent a year of my army life there from spring of 1955 to spring 1956. When people here continually ask me how I am handling the cold weather in Nebraska, I usually tell them a few tales of what really cold weather is like. Thanks to the nature of this blog, I can show you in just a few pictures what that place was like.

First, they no longer call it by the Danish name Sondrestromfjord. It is now officially named Kangerlussuaq, its original Inuit name. Further, to my astonishment, it is now a tourism stopover, and an Air Greenland flight leaves Baltimore, MD, destined for Kangerlussuaq once each week during the summer.

Since the early 1950s, there has always been a fairly nice hotel there. Sondrestrom was a refueling point for the very first over -the-pole flights from Los Angeles to Europe, and the hotel was maintained for the passengers in case the planes could not take off due to weather or mechanical difficulty. When I was there, the two airlines involved were TWA, flying Lockheed Constellations, and SAS , piloting Douglas DC-6Bs. Both were the last generations of propeller driven passenger aircraft. The USAF has closed its airbase and now the entire "town" and airfield is under the care and maintenance of the Danish government.

With today's long range jet aircraft, stopping to refuel is no longer necessary, but SAS still flies there from Copenhagen, Denmark, two to three times a week. The picture to the left was taken in the 1970s and shows a Douglas DC-8 being prepped for flight. The steam in the air tells us the temperature was probably between thirty and forty degrees below zero.


During the winter, morale was a problem for those of us who stayed the entire year. The officers in charge tried their best to keep us grinning, but signs like the one to our right failed to get the job done.
Many times in winter, when we had been outside in extremely cold weather, we were required to drink a glass of cold water before we could have a cup of coffee. The water helped warm our teeth in stages so that we could have a hot drink without cracking the enamel and requiring extensive dental work.

A creature of the north doesn't seem too impressed with the SAS jumbo jet parked on the ramp. In Greenland and Scandinavia they are called reindeer. In Canada and Alaska the same animal is called a caribou.






Even the little critters will take a curious look at what the strange two legged animals are up to.







This is what the old airbase looked like. That's the control tower in the center and the runway is just in front of it. The string of boxlike buildings at the bottom of the photo are cement barracks for quartering the military residents. Before we left Ft. Eustis, VA, to travel to Sondrestrom, we were told that when we arrived we would be able to find a woman behind every tree. As you can see, there are no trees in Greenland. None. Not even one.

Was it cold? You betcha it got cold. We army types didn't stay on the base itself as shown above. We were stationed in wooden barracks seven miles over the hills. We were located at a little facility called Camp Lloyd right at the harbor. There were twenty of us (more or less) who stayed the entire year. In the summer when the harbor thawed we imported 300 army stevedores from the States to unload ships filled with goods for the airbase. Army trucks and army drivers then hauled the goods over the hills and to the base.

Our showers and restrooms (officially called latrines) were about fifty yards from the barracks, which were not well insulated. In the winter if you wished to really chill a six pack of beer, you placed it on the floor overnight. It would be ice cold for the next day.

One night after having showered, shaved, et al, I dressed up in my bulky but warm air force flight suit and trudged back to the barracks (Walking was not difficult as there was not much snow. It was usually too cold to snow). As I stood at the barracks door preparing to enter, the thermometer on the outside wall said that the temperature was 44 degrees below zero. I reflected that I had not seen the sun in weeks, thanks to perpetual darkness, and I swore that when I got back to the USA I would never, ever complain about hot weather again. I still keep that promise today.

I apologize to my friends who check this blog to see what's going on with the L.A. transplant. January was so busy for me that it remains a blur of activity. How does that happen in such a small town and in the dead of winter? February introduced me to something I have never experienced before: Bronchial Pneumonia. I never want to be introduced to that again. It knocked me flat, and every time I coughed, it felt like red hot metal ball bearings were rolling around in my chest. Ugh. Ugh. There are a couple of bugs ravaging this area that were not covered in any of the usual flu and pneumonia immunizations that many of us received at the start of winter. My oldest daughter, Eva Marie, went down with the flu in February even though she had a flu shot in November. Almost everybody I talk to tells me that at least two members of their family were down with it.

Sickness aside, winter is on its way out but it ain't leaving without a fight. Generally everything is warmer and the snow is all gone. Saturday, March first, the temperature in Alma, Nebraska, was 74 degrees. Wow, that felt good. Sunday the high temperature was 44 with wind and rain. Today it is dry, but there is wind and cold air. This morning the time and temperature sign on the bank told me that at 9:00 AM it was 24 degrees downtown. Those who have lived East of California know that March is a month for battle between the departing and incoming seasons, but generally the trend is toward warmer weather.

I just want it to be warm enough long enough to melt all the ice on the banks of Harlan County Lake and the Republican River so I can cast my line into the waters. My freezer is empty of fish and that just isn't the way things are supposed to be.

The walking trail by the lake is snow and ice free and I walked it three times last week. Boy, my legs are out of shape. The scenery on the walk is rather stark, since none of the trees have new leaves yet. I looked closely at the ends of the some of the lower branches of a couple of trees and you can see the new growth that will soon be putting out the Spring greenery.

In the mornings now, I hear birds singing when I open my eyes and try to find the courage to get out of bed. I have always read that when Red Breasted Robins show up, you know that winter is gone. Well, the Robins are everywhere but it's still pretty cold out there today and for the rest of the week. The weekend, though, looks to be much warmer.

In the middle of the month, I am going to a nature preserve on the Platte River to watch the Sandhill Cranes. Those cranes are on their way north to Canada, Alaska and Siberia, but every spring they stop on the Platte for about a month to eat and gain strength for the rest of the journey. Approximately 600,000 of them, plus a few of the rare and endangered Whooping Cranes, will spend their nights in the safety of the sandbars of the Platte, then take off in the morning to feed in the many fields in the area. They return at dusk to the Platte for their evening snooze. The Rowe Sanctuary has built viewing blinds where we can stand unseen and peer through the cutouts to watch these magnificent birds and take pictures. No flash photography is permitted as it tends to frighten the cranes. Since the viewing will take place while the sky is still rather gray and the sun is just coming up, we'll have to use a very fast film, so I'm going to get some ASA800 film on my next foray into Kearney. We are told that by the time sun is up and the sky is bright, most of the cranes will have flown off to their feeding grounds.

One of the townspeople who knows told me to mark my calendar on the date that is three weeks before Easter. That, he says, is when the fish that spawn move out of the lake and into the river. Walleye, largemouth bass, white bass and a few stripers will be there for the taking. That date is next Saturday, March 9. I'm armed and ready.