Why All The Water?

I watched a TV news item on how the levels of Lake Meade and Lake Powell, both on the Colorado River, are at dangerously low levels due to an eight year drought. If it gets any lower on Powell, it may not be able to run the turbines that produce so much power for the western states. The largest lake in Nebraska, Lake Mconaughy on the North Platte River near Ogallala, suffers the same condition. The areas where it originates in Wyoming have seen considerably less rain than normal and the lake is only 40% full. It's a sad situation.

Harlan County Lake in Alma, Nebraska, though, is higher than it has been in more than twenty years. It is filled by the Republican River, which flows (naturally) through Republican Valley and meets the dam built in 1954 by the Army Corps of Engineers at Republican City (population 199).

I took this picture while fishing on the river yesterday (no fish, no joy). The Republican River is certainly not the Colorado, but it is a nice local waterway. It is as narrow as 20 feet and as wide as 200 feet, and at its deepest is probably 6-8 feet. It is carrying more water right now than most locals have seen in many, many years. One fella was telling me that less than five years ago during the summer, the river was dry - Not a drop of water in it.

Why we have all the water is not clear to me yet, but between last year and this year additional rain on the river course has taken Harlan County Lake to dramatically higher levels. It's a delight to the local businesses because the word is out and we can expect lots of tourist money to be spent in the area this coming summer. While other lakes are shrinking, Harlan County Lake is growing in size. Currently the lake is about nine miles long and at its widest point is about two miles wide. It's a big lake.

If you have Google Earth on your computer, ask it to take you to Alma, Nebraska. You will see the lake and your first reaction may not be positive. That is because the pictures of the lake have not been updated in four to five years. What you will see is how low the lake was at that time. It was low, really low. If you look at the picture on Google Earth, you can see a road on the left that leaves Alma and crosses the river. That road is highway 183 and it's really a long bridge over the the river and over a large dry area where the lake used to be. Today, the lake is back and extends well to the left of the bridge.

That part of the lake is now a large, shallow estuary and has attracted some wildlife I did not expect to see here. How in the world did pelicans find their way to Nebraska? How did all the seagulls get here? They are here in significant numbers, so it's not just a wayward bird or so that got lost. I want to fish that estuary area because it looks like prime territory for catfish and largemouth bass, but it takes a boat to get there and I have yet to acquire one.

The gulls and pelicans give the boat fishermen a road map to where the fish are. Out on the deepest pars of the lake, large schools of baitfish (shad) are continually on the move. The birds follow the schools and grab what they can near the surface. That tips off the boats filled with anglers to head that way. Where the bait fish are, so are the bass, walleye, wipers, white bass and other fish.

What it boils down to is that whatever Mother Nature is doing to the Republican River is fine with me and most of the other people in the area. It will probably also help our relations with Kansas which continually files lawsuits demanding we quit using so much water from the river. Just as California, Arizona and Nevada fight over water rights to the Colorado River, so do Nebraska and Kansas wage litigation war over the Republican. Ah, Well.

Computer Crash.

When I crash a computer, I don't mess around. I am finally up and running again after a week of no joy. For any tech types reading this, I finally gave up trying to fix the computer. I re-partitioned, re-formatted and re-installed everything. I thank my stars that I have learned to back-up my computer at the end of every month. It could have been worse, but it was still a monumental pain in the @*$!. Ultimately, all went well, except during the process of reloading programs I ran into some "slight" problems and wound up cursing Microsoft in general and Bill Gates in particular and finally subscribed them both to several interesting new hells of my own creation.

In Alma, Nebraska, of course, spring has sprung. From snow flurries at the first of the month, we are now seeing greenery everywhere. Fishing is good, walking is good, life is good, and today it is eighty degrees.

I saw a big difference last night between rural Nebraska and Los Angeles. Alma High School had its annual junior/senior prom. My granddaughter, a junior, dropped by in her gown and brought her date along, a young man named Adam. Since facilities are limited, a formal dinner was held at the auditorium downtown and the dance was held in the Alma High School gymnasium later. Lots of adults gather downtown to see what kind of vehicles bring the kids to the dinner. Now, in California, we all know that the kids rent limos these days. There was just one stretch limo here, an SUV that seemed to have fifty kids in it (probably only about twelve), but aside from that the methods of arrival could only have happened in a farming community. How about big John Deere tractors cleaned and polished beyond belief, with even the tires gleaming a glossy black. I liked the big, big crew cab pickup truck that must have been polished for three days to get that kind of a gleam and the tractor cab from an eighteen wheeler that could only have been cleaned and polished by a team of workers. I think I saw everything except a riding lawn mower used to transport the various and gorgeous young ladies to the dinner. I hope the kids remember it as a special evening.

To satisfy my never ending curiosity, I attended an auction at the cattle sale barn last Tuesday. It was, indeed, an education. The local ranchers bring cattle to the sale barn in Alma once a week and every Tuesday, they are auctioned off. Most of the animals for sale were cows, as opposed to bulls, and were brought individually into an indoor pen about thirty feet square with entrance and exit gates controlled by two men. I immediately noticed that on every side of the pen was a protective barrier like we see in bull-fighting rings for the matadors to seek safety behind. I soon found out why. The cows were brought in one at a time and the auctioneer began his rapid fire routine. As each animal enters the pen, it steps on a part of the floor that is really a scale covered with dirt. The weight then pops up on a large LED display for all to see. The lowest I saw was about 900 pounds and heaviest was just over 1700. Sale prices ran from slightly less than fifty dollars per hundred weight to almost seventy dollars.

Many, many of the cows were really hard to handle and entered the pen with one object in mind: To hurt someone, anyone, as soon as they could. The two men in the pen were well experienced and didn't hesitate to get behind the safety barriers when circumstances looked dangerous. It was explained to me later that the bad attitude of those cows was exactly why they were up for sale to the feed lots: The ranchers don't particularly want dangerous cows in their pastures. It's no fun, they say to drive out to the far reaches of the ranch to repair a fence or check out a calf born the night before and wind up running for your life as you try to work. The cattle brought to the sale barn normally go straight to the feed lots to fatten up and soon after appear as the Thursday beef special at your local market.

Nebraska, of course, is known for its corn production, but cattle ranching is a huge business in this state. It is not rare to go to lunch at a local eatery (Bugbee's in Alma, for instance) and watch some ranch workers walk in wearing beat up stetson hats, cowboy boots and spurs. A lot of them work all day on horseback, and taking off the spurs is just too much hassle when they go to lunch. My oldest daughter is dating a fella who owns a small ranch (fifty head of cattle normally) and is a member of the local cattlemen's association. They had their annual dinner a week ago at "The Station", a local upscale restaurant and bar, and she said she has never been served a steak that big in her life. She also says she ate it - all of it. I think it's state policy to deport all vegetarians to other parts of the country. Beef is where its at in Nebraska.

A source of concern for cattle ranchers is the "globalization" of the meat packing plants. Swift and Co., a grand old name in meat packing, was purchased last year by a company from Brazil. That company is now looking at buying the next two largest meat packers in the U.S., which has all kinds of negative implications for the small ranchers. They fear the "chickenization" of the beef industry. Just as chickens are now produced primarily under direct contract to the meat processors for various fast food franchises, some can see that before long most ranches might produce their cattle on contracts from packing plants, and the thought does not set well with them. Only time will tell.

All I can say is , "Wow"!

Some friends took me to the Rowe Wildlife Sanctuary on the Platte River to see the Sandhill Cranes. I was literally astonished at what I saw.

First off, my friends' daughter, Keanna, is an employee of the sanctuary and often appears on local TV to promote the work there. She, of course, gave us the guided tour and even arranged to have us participate in a catered dinner with the staff.

We were there for the evening "show" when the cranes return to the Platte to rest for the night after having spent the day foraging in the fields for food. These cranes are heading north to Canada, Alaska and Siberia to nest and raise the next crop of young Sandhills (For whatever reason, newly hatched cranes are called "colts"). They stop at the Platte for about a month to "refuel" and gain strength for the rest of their journey, increasing their body weight by about 18%, according to Keanna. It is the sheer numbers of these cranes, though, that absolutely boggled my mind.


On a fifty mile stretch of the Platte there are currently 400,000 Sandhill Cranes. We were told that is approximately 80% of all the cranes in the world. They leave the Platte at daylight each day to forage in the fields and return at dusk to the safety of the river. During the day, the cranes search the fields for leftover corn from the harvest. I have read that they are doing the farmers a favor by eating that corn: If left to sprout, the seeds produce inferior and unwanted corn. The cranes also pick through the available "cow pies" looking for undigested goodies. That's not my idea of a great meal, but if it works for the cranes, so be it.

Using 50X binoculars in the fading light, I was looking down the river at an area about the size of four or five football fields packed with cranes. I asked Keanna how many she thought were in that area and she said, "Oh, about 40,000". We are not talking little canaries or sparrows here, folks, these are pretty big birds. They stand almost three feet tall and weigh about 9 pounds on the average. Holey Moley (As Captain Marvel used to say), that's a lot of big birds in one small area.

They are easily spooked, and for those in the prepared "blinds", no flash photography is permitted. Noise is kept to a minimum. Keanna told us she regularly relieves people in the blinds of cellophane packages of munchies. The noise of opening the package will send the cranes flying. In the photo above, something has frightened the birds and they are taking to the safety of the skies.

The prohibition of flash photography means that pictures will normally be taken with 35mm film rated at 800 ASA or higher. Except for costly high end products, most digital cameras cannot compensate for the low light of dusk and dawn when the cranes are most at rest. using 800 ASA film out here means a trip to Kearney (60 miles) to a professional camera store, as you won't normally find it at Wal-Mart or Target.

With its shallow waters and hundreds of islets, the Platte is an ideal haven for waterfowl. Predators, particularly coyotes, find it very difficult to sneak up on them when wading through water is involved. Wile E. Coyote would get no meals here, even with the help of products from the Acme people.

Counting cranes, geese, ducks and all other types of migrating waterfowl, authorities estimate that 14 to 16 million birds pass through the migration skyway in mid-America each year. For more than a month I could see flocks overhead every day winging their way north. In the fall, I expect I'll see them heading south.

The Sandhills Cranes generally winter in southern New Mexico and southwestern Texas in marshes and estuaries. Life is not necessarily secure there, however, as those states allow hunters to take the cranes as allowable game. Nebraska is the only state in the union that forbids the hunting of cranes, and that is remarkable considering that this is a big, big hunting state, so much so that some people claim that the opening of deer season should be a religious holiday.

I intend to be at the sanctuary each spring and fall for this spectacular show of mother nature at work. In the spring the month is March. Keanna told us that by mid April all the cranes will be gone and the Platte River will lazily wind its way toward the Missouri without the companionship of nearly half a million spectacular birds.

What a sight. What a place this is.

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.