Carhenge, The Messenger & "little timidities"

Wed Aug 22

# days on the road: 15
route: North Platte Nebraska, Sand Hills, Carhenge, Agate
Fossil Beds Nat’l. Monument to Fort Robinson State Pk.
playlist: NRBQ, “Live at Yankee Stadium” and a lot of silence

The day where I check out a master showman’s house, visit a monument made of wrecked cars, and meet a messenger who radically changes my itinerary. Oh – also checked out fossil beds of the dogbear and camped for the first time.
* * *

Jack bought a bottle of whiskey in North Platte Nebraska, sharing it with his buddies on the trailer of his Greatest Ride. There is a stone statue in the square here. From the high ground here Sioux watched as trappers, pioneer settlers, Mormons escaping persecution, all passed this way heading west. A monument with 7-foot tall stone Indian marks the history, dedicated to “those that were laid away during that mighty march in conquest of an empire.” Wonder what the giant stone Sioux thinks of that?

I do a little wild driving in Platte. A lot of u-turns. My patented wrong way down the one-way street move. I love these towns! Streets are four lanes wide and empty. Nobody honks. They just look at you a little quizzically.

In the interest of wild riding I visit Buffalo Bill Cody’s house. William F. Cody, did his first Wild West Show in North Platte. Scout’s Rest – his ranch with huge stables and comfy, spacious wood shingled, multi-porched home sits just north of the city. I look at a panaramaic shot of Buffalo Bill and Pawnee Bill’s cast of their Congress of Rough Riders Show. Maybe like 300 people!! And they don’t even show the animals, or back of house folks. Tons of cowboys front and center, Indians in the back with severe dark faces. And then …Chinese guys?! Ole Pawnee Bill was rustling up any exotic ethnic groups that worked with horses. One poster trumpets “hunting llamas with bola-bolas,” Another advertises their venue holding “20,000 people twice daily.” Eee gads. In the 1880s!

Bill lived hugely long for his times - to 70 (1846-1917) with the “made a million, lost a million” trajectory. Of his three children only one survived to be a grown up. When she died at 35 her orphaned children were adopted. Who ever is out there descended from this consummate showman in his thigh-high boots doesn’t know it. Wild Bill’s progeny are so far un-locatable says the perky short lady in the comfy living room.

The house seems to want you to sit down and touch all the different warm surfaces – wool rugs, velvet settees, warm woods, cow hides, a bone chair - but velvet ropes say no. I look at Bill’s full-length horse hide and bison coats, his sadly empty nursery and wander out the back door to the vast stables and sleepy bison. Fame would freak Jack Kerouac out and help slam his drinking into overdrive. For Buffalo Bill is was like the Fountain of Youth.

I turn north to the Sand Hills, 13 million acres of grass-covered sand dunes in the middle of Nebraska. I love the incongruity of it. It looks like Assateague only where is the ocean? And who invited the cows? The cattle are spread way far apart on the meager pasturage. Here things are so dry the yellow and black mini-sunflowers crackle in the wind as they rub against each other – they are that stiff. Aside from the occasional pick-up truck and derrick pumping up some of the riches of the Ogallala Aquifer there is just nothing. Just hundreds of miles of dunes and sand and sky and crackly sunflowers. A few brave folks ranch here and their houses hide in little green borders of trees. No radio stations. No cell service. Quiet. Vast. I am VERY careful not to lock my keys in the car when I stop to take pictures.

In Mullen a fellow asks “Where in Maryland you from?” He used to live in Rockville. Retired from the Navy. Came out here with his wife – she waves – to live cuz their daughter moved here to be with her husband who is from here. Navy dude loves it he says. Seems to mean it too. His daughter, working in a vast empty gift shop, is not so much lovin’ it. She looks near hysterically bored.

I wish I could stay in the town of Mullen for their big rodeo on Sep 1 but I roll out.
Heading west there are trains full of coal. Is there such a thing as an endless line of trains with each train being almost two miles long? With each car and each train being exactly alike? I think so. I saw it in Nebraska.

Carhenge is a sublime balance of the spiritual and the comic. A scale model of Stonehenge built of wrecked American cars by a son and his siblings as a tribute to their dad who once farmed these sandy acres. In the hard blowing plains winds the gray painted wrecks creak with tiny metallic moans. Cars erupt out of the sand like ancient dinosaur skeletons. Gray Dodges and Fords, welded into squat towers, looks like some Mad Max’ian fable – the end result of our manic, movement mad, infernal love of internal combustion is a static, vertical dump on the plains. It is silly, quiet, beautiful and oddly profound. I hang out a long time. Pray. Go to the wee gift shop, buy postcards. As I head back to my Subaru a guy about my age pulls up on a motorcycle. All by his lonesome - go figure!

On his first trip out west in On The Road, Jack (Sal) gets stuck hitchin’ in Bakersfield so spends his last few bucks on a bus to LA. He meets a Mexican gal her calls Terry. “…her hair was long and lustrous black; and her eyes were great big blue things with timidities inside.” Jack falls madly in love with Terry -- for a few weeks anyway. This circumstance changes his plans. Terry and Sal travel together. They end up picking cotton, living up with Terry’s son in a tent. Jack was all about grabbing the unexpected and having that dominate his agenda.

So….I chat with the motorcycle guy. His name is Ralph and he was once a geophysicist and is now a paramedic. He lives in Kalispell and grew up in Nebraska. He knows his way around these parts. I talk travel routes and if I was doing to the Northwest from San Francisco how would that go? And I get my atlas out and come to the other side of the car closer to his bike. Well says Ralph if you were going to go to the Northwest it would be best to do it from here at Carhenge cuz you’re all ready pretty far north and west and you just need to do a wee bit more of both and you’re there. And – what a coincidence! – that is the where he is heading.

Hmmm. I need to think about this. So Ralph wanders round Carhenge taking pictures and I follow clutching my atlas and chatting and thinking. And then I jump in my car, power open the sunroof, crank up NRBQ’s “Just Me and The Boys,” and spit gravel as I follow Ralph out of the parking lot. So…I am not going back south to Denver like Jack did on his first trip. I am following a guy I don’t exactly know very well into one of the most sparsely populated parts of the country.

We drive thru nowhere on asphalt to cut across nowhere on a dirt road. The bike struggles. The cows are so lonely they come up to the fence to say hi.

The sun is setting as we explore Agate Fossil Beds National Monument. On the sides of eroding plateaus is evidence of Yellowstone’s massive volcanic eruption 14 million or so years ago. The crater was so big says Ralph, they had trouble finding it. They were looking for one too small. Here in the waterhole the beardogs and the ancestors of the hippos came to die. Their skeletons were dragged away to museums but some of their footprints are still imprinted on the side of the plateau’s soft cliffs standing over the vast empty valleys.

I realize then that I am not going to fall in love with Ralph. But I come to understand that he was sent to get me on the right road. He was a messenger. I have friends in the northwest. Ignoring them to be dogmatic about a Jack Kerouac itinerary!? I can half hear Ti Jean laughing at that craziness from the heavens. “All he wanted anyway” says my friend Stephanie “was a couch and some free food - that was his itinerary.”

So I follow the guy I barely know into the empty, pitch black campground with the fun satisfaction of knowing I’m doing exactly what almost everybody would tell me not too but it is still all going to be fine.