Nocturne: Nebraska
Now as the train bears west,
Its rhythm rocks the earth,
And from my Pullman berth
I stare into the night
While others take their rest.
– Theodore Roethke
The Fourth of July rolls in just east of Lincoln. The train is on time and aims to race the sun for eight hundred eighty-eight miles from the Missouri River west through Nebraska in the dark hours of early morning. If all goes well, the light will catch us at the Colorado line. By the time we reach Denver, we’ll have gained more than four thousand feet of elevation, a slow warm-up for the climb across the Continental Divide. The clack of iron wheels on track is muted here in my upper-level roomette. The dirty window above my narrow bed opens to a surreal vista of distant lights scattered against what I cannot see but know was, less than two centuries ago, the tall grass prairie, where a man on horseback could disappear in a sea of big and little bluestem, switchgrass, indiangrass, sunflowers.
The tall grasses of the relatively well-watered eastern plains once gave way west of here to a mixed-grass buffer zone and then the short grass prairie, where buffalo grass, blue and side-oats grama, purple threeawn, and more sprawled in the rain-shadow of the Rocky Mountains. More than a hundred non-grass flowering species splashed color through the native grasses in the centuries before they were turned out by the plow. The domesticated cultivars of many of these prairie wildflowers have become mainstays of our gardens – coneflowers, coreopsis, black-eyed susan, blazing star, verbena, cranes bill, sunflowers of all sorts.
This is a simplistic view of the prairies, of course, and when settlers moved in they discovered what the Native peoples knew well. The area is a mosaic of environments that vary in their plant and animal life, their geology, their store of water. I can barely wrap my mind around our forebears’ view of this lavish land as a hellish void to be endured en route to the promise of the far West. Steven Long, explorer and government surveyor, dubbed this place the Great American Desert in 1823 because it was, in the words of his fellow explorer, geographer Edwin James, “wholly unfit for cultivation.” Theirs was an archaic usage that mistakenly defined a desert as a wild, uncultivated, and uninhabited region. Wild and uncultivated, perhaps, but this place was not uninhabited.
As I gaze out my window into the dark I find it easy to imagine the prairie as it once was in high summer. Despite the nineteenth-century perception, this place bustled with life. Bison by the millions. Warblers and larks. Eagles, owls, hawks. Coyote and fox. Wolves. Small furry creatures by the gezillions. Snakes and lizards, bugs and butterflies. Flowers for every season–wild strawberries and pussytoes in spring, and in summer a color-wheel explosion, yellow coreopsis and cup plants, purple gayfeather and ironweed, blue sage, white boneset. And people–Omaha, Ponca, Pawnee.
***
The blue skies and birdsong that fill a summer morning can turn to muscular fury by afternoon here in the heart of tornado alley. Twisters regularly rip out anything that tries to stand in their way, and what they miss, hailstones big as a strongman’s fists can flatten in a single round. Nor are storms the only cosmic violence known here. Fire has been part of the grasslands ecology for thousands of years. Without the wildfires set by lightning and “controlled burns” set by the Plains tribes, the prairies would not have existed.
Native Americans across the continent used fire to control vegetation and enhance what biologists call an “ecological edge effect,” an area where dissimilar ecosystems bump up against one another and create a synergy of biological diversity. Here, the primary edge was where grassland met woodland. Diversity offers practical benefits. It ups the odds that people and animals won’t starve in hard times because if one edible species dies off or departs, another is still around. On the prairies these anthropogenic fires cleaned out dead plant matter and stopped trees from invading the grasslands. Grasslands, in turn, invited grazers, and bison in particular followed the people and the grasses east until they filled the landscape. The native grasses thrive in fire ecology; most non-native invaders do not. Modern prairie restoration programs still use periodic spring burns to “clean up” the population of grasses and flowers, cull saplings and other invaders, and make way for sun and rain to work their magic in the soil. What these programs are restoring is arguably not the natural flora at all, but one shaped over millennia by people and animals.
***
The interior of the train is quiet. Seth, just out of chef school and on his way to study sustainable farming in Oregon, is wired up to ear buds and laptop in his roomette next door. In the one across the aisle, Bill, a computer engineer from Monterey, is downloading images from his camera. It rides on three legs and peers out the window, recording an image every sixty seconds as long as we have daylight. He plans to turn the pictures into a movie of sorts, once he cuts out the shots of tunnels and sandstone walls and blurs of track-side trees. I find a pen and calculate that he’ll have more than two thousand pictures to screen. I’ve given him my email address in hopes of seeing the finished product.
Ours are the only compartments in this car with lights on. Most passengers on these long-run trains withdraw to sleep as soon as the last turquoise light leaves the horizon, and most are up early. The coming day – the middle day of the California Zephyr’s two-day transit from Chicago to the Golden Gate – is the one most passengers come for. The viewing car will begin to fill when the sun is still low in the eastern sky. People will stake out territories for what Amtrak calls “one of the most beautiful train trips in all of North America.” Daylight will escort us for five hundred miles across the backbone of the Colorado Rockies, through remote canyons and high passes, through twenty-six tunnels, through the mountains and into the red rocks of Utah. For the umpteenth time I read the pages I’ve printed from the railroad’s website and study the fine print in my pocket atlas, determined to understand where I am, to speculate on where I’m bound.
This car is the train’s tail, so the engine’s whistle announcing our arrival in Lincoln is almost a dream. I wonder if I’ve imagined it, then hear it again. Folk songs from my long-haired days echo in the night, songs about loneliness and freedom. Can you really hear this whistle blow five hundred miles? If you can, what does it say to you? We rattle slowly into the station. I haven’t pulled my curtains – I rarely do on trains – and I flip off my reading lamp and let the lights from the station platform filter through dust and glass into my nest. This is a quick stop, six minutes by the timetable, an odd precision for a mode of transportation notorious for being off-schedule. Why six? Why not five, or ten? Does it matter when railroad time is elastic, trains arriving early here, late there? But six is the magic number, and the handful of passengers who board and disembark here move with some urgency.
Lincoln, Nebraska, has been home to Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett, Hilary Swank, and the Salt Creek tiger beetle. Cicindela nevadica lincolniana is a half-inch-long green-brown predator and one of the rarest insects on earth. A University of Nebraska survey in 2009 estimated that fewer than two hundred adults – down from an already small population of almost eight hundred nine years earlier – were still stalking other insects in the saline wetlands of Lancaster County just north of Lincoln. Aside from its rarity, the Salt Creek tiger beetle is important as an indicator species whose presence attests to the health of the saline marsh it inhabits, and by extension the wider environment. In an effort to protect the remaining population, Nebraska declared it an endangered species in the 1990s and halted development of its critical habitat; the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service didn’t follow suit until 2005, and by then the number of sites known to harbor Salt Creek tiger beetles had fallen to only three.
Voices murmur in the luggage area on the lower level and someone bumps a bag up the narrow stairs and walks the other direction. The door to the outside world slides shut and the train’s joints groan with the effort to move on. I punch my pillow into shape and take a last peek out the window, recalling the final lines of “Night Journey” in which Roethke writes, “I stay up half the night/To see the land I love.” Before I close my eyes, I click on my iPod and read the poem again. Vibration and sway from the car around me infiltrate my own joints and sinews. Like Roethke before me, “Full on my neck I feel/The straining at a curve;/My muscles move with steel,/I wake in every nerve.” I have read about the route we will traverse tomorrow, have traveled parts of it by car, and anticipate now, through the poet’s words, a new way of being here: “We thunder through ravines/And gullies washed with light.”
After sunrise and beyond Denver we will twist and climb our way over the Rockies and descend into eastern Utah. I’ve already stayed up half the night, but now, as we leave the outskirts of Lincoln behind, I crawl under the blue blanket to dream the dreams of travelers as we roll west across the prairie.
***
We push across Nebraska while I sleep in fits and starts. I wake every hour or two and peer out the window at distant lights and sleepy towns, then drop back to sleep. Dreams take me away from the prairie, but somewhere in the dark it strikes me that there is no better day to be crossing this stretch of American ground than today. It’s the Fourth of July, and in the wee hours we stop in Hastings, Nebraska. If you got off the train here and drove south for a bit more than an hour, you’d find the geographic center of the forty-eight contiguous states. At least that’s what the marker at Latitude 39°50' north, Longitude 98°35' near Lebanon, Kansas, claims, and although geographers quibble about the accuracy of the measurement, it’s close enough. If you traveled north again to resume your journey, US-281 would run you through Red Cloud, Nebraska, where Pulitzer-winning novelist Willa Cather lived as a child. Her prairie trilogy is set here, and I make a mental note to reread my favorite of the trio, Song of the Lark, when I get home.
We pass in the pre-dawn darkness through the region once known as mixed-grass prairie, the transitional strip where tall and short grasses met and mingled. Early in the nineteenth century the U.S. government declared this “empty” area to be Indian country, generously granting to Native Americans a homeland they already had. But by mid-century the economic potential of the land became clear. Promises were broken. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 gave settlers free access to the Nebraska Territory, a tract that reached from the Kansas-Nebraska border north to Canada, and from the Missouri and White Earth rivers west to the Continental Divide.
I awaken, sit up, gaze out the window at feedlots filled with cattle. Thousands of them. I am at once thrilled and appalled at this bovine sea, lit here and there by bug lights that tinge the night with a jaundiced air. I can taste the acrid dust rising from beneath thousands of hooves. I can smell the thick muskiness of the cattle, I swear I can, but wonder later whether I made that up. This mass of market-bound animals conjures the great herds that once ruled here and formed the heart of the plains tribes’ economies. By the mid-1880s the American bison had been hunted nearly to extinction, cattlemen had replaced them with longhorns, and the newly planted railroads were carrying beef to the growing Eastern markets.
This is cowboy country, and I’m as much a sucker for the romanticized icon as anyone, but I confess to my own ambivalence. I love traveling by train, and being able to move in comfort around this country of ours. But the truth is that trains and the influx of settlers and livestock devastated the land and the people and plants and animals who lived as part of it for millennia. How do we open our eyes and become responsible without losing hope? I turn away from the cattle, try to sleep, but random thoughts bang and rattle until I can’t tell them from the night sounds of the train.
***
When Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act into law in 1862, settlers followed the lure of free land, and by 1870 Nebraska’s non-Native population had swelled from a few thousand living mostly along the Missouri River to a hundred and twenty thousand spread across the state. Lumber was a luxury on the prairies, so settlers relied on houses built of sod wrestled from the prairie floor to shield them from rain and sun and the never-ending wind. Sod houses were notorious for harboring bugs, vermin, and snakes in the walls. In dry weather they were dusty; in wet, they leaked and turned mucky.
In my sleeplessness I surf the Internet to learn about Nebraska and come across a photograph in the Library of Congress collection. It’s the Sylvester Rawding family posing in front of their sod house in Custer County, Nebraska, just north of the Zephyr’s route. Sylvester and his wife are relaxed as they sit at the ends of a table set with a tablecloth and a halved watermelon. A young woman sits to Sylvester’s left. Three young men stand to her left and a collie-type dog flanks one of these sons. Two horses in harness attached to a plow fill the far right of the image, and a milk cow stands on the roof of the house where it merges into a hillock. This is probably not their first sod house, for this one is fancy. It has glass in the windows, and curtains. I love this photo. I would like to know more about these people.
The notion that some people are driven to pick up and move of their own volition has always been part of my world view. Both my parents were born to such people. In 1912 my mother arrived in Alberta, Canada, at the age of seven. Her father had left Scotland a year earlier with surveying skills and two sets of clothes. Economic opportunity was the acceptable explanation, but my mother’s stories of her dad make me think that a daring escape from boredom was the real siren song. For my mother, childhood among immigrants from across Europe was a wild adventure. So too for my father’s father, who responded to Canada’s offer of free land by moving his wife and three young sons from a settled urban life in New Hampshire to a homestead in eastern Alberta in 1905. Their stories were not so different from the stories swirling in the dust outside this train.
For the women, the bright lure of a new life was often dulled by loneliness, backbreaking labor, and lack of medical care. Men, too, exhausted themselves with physical work and were always at risk of injury or disease, but for women the risks were compounded by biology. Caring for a family, especially young children, involved a never-ending round of hard labor by hand or with basic tools. Pregnancy and childbirth were frequent and dangerous. Babies and children died easily. Grief was a constant specter. My dad was too young to remember, but my Uncle Art spoke of how their mother melted snow in winter to scrub their clothing and bedding in a galvanized tub with a washboard. My mother lived mostly in mining camps where her dad worked as a surveyor, and in small towns east of Calgary, but she had stories of hitching up the horse, milking the cow, caring for the hens and running from the rooster, working in the household garden. These scenes played out all across the prairies of North America.
The homesteaders of Nebraska were a motley bunch. They were tenant farmers from the eastern states tired of working someone else’s land. They were newly arrived immigrants from central and eastern Europe – Czechs, Germans, Russians, Swedes, Danes – tired of war and out-dated economies of oppression. They were single women, families, children. They were Irish fleeing the Great Hunger and east-European Jews fleeing the great pogroms. They were former slaves and former soldiers. They were people with hearts on fire for free land and a free way of life.
They learned quickly that the land and the life were not free at all. They were purchased at the cost of isolation, disease, privation, loss, and bone-breaking work and, although they didn’t see it this way, the destruction of ecosystems, species, and peoples. The prairie grasses did not give up their holdings without a fight. John Deere’s cast steel “grasshopper plows” were a technological boost for sod-busting settlers, hardened for blade-to-blade combat with the grass, but they could not drive themselves. Draft animals – horses and, more often, oxen – were essential equipment. In some places it took as many as twenty beasts in harness to rip the prairie open and expose her fertile soil. These were tough, determined people. Still, it’s difficult from where we stand now, with history’s view of the Dust Bowl to come, not to see the rape of the Great Plains as an environmental disaster.
***
Some people itch when settled too long in one place, or in the wrong place. This was certainly true of the people who scattered across North America during the past four hundred years. Even before they saw the agricultural potential of the Great Plains, people came through here on their way west. Pioneers on the Oregon Trail passed just south of Hastings, an estimated half million of them between 1843 and 1868. Those who traveled the whole route packed all their worldly goods into four- by ten-foot Prairie Schooners and slogged two thousand miles from Independence, Missouri, to Oregon City, Oregon. My roomette is nearly that big and I feel crowded with my suitcase and laptop. I am carrying more clothes for a week away than whole families owned on the trail. I do not have to carry food to last for weeks, nor the tools to begin a new life, and my journey will be faster and infinitely more secure. In a good day a team of oxen could haul the covered wagons fifteen miles, and the length of Nebraska, which we cross tonight in five comfortable hours, took them a month if all went well. Often it did not.
The Oregon Trail has been called “this nation's longest graveyard.” One in eight pioneers died along the way, mostly from accidents and disease. A world-wide pandemic of cholera followed settlers along the trail, spreading from one group to the next through garbage left in camps. Infant and child mortality was high, and many women died in childbirth. Accidental shootings, often self-inflicted, were not uncommon, nor were injuries from working with large animals. With no antibiotics or clear notion of what causes infection, cuts and scrapes that we think minor could be fatal. Many medicines were themselves questionable. A typical kit might hold patent medicines that were often just alcohol or sugar, along with castor oil and peppermint oil for intestinal and skin problems, rum or whiskey to clean wounds and treat illness, and quinine for malaria. Hartshorn, made from the antlers of deer, was used to treat snakebite, but was useless if the snake was venomous. Laudanum and morphine were used as painkillers and sedatives. They didn’t cure anything, but might at least ease pain. The road west took many victims over a quarter of a century. Some lost their minds; some sixty-five thousand lost their lives.
My family did not travel the Oregon Trail, but I grew up on stories of immigration into a wild, unsettled place. Alberta at the start of the twentieth century offered some advantages over Nebraska a half century earlier, but the two were similar in many ways. Opportunity was tempered by risk. Crops and livestock could be wiped out by weather or fire, pestilence or drought. Whole families died within days of diseases we never hear of in the U.S. or Canada today, although some are making a terrifying comeback. My mother’s parents survived typhoid fever, my mother scarlet fever and whooping cough. She spoke of a woman she knew who lost seven children to a diphtheria outbreak, and, eight years later, three more. When he was two years old, my father lost his mother and a baby brother in childbirth. So it was with settlers throughout the continent.
I continue to read and feel a mental shift, an attitude adjustment, a new perspective. Threads of regret and blame and deep respect tangle themselves in my mind. This is not the first time I’ve read about how things were, of course, not the first time I’ve wrestled with my own gentle complicity in changes for good and for bad. Nor is it the first time I have traversed this wide stretch of land. But in the past I have done so by car, by the glare of the modern world. To the day-lit eye, this place is vast, tough, uncrowded. Night draws the past in closer, and as I gaze into the dark outside my window, the shadows of people and animals and plants that passed through here before me. These plains are a place of spirits, no more empty now than they were when the tall grasses waved.
A wayfarer in her writing as in her life, Sheila Webster Boneham prefers to follow where the words take her. She writes across genres, and most of her work concerns nature, place, and animals, ourselves included. She has written extensively about companion animals, and is often accompanied in her wanderings by her dogs. Sheila has ridden long-distance trains in North America, Europe, and Egypt, and is currently working on a series of essays about trips by rail. Sheila holds an MFA from the Stonecoast Creative Writing Program and a Ph.D. in folklore from Indiana University.