May 30th - Lincoln, Nebraska

Having had some encounters of the itching kind with the local mosquitoes, we put up a 10’ x 10’ screen house we had purchased right before the trip at Wal-Mart (where else?). The instructions were fortunately still legible despite having suffered thru several downpours along the way, because the framework was a maze of little pipes with numbers pasted on and without instructions it would have been quite a bit of guesswork. But we puzzled our way thru it and staked down the corners before we were off for the day.

We had decided that while we were within striking distance of Lincoln, Nebraska, we would drive over and do the Volksmarch there. That way we could knock off the state of Nebraska and the capital city of Lincoln in one fell swoop, so to speak. Besides, my brother-in-law Jim had told us there was a really good museum of natural history there and we should by all means see it if we were in the area. So we trundled down Interstate 80 southwest for about an hour until we reached the outskirts of Lincoln and then branched off on U.S. Highway 6.

The start box for the Lincoln Volksmarch is at a Texaco gas station and food mart, but the start point was a short drive in toward the center of the town. We parked at the John C. Woods sports complex which seemed to be a nice place with bathrooms available. There were also plenty of parking spaces in a big parking lot so I could find one deep in the shade of a big old tree and keep the truck cabin a little cooler. It was already warm and with a cloudless sky it was clear to us that this was going to be a scorcher.

The route for the Volksmarch is kind of a large, squared-off oval around the central part of the city. The first part led to the north side of the downtown area and the University of Nebraska campus. There we found the Natural History Museum that Jim had recommended and delayed our walk to see the museum. The museum had three floors of excellent exhibits covering a wide variety of topics. One floor had exhibits focused on the fossils of ancient animals found in Nebraska. They ranged from an ancient version of an elephant (much bigger than today’s versions) to the sharks and fish of the inland see that repeatedly covered Nebraska over the last hundred million years or so.

One new thing I learned was that there were over 100 species of flying dinosaurs called pterosaurs, and these ranged from the size of sparrows to monsters with 40 foot wingspans. Now I figure I could handle a pterosaur the size of a sparrow, even if it did have a toothed beak and a nasty disposition. The pet sparrow my foster-mother kept when I was young did indeed have a nasty disposition and he could peck quite vigorously with his beak when curious young boys put their fingers in his cage (mea culpa maxima). In retrospect I was, I think, fortunate that he didn’t have any teeth because he certainly didn’t like being disturbed.

But imagine what it would be like to come up against a flying dinosaur with a 40-foot wingspan, teeth, and a voracious appetite. I mean, my Cessna 172 doesn’t even have a 40-foot wingspan, so I’m forced to imagine an animal bigger and definitely meaner than my Cessna flying around looking for lunch. I’ve never been attacked from the air except for a mockingbird when I got too close to its nest, but it wasn’t really trying to eat me, for heaven’s sake. When I walk too slowly out in the country I’ve been eyed with apparent eagerness by some vultures, of course, but as soon as I start moving again they always lose interest. A beast like the pterosaur that could attack from the air and carry you away for a meal would be a very bad combination. It’s probably just as well that they were extinct by the time we humans started to evolve, I would say.

Another floor of the museum had displays of human cultural artifacts from around the world. The pottery from the Indians of the southwest was particularly nice—I’ve been interested in that pottery since I first saw it when we toured the Native American museum in Anadarko, Oklahoma. That was when I was living at Fort Sill, Oklahoma for two years courtesy of President Nixon’s draft lottery—I got a low number and that meant I lost 2 years of my life. But they also displayed a large number of simply beautiful artifacts from cultures around the world including textiles, vases, quilts, and so forth.

The final floor had dioramas of scenes from Nebraska’s natural history that were very well done, and a quite thorough chronology of Charles Darwin’s career. There has always been a question of why Darwin was in such poor physical health after his voyage with the Beagle. While the old view was that he had a psychosomatic illness, the new view is that he picked up a debilitating parasite on the Argentinian pampas. Given his debilitation, it’s just amazing that he was publishing book after book, year after year, on topics both in botany as well as biology and even the origins of human emotions--what a record!

Two hours later I finally got out of that museum, and by that time we really had to have lunch. We curled back to an Arby’s we had passed just before the University of Nebraska campus and had lunch before continuing on our way into the downtown area. Altho I saw some vacant storefronts along the way, the area around the old train station has definitely been revitalized with new development. One anchor was a small park with an old steam locomotive and watering tower. It was kind of a pocket park that also featured a large, 3-dimensional mural of a steam locomotive made from ceramic tiles. In the area surrounding this park I saw new restaurants, bars, art galleries, and, of course, the ubiquitous over priced condominiums that are a sure sign of gentrification. It was good to see part of the central city revitalized like that.

We continued on our way swinging past the capitol building, which is remarkably modern looking compared to some of the more traditional ones we have seen while walking the 51 capitals. The dome is golden—tile I think—and there is somebody perched on top but I couldn’t quite make that exactly who. Maybe a cornhusker husking corn? Anyway, we passed by and started to work our way back to the sports complex where we had parked.

One very pretty thing we saw along the way back was the sunken garden area with a marvelous arrangement of pools, fountains, and flowers—definitely worth a look as you walk by and it would be a great spot to eat a lunch if you bring one with. All in all we thought this walk had a lot of nice variety and no really boring sections. Coupled with decent opportunities for lunch and a crackerjack museum, you just can’t ask for anything more!

The winds had kicked up into the 20s and 30s during our drive back in the afternoon and I was surprised to see a low lying, dark brown haze layer that was thinner than the bluish haze due to water vapor we get out east. I was surprised because it was such a marked contrast to the clear skies we had experienced since we were on the western side of Missouri and in Kansas, and I finally figured out that this haze layer was really blowing dirt! The farmers had all been tilling the fields for spring planting and the high winds just lifted up dirt everywhere and blew it across the fields and streets. It left a dirty film on top of everything and I imagine it was a small sample of what the dust bowl back in the 1930s would have been like. The winds that day were really strong, however—while we were driving back a gust blew an aluminum tent pole out of the bed of my truck and the guy behind me ran it over, twisting it into a pretzel.

Since the winds were that bad, we were worried how the new screen house would hold up and we hurried back to camp. I had, after all, only secured it with a stake pounded into each corner that morning and that’s not much security for a 10’ x 10’ structure. As luck would have it, however, we had pitched the screen house in the lee of a line of trees beside our campsite that gave it enough shelter that it had survived the afternoon winds just fine. So we moved our chairs into the screen house for the evening and had a fine old time with Monika playing the dulcimer and me writing the journal.