Drought, Ghost Towns and Coyotes

            We just completed a 5,100 mile road trip to the Portland, OR area and back.  It has been 4 years since we took a long road trip – that time from Reno, NV to Louisville in a moving van.  As always, the excitement of the road trip, my love affair with America, the joy of traveling has consumed my summer.  I could not wait to see the vastness, the beauty and the majesty of my America again.

            As always, the first and major impression of the road trip is the vastness, the scale, the scope of our nation.  It is a vast land – huge and sprawling – telling the history of the physical world in the hills, valleys, streams, mountains and plains of America. The land was formed by the drifting and colliding of great land masses, the upheavals of huge chunks of rock, and the violent cataclysms of volcanoes.  The land has been crafted across eons by the forces of wind, water and ice.  For all of the timelessness of the landscape, those of us who know, know that we are looking at a mere snapshot of the land – that it was different 10,000 years ago and that it will be different 10,000 years from today.

            The effects of this summer’s drought and heat struck me as our first morning on the road unfolded with the rising sun.  Southern Indiana and southern Illinois are dryer and more parched than central Kentucky.  The crops are devastated across a vast swath of America this summer. Dry land farms look bad; but even some irrigated corn will not make a crop this year.  It’s funny sometimes, how bad weather will compound tough economic times.

            Still reeling from the visions of shriveled crops and burned out pastures, we rolled through St. Louis.  Here is a city in the very heart of America.  This was once a great river port, the Gateway to the West, the well spring of the American Dream; the Gateway City looks like a bombed out war zone.  Vacant apartment buildings, abandoned factories skyline their skeletal frames in a show of destitution, of emptiness, of 60 years of liberal control choking and throttling the economic engine that built the once great city.

            It wasn’t just St. Louis.  All across the country, small towns and cities seem to be reeling from the Recession.  Boarded up buildings and vacant store fronts lined the streets of almost every town that we went through.  Many of the small elevator towns in Nebraska and Wyoming looked like ghost towns – waiting for phantom trains to come and haul away the ghostly grain.

            And, this year, that is all there will be; the ghostly memory of harvests past.

            We spent two days in our old home town of Reno, Nevada.  And sadly, the oasis at the edge of the desert has not escaped the wrath of the Obama Recession. Downtown Reno looks like some European city at the end of World War II.  Only the strongest of the casinos have survived, but Virginia Street, the main drag through town looks devastated, the side streets nearly abandoned. It is a sad vision of a city that was thriving just 4 short years ago.  I keep telling myself that for the sake of the cities and towns and lives ruined across the country, that November cannot come son enough.

            Rolling eastward, later then, headed home across the vast high prairies of Wyoming, I saw a wondrous site.  Standing on a bank, on the south side of the road, was the biggest coyote that I have ever seen.  He was resplendent in his summer coat, shining golden in the morning sunlight, as big as most German Shepherd dogs.

            My reaction to seeing the monarch of the prairie was interesting.  After the initial shock and disgust at seeing the great predator – I am never far removed from my cowboy past – I found myself thinking that regardless of the drought, regardless of the politics, regardless of what mankind does, the coyote will survive.  Like the rainbow, the coyote may be God’s promise that life will go on – whether we understand it or not.

            Fifty one hundred miles from home and back; two days in Reno and the deserts there around, three days in Vancouver, Washington; road trip extraordinaire!  It was great to see my second great love, America, again.  I have missed her over the years.

            And, it is also great to share my thoughts about the road trip with my Faithful Readers, once again.