A Different Kind of Arch

The road sings beneath the truck’s tires. Literally sings in deep tones and high ones, running the scale one moment, staying on the same note for other moments at a time. It starts somewhere around mile 285 on I-80 in Nebraska, lasts maybe 25 miles. The road has a peculiar ribbing here, the lines just wavy and off-kilter enough to create and change harmonics as I drive. I miss the music after the road goes smooth again.

Travelers I’ve met have called I-80 through Nebraska the “boringest” drive in the US. I have found it, in mid summer, to be lovely and easy on the mind and spirit. I expected only flat flat flat fields, horizon to horizon. What’s here are flat highway (great hauling mileage), with tree-edged rivers and cornfields, cattle plains, and grain-processing plants that pop up out of the green like oil refineries in a Mad Max desert.

I see lakes, farm rooftops, rivers. Metal grain silos squat near their houses, wearing peaked little coolie hats. Wheeled irrigation systems stretch across fields like delicately arched monorails. Tall skinny radio towers pipe my NPR station, plus scads of other options. Across Utah and Colorado, I could hardly scan a handful of stations that offered good reception through the mountains. In the plains of Nebraska, stations crowd the airwaves barely a decimal point apart on the dial.

The occasional white, steepled church stands stark against the green, looking like it was plunked down from the east coast. Fuel station signs poke above tree lines two miles away, and billboards announce the next attraction or hotel or food opportunity from the edge of a cornfield. Bright, leafy corn, of course, plus low-lying acres of deep-green soybeans, with corn stalks sticking out of them wherever a kernel was missed during the crop rotation.

Today I took the advice of a friend (thanks, Art!) and made a mid-travel stop at The Great Platte River Road Archway at exit 272 on I-80. They have good RV parking. Opened in 2000, this attraction spans the I-80 freeway in Kearney (“carny”), Nebraska, and celebrates the place where four famous westbound trails converged: the Mormon Trail to Utah, the Oregon Trail to the west coast, the California Trail to the gold rush, and the Pony Express to Santa Fe. It’s also on the transcontinental railroad line, the old Lincoln Highway (that famous road I stumbled on in North Platte), the first interstate highway (80), and the first transcontinental fiber optic system.

I was officially greeted by Meke, a stooped trapper leaning on his walking stick. After taking a pretty decent lunch at their onsite buffet, I bought a ticket, donned the headset, and rode the escalator up to one of the most amazing museums I’ve been to. It’s a multimedia, surround-sound, you-are-there walk through time, what you might get if Disney and Caesar’s Palace joined up with the Smithsonian and National Geographic to document the trails to the West over the past 160 years.

A poor shot, but at the top of this escalator is a film loop of wagons and horses crossing the desert. It’s as if you’re joining them on the trail as you go through.

The realistic detail of each tableau almost wrenching.

Stay long enough, and the lighting in this room changes from dawn to dark, with a lightning storm in between. Having just lived through my first storm last night, I recognized the realism of this one. I almost expected to get wet.

Many handcart groups were rescued from a bad winter that stranded them en route to Utah. So true to life that ice glazes the cart and the woman’s skirt.


As food became scarce and the travel harder, not everything made it to their new homes. Gravesites and debris marked many a trail.

A gold rush scene. I could almost smell the buffalo ribs and wanted to read over this guy’s shoulder.

Hang around to watch the day’s delivery through the front door.

The Lincoln Highway credo.

I can relate to this.

And this!

The cross-country road today: I-80.

Patchouli does his own impression of an arch.