Nature’s Light Show

The radio has been announcing storm watches and warnings all week across most western and central counties of Nebraska.

This, my last night in North Platte, brings my first severe weather of the trip. I woke up to lightning about twenty minutes ago, unplugged the 30amp power cord, and am now running the sparest of lights on 12 volt battery. It’s about 11:30pm, I’m in my jammies, in a mostly dark trailer, and staring awed through the windows at an electrical storm that’s riding in from the west.

Lightning flashes through skylights and glass, putting the rig into bright then dark, then grumbles away into thunder some distance off. The air is hot and thick and on edge. Shock after shock of multi-forked lightning crackles. The insides of clouds flash magnesium-white, as if the gods are taking family photos.

The storm moves directly toward our RV park. White-blue light splits thickly across the sky above the border of trees. The thunder rumbles so deeply, I can feel it vibrate through the floor.

I have never heard such singular claps of thunder before, never been directly beneath one. It is a rock-splitting sound that makes me jump. The Catskills Bowling League has come to town for a tournament, and the trailers here could be its next pins.

One crackling flash and its sonic boom are nearly simultaneous, nearly on top of us, and the lights go out in our campground and nearby hotels. They are back on very soon. A ridiculously small amount of rain patters as the storm passes over. The whole event, both spectacular and unnerving, rolls away in thirty minutes.

Tracks of History

The internal body clock of North Platte, Nebraska, ticks slowly. The posted speed limit is 25mph almost everywhere: residential streets, thoroughfare bridges, industrial areas, cornfield-lined country roads, and stoplight-filled Jeffers and Dewey streets, the two (opposing) one-ways that bisect the town.

Sleepy, tree-lined neighborhoods mix homes with a grocery store, schools, and churches. People sell corn and fresh produce from their front yards and pickup trucks. Most other businesses—strip malls, fast food joints, Starbucks, fuel stations, hairstylists, banks, a Goodwill—congregate in a faded, slightly gritty way along Dewey and Jeffers. During my stay, I continuously tat along these streets in little loops, making only left- or right-hand turns to run an errand or visit a side street and return to my original direction of travel.

Transactions are also slow at the Sunmart grocery store as clerks greet customers by name and ask after family. My ice cream softens on the conveyor belt while the cashier leaves her station, goes to the back office, and checks whether it’s OK for the customer ahead of me to use a certain kind of coupon that her register doesn’t acknowledge. Refreshingly, neither she nor the customer offers an apology for this delay. It’s as if no one knows the force of a pressing schedule here. How different from a life driven by instant messages, the next to-do list, and artificially urgent deadlines.

To enter North Platte from its south side requires crossing the South Platte River. To leave it from its north side requires crossing the North Platte River. I find this logical setup comforting.

In between these rivers sits the entire city of North Platte and one of its many claims to fame: the world’s largest railroad classification bailey (sorting yard), a confluence of one eastbound and one westbound track that split off into over thirty tracks for detaching, rearranging, and reattaching thousands of railcars into trains that will carry only the goods that are meant for their proper destinations. This 24x7 operation processes more than 10,000 railcars a day and is the heartbeat of the Union Pacific railroad.

Among North Platte’s other points of pride is that its state is at the center of the nation’s first transcontinental road, the Lincoln Highway Scenic and Historic Byway (Hwy 30, “America’s Main Street”), whose traffic is now handled mostly by the roughly parallel, multi-lane I-80. It’s home to Buffalo Bill’s personal ranch, Scout’s Rest, where he would retreat between his Wild West Show tours to relax and entertain guests. It’s the stomping ground of its most famous native son, William Jeffers, president of Union Pacific and the “Rubber Czar” of World War II (he stopped the rubber shortage by producing enough synthetic rubber for the war). And it’s the site of one of the most amazing volunteer troop support efforts for World War II—the North Platte Canteen.

Rather than my relating the story of Buffalo Bill and his North Platte home, you can double-click this image to enlarge and read it.

Imagine this front yard as a dirt (and muddy) drive of horses and carriages, with cattle and buffalo fields surrounding, for an idea of what it was like before all the grass and trees were planted.

Exterior of the Cody home, spic and span.

Entry way, original glass.

Like Gaston of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Cody apparently used antlers in all of his decorating. These two chairs are original.

Memorabilia in the house includes some of his Wild West Show costumes, saddles, and related programs, as well as private furnishings, awards, honors, and relics from his many scouting years. This three-way mirror traveled with him on almost every Wild West Show.

The current park-like grounds. Cattle graze way in the distance and walk through the headwaters of the creek, which I don’t think is original, given the photos inside the house.

The 1887 barn where so many of his horses and their tack was stored.

The eaves are shaped like rifle stocks.

Interior of the barn, front stalls. Old posters of the Buffalo Bill shows, many almost peeled off the walls now, line the area above the stalls in a back row, and lots of photos and history are posted to read about here. You also get to go up into the full-length hayloft, where they had an ingenious system for stacking hay in vertical chutes that dropped it down into hay feeders below. Kind of like an automatic feeder for horses.

A new museum, The Golden Spike, has room for improvement, but it gives a nice aerial view of the railroad yard and environs (mostly cornfields).

A drawing of the railroad yard. Each line depicts a separate train track for sorting railcars or moving engines to the repair and fueling shops. On two raised “humps,” incoming east- and westbound cars are split off from their trains and sent by gravity down the proper track to join others and an engine. The cars on each newly formed train must be grouped in a specific order based on the order of their arrival to the next destination, so they can easily be dropped off at the right city and the rest of the train can continue on.

Railroad cars to the horizon.

The Lincoln County Historical Museum has more to offer than its humble façade and $3 fee would suggest. An 18-building western prairie village (shown here) is at the back, and artifacts and antiques since the turn of the century are arranged inside in appealing groupings. Vacuum cleaners through the ages (OMG, I recognize that old upright Kirby), old hair dryers and perming machines, a mock radio station, outmoded movie-theater projectors and cameras (remember flash cubes?), areas set up as complete dining rooms, kitchens, and parlors. I practically had the place to myself for a couple of hours.

A fort building in the village has been converted to a child-friendly spot where people are encouraged to handle farm implements, tools, and buffalo.

A manufacturer of jail cells, from the 19th century heyday of steel in Detroit.

Their handiwork.

No telling where this sign originally hung in North Platte. Now it’s relegated to a warehouse of farming machines in this museum. The back reads “CHANGE TO MOUNTAIN TIME HERE. Set Watch Back One Hour.”

One honkin’ big mixer. Makes the one at Camp Burton on Vashon look like it came from an Easy Bake Oven kit.

The Lincoln County Museum also has an exceptional exhibit on the World War II Canteen of North Platte. You walk though a brief setup of the war and its effect on the town, then past lots of story-telling memorabilia for how the canteen started and what it was like to work at and be there. I sat down to watch almost an hour of the excellent video documentary that interviewed 70- and 80-year-old women who worked at the canteen, and some of the soldiers who had visited it.

The canteen was a spontaneously organized, all-volunteer group that started because a few women wanted to greet the US servicemen whose train stopped in North Platte (and every one of them did) on their way to deployment in the war. The train stop was only ten minutes, but every serviceperson on it received free coffee and snacks and homemade baked goods, and was sent on his/her way with the good wishes of all of North Platte. The small idea quickly grew into a multi-town program, with food and ingredients donated and driven to North Platte from all over Nebraska. Sandwiches, fruit, cigarettes, donuts, endless urns of coffee. Every day they gave away more than 20 birthday cakes to the servicemen, even if it wasn’t their birthday.

A sample canteen table, one of scores that eventually took over an area of the Union Pacific train depot, donated by Jeffers for the cause. The canteen served thousands of soldiers daily, week in and week out, eastbound and westbound, for four years—over six million servicemen and women all told.

WWII servicepeople who visit the museum today can record their memories of the canteen in a three-ring binder. Many comment on what this small hospitality meant to them so far from home and with so uncertain a future. A few noted that they had to good fortune to pass through twice: once at deployment, and again on their way home.

Local visitors are encouraged to identify people they may recognize in old photos of canteen workers. This image was full of stick-on notes.

Back home, Patchouli dreams of taking his lasso skills on the road with Buffalo Bill.

Sound Rocks, Crazy People

Ever baked a cake or a batch of brownies and had the batter erupt into edges that got all crusty and made weird shapes on the top? That’s about the same effect as what happened on the earth’s crust to create Red Rocks Amphitheater in Golden, Colorado, where great chunks of the Rockies were pushed up thousands of thousands of years ago. Only instead of yummy dry cakey stuff jutting up into space, you’ve got walls of red rock rising like ships out of green grass and surrounding stone.

What’s more, a few of these monolithic rocks are sized and combined and aligned in just the right way to produce a natural, almost perfect, acoustical theater.

Native Americans had long used this area for sacred ritual, and European and American opera singers, musicians, and audiences flocked to it in the late 1800s and early 1900s for its high-fidelity sound. But it took an enterprising entrepreneur, a talented architect, and the United States CCC (Civil Conservation Corps, pre World War II), to turn the space into a real money-making venture. Working within the constraints of rock and valley, they designed and built a 70-row amphitheater that exploits all the natural gifts of the area while retaining its true beauty.

Since its first Easter sunrise service in 1947, Red Rocks has hosted innumerable big-name performers. Johnny Cash. Sting. Ella Fitzgerald. The Beatles. Joan Baez. U2. The Go Gos. You name them, they’ve probably played here—or will very soon. (Tickets are still available for Flogging Molly in Sept 2009, if anyone’s interested.)

OK, for all its fame, I know virtually nothing about music concerts, so I had no idea this place existed until a local advised me to see it. I arrived about 10 a.m. on a Monday, not knowing what to expect except maybe some nice little hikes and a repeat of the beautiful rocks of Utah.

At 10 on a Monday morning, there are crazy people here. Dozens of them. Wearing shorts and tank tops and track shoes. Panting and pounding and sweating. They are charging up and down the hundreds of steps. They are running back and forth on the rows, working up from the stage to the highest seats, sprinting some rows, trotting others. Some are on stage heaving iron kettlebells. Others are high-stepping sideways with their trainers down the rows—one foot on the seat, right knee to left elbow, touch ground, bounce, step down one level. Trainers are bellowing “Another lap, Susan, keep it up!” and three people are working their way along the south set of steps by running down a flight sideways to the right, up them sideways to the left, and advancing down to the next flight to repeat. The temperature is above 80 degrees. Even the runners’ dogs are smart enough to stop in the shade.

I meander among all this energy, slowly, methodically, in full appreciation of this gorgeous place, plodding my way up the steps and trying not to get tired just watching these other people.

Memorial to the CCC crew of young men who built this place.

Environs.

The Ruby Falcon, for scale.

Visitors Center (circa 1990s) is the round building at the left. The CCC crews lived at a camp in the valley below when they built the amphitheater in the 1930s and 40s.

This scale model of the amphitheater was very helpful...the place is really too big to take in at once.

Red Rocks is very near Dinosaur Ridge, home and death place of many a stegosaurus and other thunder lizards.

The sealife came big in those days, too. I suspect this clam-like fellow would have fed a whole tribe, had it been around at the same time as humans.

The museum documents everyone who has played at Red Rocks.

Some of those crazy people.

Views from the top.

This puppy is 300 feet tall, and has a matching one at the other side of the seating.

Backstage buildings.

Imagine facing the audience from this vantage point. One performer said he loved playing here because he could see the faces of everyone in the crowd, even at the back row.

All the concrete for the seating platform was poured by hand; the engineers devised a unique system for making it flow evenly as they worked down the amphitheater. The rest is red rock and wood.

Even water runoff was handled with remarkable brickwork.

More info at http://www.redrocksonline.com/pages/visiting/hist_geo.html

Golden Days of Drinking

The beauty of not researching an area of ahead of time is that everywhere I go becomes a discovery. I approach a new place with my mind, and expectations, a blank slate. (Some say I depart that way, too, but that’s their opinion.)

So when I land in a new region, I quiz the RV park owner, or hit the visitor’s center, to see what the locals think is important. And with amazing regularity, a theme emerges to shape my explorations.

In Golden, Colorado, that theme is drinking.

Or more precisely, the companies that make things to drink. The Celestial Seasonings tea manufacturing plant is in nearby Boulder. Wineries (yes, wineries) dot the ’burbs and farmland environs with Colorado-grown vines. And the Coors plant that gave post-gold-rush Golden a new identity still pumps out millions of gallons of beer a month under the shadow of Castle Rock at the north edge of town.

Tea, wine, beer. Sounds good to me. Let’s take some tours!

Boulder is about 45 minutes from Golden. When following the advice of my navigation system, it takes five highway exchanges to get there, thanks to the LA-like webwork of highways at Denver’s outskirts.

Boulder is the original, and only, home of the Celestial Seasonings tea company. The neighborhood of corporate headquarters is tidy residential, not industrial, which I found surprising. I just didn’t expect to find an international tea manufacturer around the next bend from that guy with the lawn sprinkler and the lady walking her dogs.

Too bad they only use these signs at headquarters, and not also in the surrounding neighborhood.

The company started in the 1970s, shipping small muslin bags of tea made from hand-picked local herbs. In 2000, they joined up with The Hain Food Group (makers of Jason, Avalon, Terra chips, and other organic brands). You’ll now find them on every box as The Hain Celestial Group.

With the exception of their newest high-end Saphara brand, every bag of Celestial Seasonings tea you buy anywhere in the world has been blended, tested, and packaged at this facility. (They don’t yet have the equipment to make anything other than their little tea “pillows,” and Saphara uses one of those triangular loose-tea bag thingies; they are done in Canada, I think.)

Smell is the first thing you notice when you walk into every new space at Celestial Seasonings. Cinnamon. Clove. Peppermint. Strawberry. Vanilla. Lemongrass. Chamomile. In the tea storage room, it’s a thick, musty, earthy flavor-smell that hits the back of the throat and lingers like warm, dark bread. In the mint storage room, it’s the eye-stinging, sinus-clearing sharpness of menthol, so strong that it chased out half our tour group the moment they walked in. I was one of those who stayed as long as possible, sucking in the peppermint and spearmint stored there. As needed, the room is also used to store one other member of the mint family: catnip, for their Tension Tamer blend (which also includes hops, by the way).

There are three good reasons to visit here. First, a free guided tour, which includes a trip into the Tea Room and Mint Room, past live inventory, and alongside the packaging assembly line. We learned how they clean, dry, chop, and mix the tea ingredients, sample each blend to match it to exacting standards, and send them on to packaging if they pass muster. They produce up to five teas at a time, with each blend given its own track on the assembly line. It takes only five minutes for a teaspoon of tea to go from loose in the bin to a cellophane-wrapped box in a shipping carton, ready for distribution. Sadly, no photos are allowed because their setup is proprietary.

My 1:00 tour ticket: a free sample of Black Cherry Berry tea.

They import ingredients from around the world with fair-trade practices, and the daily inventory varies greatly, depending on what they’re manufacturing that day. Sleepytime and Peppermint are their best sellers, so chamomile and peppermint are always on hand. We pass bins of fragrant lemongrass ready for production, and rolls of packaging ready to be folded into boxes.

The storage rooms for the “real” tea (black, white, and green, all members of the same Camellia sinensis species) and the mint are sealed off with roll-up warehouse doors to protect ingredients from contamination. The real teas too readily absorb the flavors of nearby spices and herbs. The menthol in mint too readily infiltrates other goods. Black/white/green teas and mint meet other ingredients only right before they’re ready to become packaged teas.

The second reason to go to Celestial Seasonings is their free, “all you want to sample” tea tasting room, and the beautiful tea-related art on display there. I tried nearly 20 flavors of tea from their inventory, many of which I’ve never seen in stores in the west. The place was a bit crowded, but the staff was always relaxed and friendly and seemed genuinely happy to be working there. It’s certainly not hard on the psyche to be surrounded by original art from their packaging, as well as the inspirational sayings painted on their walls, just as they are printed on their boxes.

The tasting room and gallery.

Tea drinkers may recognize a few of these images, which look magnificent in the original.

One of the many amazing teapots on display.

Yep, a dress made of tea packages. Not suitable for rainy or muggy days.

I wanted to wrap this sign around the trailer.

Have list, will sample...a lot!

The third reason for visiting is, of course, a pretty cool tea shop. Here you can buy every kind of Celestial Seasoning tea, some popular Hain organic products, and loads and loads of gifties like candles, teacups, teapots, tea gadgets, and Celestial Seasonings merchandise. I now have a full larder of breakfast teas, afternoon teas, dessert teas, and anytime teas, from black to herbal, simple to complex. Good thing I really like tea.


The front seat of the truck now totally tea (a new meaning of teetotalling?), my next stop was a winery that was supposed to be in the heart of downtown Boulder. In searching for it, I stumbled on a weekend art walk, part of a year-long birthday party for 150-year-old Boulder. Turns out I was on the Pearl Street Mall, a multi-block, open-air space that is completely pedestrian, with brick pathways lined by boutiques, restaurants, world-goods shops, and lots and lots of art galleries. It reminds me of Faneuil Hall in Boston.




Book Cliff Winery had moved to a long row of warehouses a few miles up the road. Missing the entrance that leads to the front of the building, I wound around to the back, parked, and entered through a unwelcome-looking white steel door—and was immediately greeted by the swelling sounds of live classical music played by a string quartet to an audience of one, a table of cheese, crackers, and cherries, and stainless steel vats on one side, side-stacked barrels on the other.


The winery is owned by husband/wife team who started in their basement in Boulder. The shop is lined with vivid, semi-impressionistic oil paintings done by “Scramble Campbell,” an artist who creates his paintings during live music performances. The winery sponsors festivals at the (famed, but I would never have known it) local Red Rock Amphitheater, and Campbell paints during their shows; he also paints a limited number of bottles on Book Cliff’s reserve wines each year. At sixty bucks a pop, I decided to pass, although I did walk away with a couple of their white wines and a dessert, portlike red.



A few other people arrived for tastings, and I met a woman named Kim there. We swapped pours (the winery charges a small fee for five samples of our choice), and found we have similar tastes in wine, as well as for other things about life. She’s also single, about ten years older than I, and is looking for a life change that involves travel. She was intrigued by my RVg and especially liked the idea of working on farms with the WWOOFing program in the U.S. From her, I was reminded that it’s perfectly doable to trust the universe to guide me from job to job and adventure to adventure, no matter how long I do this or how old I get.

Three new bottles of wine joined the dozen boxes of tea, and I was ready for a third drinking tour the next morning: Coors. I’m not really much of a beer drinker, but I’m game to try out most new flavors and foods, so giving them a fair go seemed reasonable. After all, when in Golden, do as Goldeners do: get free beer from Coors.

Unlike at Celestial Seasonings, this tour is self-paced, all photos allowed, and guided by an audio-headset spokesman who walks you through many parts of the facility, even past less glamorous offices in connecting hallways.

And unlike tea sampling, beer sampling can, well, lead to stupidity when overdone. So while Coors makes a point of advertising “1. Free beer. 5. Did we mention the free beer? 10. Oh, and free beer!” as part of the top ten reasons to take the tour (you get up to three half-pints, plus a smaller sample midway through), they also take pains to ensure their clientele doesn’t overindulge on their “hops-itality” (sorry, that was mine).

When you check in, they require your driver’s license as proof of age to receive beer, and they scan the license to keep a record of your visit. Then they give you a personalized, hole-punchable wristband for tracking how much beer you’ve had. All of this is also to make sure you don’t receive more than your allotted share, and that you can’t come through the tour more than once the same day—such as under a disguise. Yes, it’s been attempted.

My personalized wristband, tracking my free beer intake.

Shuttles take vanloads of tourists to the Coors plant from a nearby parking lot.

The company was started by a German emigrant, Adolf Coors, in 1873. The clean, clear, Rocky Mountain water is what made him decide to build his brewery in Golden. To stay alive during Prohibition, the company sold malted milk, nonalcoholic beer (near-beer, marketed as “Mannah”), and porcelain from another of their business enterprises. Theirs was one of the few breweries able to start up seconds after midnight on the day Prohibition was lifted in 1933. This is one of the original brewing kettles.

The half-hour tour took me over an hour to absorb and enjoy, so excellent were the graphics and videos and placards. The tour takes you past displays of company history and hands-on bins of beer ingredients, onto viewing platforms of brewing vats and mash mashing, down office halls and quality control, and to a bird’s-eye view of the assembly line floor.

Throughout the trip, not-so-subliminal marketing messages punctuate the audio script. A woman’s seductive voice occasionally breaks in to purr “Coors” and “Killian’s” when the male guide mentions these brands. And the guide himself often concludes a blurb with things like, “Making you thirsty yet?” “Mmm, I’m getting thirsty. How about you?”

Barley, hops, and cereal grains (rice, corn, etc.). Just add water and cook.

Testing the brewing beer. This area smells of hot breakfast grains plus hot hops, slightly sour. It is very warm to be in. It's also quite pretty, with all the copper kettles and pipes.

Command Central for all the brewing, manufacturing, and packaging equipment. Every phase is precisely timed and measured here.

Even interim hallways are made more interesting with beer factoids and bubble etchings on office glass.

A speedy 18 minutes from finished brew to sleeved package, then onto trains and trucks for shipping. The whole goal is to keep the beer cold, cold, cold as long as possible in packaging and transit.

“Waste is a misplaced resource” a fourth-generation Coors magnate is quoted near the end of the tour. They live up to this maxim by selling almost every by-product of beer brewing. Mash goes to cattle, yeast to cat food, and “sad beer” (sub-standard batches) to producing ethanol. They make their own cans and bottles locally, with a heavy focus on recycling glass and aluminum. (In fact, it was Coors who started the use of aluminum cans in 1959, leading a recycling program that reclaimed a good percentage of their own cans and others’ for reuse.)

The tour ends in the Coors tasting room. All right, it’s a bar. I kept to half-glasses, as I hadn’t eaten much and am a liquor lightweight. I had already tried the original Coors mid-tour and disliked it. Killian’s Red was amber and more flavorful, and probably good mostly because it was on tap. Blue Moon Belgian white, served with an orange piece at the bottom, was sweet. None of the others available appealed to me enough to use my third free tasting, although I wished they offered more than six kinds out of the dozens they produce.

My stand-up table at the Coors tasting room. The flowers come from the onsite greenhouse, started by Mrs. Adolf Coors in the late 1800s. It still supplies daily roses and carnations throughout the factory and office buildings. I was disappointed that a tour of the greenhouse wasn’t included.

The gift shop offers the unusual alongside the usual. Here, a hat made out of a Coors box, and a beer holder that makes the Incredible Hulk look like a wimp. (My hand is gripping a bar inside the fist to hold it up.)

The final verdict? Call me a purist, but any beer that must be kept, and served, ice cold in order to retain its flavor really isn’t much of a beer. So, as fascinating as the tour was, the only Coors you’ll find in my refrigerator is one of those labels that’s made to turn blue in cold temps. A freebie to those few of us who stopped to chat with one of the chair-bound docents stationed throughout the tour, this specially treated paper lets me know whether the Flying Heart’s fridge is still going strong. White mountains bad. Blue mountains good. Thank you, Coors.

For those interested in more info, here are the company websites:
www.celestialseasonings.com (I recommend the brief online virtual tour)
www.bookcliffvineyards.com
www.coors.com (snappy timeline; some video histories)