Another Long Day with Another Surprise Visit

Today was another long day, but a good one. With Dad’s help we managed to put in a little over twenty two miles. Dad walked along for about thirteen of them, so it looks like his foot is well on its way to a full recovery.

The Road to the West - Between Orchard and O’Neill, Nebraska

The first half of the walk happened along the shoulder of US Highway 20 between Orchard, Nebraska and O’Neill, Nebraska. The road was mostly flat, straight, and relatively empty.

For reasons not completely clear to me, we ran across a fairly large number of fairly small toads along the fringe of the road. Once again, a couple of them seemed bent on making the treacherous journey across the highway to a spot where the grass was just about the same level of greenness as the side they were bent on departing.

Dad was with me, and we did our best to chase them back into the grass on our side of the road. We were pretty successful, but one hard headed amphibian simply would not be herded.

I chased him to about the middle of the highway, and, finally fed up with his apparent intransigence, I picked him up and carried him back from whence he came.

The road was flat and straight and disappeared into the western horizon. On both sides of the road, the corn and soybeans finally yielded the space to vast fields dedicated to the production of hay. Row after row of freshly cut prairie hay weighing approximately twelve hundred pounds apiece littered the fields.

This subtle change in crop production is a little thing, but it’s the sort of change that keeps the walk interesting. It raises all sorts of questions, and the more I learn, the more I realize how much I really don’t know. How do farmers decide whether to plant corn, soybeans, or produce hay? How do these individual and apparently uncoordinated decisions drive market conditions later in the season at sale time? What do you do with a twelve hundred pound bale of hay that doesn’t sell, and how long will it last? All sorts of questions.

Closing out a productive day of walking, another Navy colleague called just as we were wrapping up our pedestrian efforts for the day. He was going to be passing through town on his way to visit family in South Dakota, and, once again, we were afforded the opportunity to catch up, tell a few tall tales, and participate in some good conversation. It’s the sort of thing that makes long stretches of solitude out on the road worth every step.