Thunderstorm on the Horizon

As promised, we were back at it this morning after a night of camping characterized by heat, humidity, and broken sleep. Something had jostled me out of my fitful slumber around midnight. Probably a rivulet of sweat dripping off my back and onto my sleeping pad. I rubbed my eyes and looked at my phone. There was not a breath of air. A coyote yipped in the distance, and the temperature read eighty-two.

Daylight finally rolled around, and I taped up my feet, popped a couple vitamin M, and we headed off to the start of the trail.

When we got to the intersection of Fox Avenue and US-20, the sun had cracked the horizon, but there was definitely change in the air. Three hours into today’s march the clouds once again gathered in the north, and the long promised cool front whistled in like a zephyr across the path. The temperature dropped almost instantly from the low 80’s to low 70’s, the wind whistled, and the hot humid air being displaced by this gift from the arctic immediately began forming thunderstorms all around us.

When you go about planning an adventure like this, you get some ideas about how things are going to turn out. Often these idyllic stories that you tell yourself turn out being a long way from reality.

One of the things I had imagined was watching great thunderstorms form and unleash their fury across the great western plains. Of course in these dreamy fantasies, the storms always stayed a respectable distance away, and I was able to watch them in all their glory from a sun drenched trail where the temperature was just perfect.

Thunderstorms on the Horizon - Holstein, Iowa

Today was one of those rare moments where reality and my fantasy walk ended up aligning quite nicely.

As the storms formed, Dad observed, “We’re gonna get our butts wet.” He’d joined for an eight mile out and back to continue to test his foot. I’m happy to report that his foot held up quite well, and his future as an oracle is in doubt.

We got a few drops, but for the most part, we were able to watch the energy of the storms expended on a piece of land we weren’t occupying.  No sun drenched trail, but the temperature….perfect.

The cold dry air that blew in today promises to make for just about perfect walking weather for about the next five days. We’re going to try and take advantage of it and make some distance.

Ahhhh......Rest

We’ve been pressing pretty hard for the last week or so, and today we took a much needed rest day. I finished up some military retirement related business in Sioux City, IA, but the rest of the day was dedicated to getting ready for the push into Nebraska.

Home Sweet Home - Little Sioux County Park - Correctionville, Iowa

On a side note, the parks here in Iowa have excellent camping facilities. Makes for a nice (and legal) Home sweet home!

More tales from the road tomorrow if things go as planned.

Heat

The thunderstorm from yesterday was replaced by the heat today. Temperature, heat index, humidity, blah, blah, blah. Heat is one of those things that just must be experienced to really get the feel for what it’s actually like outside.

The first three hours of the walk were actually pretty pleasant. Clouds left over from the evening put a gossamer drape between me and the sun rising in the east. A little breeze was blowing out of the south, and although it was muggy, the feel of the air wasn’t unpleasant.

Not to be denied his fun, the nuclear furnace approximately eight light-minutes away cranked up the fission reactions as it traced an arc in the sky from east to west. By mile nine, the clouds were all gone, and the sun beat down. I’m not going to say there wasn’t any shade because I was wearing the Jello cap, but that was about it.

I could feel the temperature start to rise on the concrete, and warm drafts of quickly heating air tickled my shins.

My brow beaded in perspiration, and my shirt became thoroughly soaked. I didn’t dare roll up my shirt sleeves. I’ve been keeping them down to avoid sunburn over the last several weeks, and my tan lines have faded as I’ve browned through the fabric. I’m concerned I might spontaneously combust with too much exposed skin.

Unlike the thunderstorm which was a relatively quick and acute experience, heat just grinds on you. Step after step….mile after mile the sun does its work. The heat and the sweat and the salt and the sun hone you. The concrete road is gleaming white, and the rest of the landscape starts to grey and then yellow. 

You reach for the bottle of Powerade which came out of the ice chest nice and chilly just an hour ago. If you’re lucky, it’s tepid with a few areas of relative cool. Most likely it’s lukewarm, but you drink it anyway. The salt collecting in the shoulder straps of your backpack has to come from somewhere.

The heat hones and you just grind it out. You think about taking off your glasses to wipe the sweat from your brow, but you know it will be back just a few minutes later. Instead you just trudge on. 

Tasseling Corn - Sac County, Iowa

The corn loves the heat. Heat makes the corn grow, and the engineered hybrids in wide use today have a known number of heat units required for a successful harvest. It’s usually between about two thousand and twenty five hundred heat units depending on the variety, and that translates into about ninety to one hundred and ten fairly warm days. 

The corn to my left was soaking up the bounty of the sun. Taller than most men, the stalks were beginning to tassel out giving the field a yellow tinge in a sea of dark green.

I stopped for a moment to take in the miles of corn revelling in the heat. Then I moved on. I’m glad something enjoys these hot midsummer days.

Thunderstorm

The weather report called for hot and sunny after a few scattered clouds in the morning. When I started the day, a band of darkness stretched out across US-20 from north to south, but it seemed pretty far out in the distance. The consensus was that thunderstorms, if they should form would skirt north of our location.

About six miles into the morning, the band of darkness to the west had started to coalesce into some actual cloud structure, and the only movement appeared to be directly in my general direction. Constant bearing, decreasing range.

I looked to the south and the band of clouds stretched for at least two or three miles. To the north the situation was similar, but I still didn’t see any rain. The air was warm and calm. I thought, at least the clouds are tamping down the attention of the sun.

Minutes later what my sister, the cloud expert in the family, described as a shelf cloud started to form up all across the five or six mile front. This wasn’t skirting north. It was headed right toward me. 

I still didn’t see the rain, so I began to look forward to the coolness that the front would inevitably bring. The cars headed my direction had their lights on, but none were using their wipers. This was going to work out just fine.

The shelf cloud continued to build, and the dark clouds blotted out the sun to the east. I grabbed my camera and started taking photos.

The front headed my way was beautiful. Grey and white clouds roiled and turned back on themselves in the wind. Blues and golds from the sun in the clear sky behind me. Vibrant turquoise and purple clouds that looked like the sea of the Caribbean surrounded by an overly ripe plum. I stood in wonder as a small section of the formation to the north started to dump dark grey buckets of rain. I glanced to the south and witnessed the same thing on a much larger scale.

Shelf Cloud Rolling West - Calhoun County, Iowa

The shelf cloud passed overhead, and a cold north wind blasted past in its wake. I still didn’t think I was going to get wet, but I dropped my pack and pulled out a Ziploc for my phone and battery. I tossed them in as a precaution, and then the first fat drops began to fall making quarter inch circles on my pack and the pavement. I dug for my pack cover. Maybe a little drizzle or two. Better play it safe.

I wrestled my pack into its cover, and the sky split open just as I finished getting the pack cover secured. Sheets of rain blasted to the south by the wind pummeled my right arm and face. The corn to the south bent with the wind, and the sheets of rain looked like fast moving mist across the forest green miles of corn.

People have asked what happens to us when it rains. The simple answer is that we get wet, and boy did I ever get wet. The wind driven rain peppered my arms enough to impart a little sting through my long sleeved shirt. The water ran in rivers off the brim of the Jello cap. 

I took off my glasses and glanced to the sky and laughed and shouted into the storm. It was a laugh that came all the way up from my belly, and the shouted “YESSSS” was pulled out of my mouth and driven south by the wind. It was glorious!

I picked up my trek poles and headed west. I stepped to the very edge of the rain soaked gravel apron of the road. The traffic still moving could only be seen about three car lengths away, and the spray of the semis was trivial in comparison to the maelstrom all around us.

The rain chilled me, and I remember thinking that I wished I could bottle it up for the inevitable heat and humidity that would follow in the afternoon.

After about thirty minutes, the rain started to slow and the deep purple of the sky started to lighten. I walked into the ragged sunlight at the back end of the storm. Lightning flashed across the clouds in white hot veins of fire, the thunder crashed, but the storm was over. 

I reflected back on how our distant ancestors had dealt with this sort of storm. No Doppler radar, no warnings, no fast drying tech fabrics, or durable water resistant nylon to keep their gear (mostly) dry.

I’d like to think they saw the beauty and shouted into the wind as well. I know they survived because none of us would be here if they hadn’t, and that’s an important thing to keep in mind. We’re the descendants of a long line of survivors and their genes and memes have put us all in a place of incredible power, luxury, and responsibility.

It was a wondrous storm, and I am deeply grateful to have experienced her in all her majestic power.

Toad on the Road

Creek and Cows - Webster County, Iowa

After four days of making my way west on lightly travelled county roads, I got back on US-20 today. From here to Sioux City, Iowa, US-20 is a four lane divided highway. I would not necessarily call it lightly travelled. 

Back when I was younger, my sister and I would play a number of road trip games when our parents had whisked us off to parts unknown. We’d play I Spy…., Slug Bug, Round-Up, and Count the License Plates. Today, since I was on my own, I decided to count cars that I passed, or more appropriately, passed me. On average, I was getting passed by five cars every minute, and it was a bit of an adjustment from the relative serenity of the last week.

As I was walking along counting cars, I glanced down and noticed that my right foot was coming down dangerously close to a toad. Now this guy was sitting near the white stripe separating the shoulder from the road gazing longingly across the two lanes of concrete to the grass in the middle of the median.

The first thing I did was slowly break out my phone to take a picture. This caused him to hop to the east. He was still dangerously close to the road, so I took my trek pole and gave him a little nudge toward the water filled ditch on our side of the road.

He looked back over his right shoulder in a bit of a huff, and hopped lightly into the grass and disappeared. I had thwarted his plans of greener pastures across the eastbound traffic lanes.

There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere. If the toad was in a huff that his dreams had been thwarted, I was relieved that he’d made the decision to return to safety with a bit of prompting. From an inch above the ground, his horizon wasn’t sufficiently expansive to truly grasp the danger he was facing. At five cars a minute, odds are that hed wind up as flattened toad. I’ve seen enough of that along the path to know he wouldn’t have enjoyed it much.

Sometimes the Universe works that way. We get turned around in our dreams or our plans based on outside circumstances. Instead of getting in a huff, it might be useful to consider that some force with a greater perspective than ours has intervened to save us a great deal of trouble. 

In the end, I didn’t get a picture of the toad, but I did get a picture of a creek with some cows in the background. It’s the best I could do while adjusting to the new normal of traffic. 

Hope you all had a great Tuesday!

The Little Things

Sometimes it’s the sweeping view of the landscape and the sky that catches my attention. When I started off this morning after a healthy breakfast in the relatively cool part of the day, I thought the most interesting scene I might see were the sunbeams filtering down through the clouds. I ended up snapping quite a few photos of that view because….well, you never can tell what the day might bring, and I have to have something to write about when it’s all said and done.

Once again, the Universe proved me wrong. It was mid-afternoon, and any semblance of cool had long since been banished as the day had matured. I mean, it wasn’t quite like walking across the anvil of the sun, but it was pretty close.

The bright green grass that has been a companion over the last several weeks was starting to get the singed yellow edges that come with the dog days of summer. I was crunching along a gravel county road, and each step sent up a little plume of pulverized rock that immediately adhered to the perspiration on my lower legs. I was like a one man pedestrian cement factory chuffing along.

I glanced up to my left, and saw one of the few remaining stands of wildflowers. I thought I better take a few photos before the summer heat finishes its grim work and the flowers disappear until next spring. Actually, I just needed to rest a little and some flower photography seemed like a good excuse.

I’ve been trying to capture a picture of a butterfly going about the busy work of pollination for quite some time now. After many a frustrating attempt, I can tell you that they seem to have a sixth sense about photography. They’ll spread their colorful wings and pose right until the moment the camera comes out. Then they’re off like the ethereal insects they are.

Green Sweat Bee At Work - Webster County, Iowa

I was under no illusion this time about capturing a butterfly. I moved in close to some pretty purple flowers and started snapping away. Just as soon as I took the first photograph, a bee landed and started dancing around the flower collecting nectar. I just kept exercising the shutter.

Only later, when I reviewed the photographs, did I realized that I’d been lucky enough to capture a Green Sweat Bee at his work. Green Sweat Bees are solitary dwellers eschewing the comfort of the hive to live in burrows on their own. This one is definitely identifiable as a male owing to the distinct striping on his abdomen.

Sometimes it’s the little things that break through and capture my attention. Today was one of those times.

Crossing I-35

Junction of County Highway D35 and I-35 near Blairsburg, Iowa

Anyone living in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex probably has a great deal of familiarity with Interstate 35. I know that the highway and associated beltways were a fairly broadly discussed and experienced topic in my own youth growing up in the Dallas area.

I-35 is a major north-south interstate highway that runs from its southern terminus in Laredo, TX all the way up north, ending in Duluth, MN. It’s a little over fifteen hundred miles long making it the third longest north south interstate in the country behind I-75 and I-95. The last section of I-35 to be completed in the late 1970’s is the section through central Iowa

Today, near the town of Blairsville, Iowa, I crossed under the I-35 overpass. It was a bit of a milestone since that road that was carrying cars, trucks, and busses just a few meters over my head had such a big impact on my experience down in Dallas. We used to head north on I-35 to visit my grandparents in Oklahoma, and I can still remember the welcome center on the TX-OK border like it was yesterday. 

Today, the overpass provided some much needed shade.

Over the last one hundred days, or so, the time I’ve spent out on the road has reminded me how much these concrete rivers of commerce and communication shape our lives and our experiences. It’s almost unfathomable to me that I could have climbed up the grassy green embankment today and be connected with my hometown by an uninterrupted ribbon of concrete and asphalt.

Sure there’d be traffic, but a couple of days from now, I could be back in my Texas aving passed through the town in Oklahoma where I spent the summers with my grandparents. It’s an incredible legacy this road system that we’ve inherited bestows upon us. I’m grateful that we have it. Even with all the traffic, and the attendant frustrations associated with that bit of frustration.

Do any of you have stories about roadways that have shaped your life?