Day 4: Johnson Lake Nebraska
Okay, so no Badlands. So what? Yeah, it's a drag but it was not meant to be. I am just too insane and disorganized.
I didn't get out of Laramie until about 11am, and that was after waking up at 8am. I drove past Cheyenne and into Nebraska and pulled over one more time to look at the maps. This was my last chance to head north into South Dakota, or even into the Badlands of Northwestern Nebraska. I did a lot of thinking and a lot of math and decided it wasn't worth it. The main reason is that I miss the living shit out of my family so I just can't add any days to this trip and to go up there would mean some marathon driving to make up the time and I am already pretty burnt out on the driving at this point.
As soon as I made the decision to skip the Badlands, I felt relief. I could now take my time, driving a comfortable ammount each day, and it re-opened to possibility of camping, something that is nearly impossible when you drive ten hours and then just need to collapse. Loona and I celebrated the death of the OCD part of my journey by pulling over and going for a long walk. We found an exit off of the I80, where there seemed to be just nothing for miles. Just green and brown rolling hills and you could see South, literally all the way to mountains of Utah, where I spent the night on Thursday.
I once again had the urge to just walk right into the nature. It gets so frustrating how the whole country is on display for you as you drive through it, but so much of it is fenced off.
See how I illustrate that point by showing you a fence? ooh. I'm smart! Anyway, this exit did lead to a road that went up into the niceness. We pulled over and walked into the brown and green, having to cross some train tracks and crawl under a barbed wire fence.
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After that, though, we could have walked all the way back to Sundance, or so it seemed. When I see landscape like this that is so enormous and just empty and goes on and on, I don't get it. It doesn't fit into my head that there is this much world, just in Nebraska alone.
It's a great thing to be somewhere where I am able to let Loona just run and run until she becomes a brown and black smudge in the landscape. I couild see her way at the bottom of a grass slope I was descending, rolling on her back in the grass.
Then she started to chew on something. When I reached her, I was reminded that she was an animal, who would probably gnaw on my dismemembered foot if she came across it here some day.
Why just a deer foot? Where's the rest? Weird.
After a long walk in, we walked back out, back to the car. I got these pictures of Loona just as the train rolled by behind her.
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Here is a video of right after that.
The instant this video ends, huge buckets of rain started pounding down from the sky, sideways, accompanied by a crazily strong wind! It was nuts. We ran for the car. I couldn't see any clouds above us, but it was hard to even look up to try to see them because the cold rain was stabbing me right in the eyes! Like whatever cloud was throwing this at us was deliberately doing it so that we wouldn't look at it, because it didn't have any underwear on or something.
The instant we got back to the car, soaking wet, and closed the doors, the rain stopped and the sun was shining. Loona nd I got back out of the car, dried off and ate lunch right there in the middle of the dirt road.
All of my relief at having nowhere to go but home quickly faded though, as I looked at the map with my renewed plans and realized that now I have to drive across Nebraska and Iowa, followed by Illinois, Indiana and then fucking Ohio. Jesus. Okay. Here we go.
About a hundred miles later though, deep into Western Nebraska, I found an outdoor type store, where they had a very detailed map of Nebraska for hunters and campers. I found a place that was perfectly situated right about where I'd want to stop for the night. Lake Johnson. And the map showed that it has two State-run campsites with tent spots. These are by far the best places to camp. KOA is awful and most every other privately run campsite is geared toward cramming a bunch of RVs together, plugging them in, with full cable and DSL at ever site, So that folks can pretend they're still home. But State campsites are just a lot of brown wooden signs and picnic tables. Very simple and usually not too crowded. I found Johnson Lake at about 7pm, and the campsite had one perfect vacancy, which had just been left by somebody else, right up against the lake.
I parked, unloaded and pitched my tent, only to realize that I'd forgotten, Loona chewed right through that tent back in the desert. Luckily, I had bought a tent repair kit. Unluckily, I had to figure out how to use it and repair this gaping hole before nightfall. To make matters interesting there was an intense swarm of some giant kind of mosquitos filling the air more and more by the second and I knelt in the grass and sewed the hole shut. Here is the final job I did. I am glad I'm not a surgeon.
As it got dark, these insane bugs started concentrating on my lantern as I cooked my dinner, a can of chicken noodle soup and some pita bread. As i ate, I realized that the bugs were flying into my soup and dying in there by the fuckload. I was so hungry, though, that I didn't care. Loona and I ate as fast as possible. I finished putting up the tent and laying out the bedrolls for us, all in the dark so that the light wouldn't attract the bugs into the tent. I zipped it shut, cleaned up from dinner and took Loona for a long walk in the dark. We stopped at a little bait shop on the way where I bought an ice cold can of Miller High Life. The only possible beer for the moment. Some kind of Italian or German beer in a fancy bottle would have been all wrong. So we walked and I drank my beer, also smoking a cigarette which was exactly as perfectly appropriate as the beer for the moment.
When we got back, I zipped us into the tent. Amazingly, it really kept the crazy bugs out. The breeze off the lake flowed through the mesh windows of the tent as Loona and I settled in and slept, kind of, in fits, until 5am this morning, when I was woken up by rain hitting me gently in the face through the mesh window above my head. Thinking it was about to pour down on us, I jumped up and started frantically breaking camp. It never really started to come down but I'm glad I thought it would becasue it motivated me into doing something in ten minutes that usually takes a good ADD hour for me to do. The red sun came up over the lake as I used the propane flash boiler to make hot cereal and french press coffee.
that and a grapefruit that I bought in Las Vegas made a perfect breakfast.
God, this is a boring one, isn't it? Well, that's just about it anyway. I'm making this entry from out campsite. It's about 8am now. When I'm done, we'll take a walk and then get out of here and I'll post this at the next wifi I come across. Maybe something fucked up will happen to me today and you'll have more interesting things to read. If any of you have a response to any of this you can post it on my message board. Thanks for reading.
LCK