The Midwest...Wild and Otherwise

People on the West Coast tend to be spoiled.  Even I say, "The West is the best and the Coast has the most".  Smugly, at that.  OK, the Midwest doesn't have towering snowcapped mountains.  But it has everything else...bustling cities, history, tranquil countryside, dynamic weather, and water...big rivers, peaceful ponds, inland seas.  Here the Lizards are contemplating their entry into the Midwest along the South Platte River in Sterling, Colorado.  The Midwest really begins at Denver.  Before I lived there, I always categorized Denver as a western city.  But it's really about half western, half midwestern.  Many folks from the Midwest go as far west as Denver, and stay there.  It's like there's an umbilical cord between them and their native land that will remain intact in Denver, but might sever if they cross the Rockies and go farther west.

Cozad, Nebraska lies on the 100th meridian of west longitude.  This is roughly the boundary between semiarid steppe to the west and wetter prairie to the east.  Irrigation is absolutely needed west of here, not so much to the east.  In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, salesmen of dubious integrity told settlers that once the land to the west was tilled, rain would "follow the plow".  Not!  For a couple unusually wet decades, it seemed that might be true.  Then came the dust bowl in the 1930s.

The state capitol in Lincoln, Nebraska.  It's an early Art Deco classic, completed in 1923.  I was in Lincoln on a football Saturday...Huskers vs Ducks.  90 thousand fans were converging on Memorial Stadium, about a mile north of here.  All the ones I saw were upbeat and friendly.  And they did beat the Ducks.  Didn't go to the game...I probably should have planned to.

Abe Lincoln in his namesake city.  He seems a bit downcast...perhaps he wishes his Fighting Illini had a program as strong as those of Nebraska and Oregon.

An old church and a new one in Lincoln.  The old church is similar to the one on Jackson Square in New Orleans.

The Iowa prairie.  It oozes lushness and fecundity.  Corn and soybeans thrive.  And windmills...Iowa is a good source of wind power these days.   On the prairies, there's nothing to stop the wind from Saskatchewan to Texas.

The Iowa state capitol in Des Moines.  Pleasant grounds surround the building.

A massive Civil War memorial in Des Moines, near the Capitol.

Tallgrass prairie near Joliet, Illinois.  About 40 miles SW of Chicago, it's peaceful here.  The grass in the pic is 7-8 feet high.  Shaq could hide in there!

Chicago.  So many innovatively designed skyscrapers, soaring into the sky.  A great city!

Ready to cross Lake Michigan from Milwaukee on the ferry.

Departing on a rainy morning.

Muskegon light at the entrance to the harbor.  Like many spots on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, Muskegon actually lies on a smaller lake that was isolated from the big lake by a sandbar developing along the shore of Lake Michigan.  In Muskegon's case, a gap was dredged in the sandbar to make the city a major lake port.  Glaciers carved the original lakebed with many inlets, which were mostly dammed by sandbars.  Thus there is the odd phenomenon of many substantial lakes separated from Lake Michigan by a sand ridge only a mile or two wide, if that.

The Lake from the top of a dune in Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, northern Michigan.

A glowering sky silhouettes the landscape.

Dunes and lake.  South Manitou Island in the distance.

Fall colors are just beginning to develop.  It's been very warm over the past several weeks, with no hint of frost, so the leaves are a bit late this year.

MOMA?  No...Lake Michigan, dune, clouds.

The Lizards take to the beach at The Lake.  The water is still fairly warm...around 70 degrees.  The surf was very gentle, but the Lizards were still uneasy.  They have zero buoyancy and I think they were afraid of a rogue wave.  A rogue wave on a lake??? Well, there was the case of the Edmund Fitzgerald...