Human Nature: Platte Attraction
A cross-country trip goes swimmingly.

By Christine Mlot
 

Interstate 80 cuts a nearly straight shot across the country, from New York’s outskirts to San Francisco. I drove most of it with my college chum Becky the summer after we graduated.

Becky had her sights on a job in California, where I was headed to graduate school. With newly inked diplomas and little else, we signed on with a company that matches eager drivers with cars needing delivery to distant owners. We gambled that by the end of the summer, the company would find us something headed west, with room enough to relocate our lives.

June and July came and went as we passed on a parade of sports cars and a tempting diesel Cadillac. Finally, with Labor Day looming, our dream ride arrived: a Ford Econoline van. Destination: central California. We stuffed it with boxes of books and other belongings, two bicycles, even a couple of houseplants. Ecstatic, we headed southwest across Wisconsin, hung a right at Iowa and merged onto I-80, our futures waiting at the end of the road.

After a few hours of interstate sameness, the excitement wore off, and the reality of driving 2,000 miles within a few days set in. Worse, our clean, repainted van began to smell of a lemon. Never mind the lousy mileage or the lack of air conditioning; it leaked a chartreuse-colored puddle every time we stopped. We began to buy jugs of coolant along with the frequent fill-ups, wondering how we would make it over the mountains.

Halfway through Nebraska, just when we thought we couldn’t drive another mile, a rest stop beckoned from the banks of the Platte River. More than a sight for road-tired eyes, it also had a small beach and roped-off swimming area. It wasn’t the prettiest swimming hole I’d ever seen, but it was easily the most welcome. We dug our swim gear out of the simmering van and headed for the water.

The cool river closed over me, creating a pleasant and much-needed sensory deprivation on the hot summer day. Tots shrieked and bobbed in the shallow water, but I managed to swim out along the rope, kicking away the fatigue that comes with sitting strapped in a moving car. I felt all the drag from the trip wash away—the road dust, the vinyl-seat stickiness, the radiator worries, the interstate ennui.

I didn’t know it at the time, but it turns out the same stretch of river is an ancient oasis for sandhill cranes traveling up the central flyway. Each spring, more than half a million converge there to rest and refuel before flying on to northern breeding grounds. The shallow, open waters of the Platte provide safe nighttime roosts.

As refreshed as the birds must feel after a layover at the Platte, we relaxed into the drive. Outside Laramie, we took the suggestion of a cowboy-hatted gent and drove up into the Snowy Range. We stopped for sheep crossings and snapshots of alpine lakes—and to let the van cool down. That became our mountain-crossing strategy: Whenever the temperature gauge started to read hot, we’d pull over and read books until the engine simmered down enough to take more coolant.

We made it that way, haltingly, through the Rockies, past the Great Salt Lake and over the green Sierra Nevada. Yet of the many scenes from that trip that stick in my mind’s eye, the Platte is the only one that comes with muscle memory, too, of the cool ablution on a hot August day. I feel it whenever I hear about the crane travelers’ rest stop along the river.

Some spring day, I hope to visit the Platte again and see the sandhill cranes in their element. I don’t expect I’ll do another cross-country drive, though. Instead, I’ll take a cue from the birds: I’ll fly.
 

Christine Mlot writes about science and nature from Madison, Wisconsin.  Her last story for Nature Conservancy, about the rare Karner blue butterfly, appeared in the spring 2007 issue.