road trip

Last night I stayed in Ogallala, Nebraska. I’m about three hours from my destination. The Ogallala Aquifer has its site locality here and runs under eight states in the Great Plains (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer). The aquifer is being depleted at ever-increasing rates. I learned about it in a college environmental-issues class and was shocked at how much…

I traveled to Davenport, IA, yesterday on my way to Wyoming for the Literature and Landscape writers’ retreat. Davenport is the home of John Deere, the tractor mogul who developed a steel-bottomed plow back in the 1800s. Davenport, for me, brings images of my German grandmother’s white-leather living room sofa, which she called a davenport.…