Beautiful Nebraska

"Look, look at that pivot over there! See the brown spots in the corn and look, there is a small lake of standing water. See how green everything else is too?"

Such were the words of my passengers on a recent flight. We started over water in the filled-to-capacity reservoir at Alma and flew the Republican River west into its headwaters in Colorado. It was look, see and enjoy the view all the way around on a special four hour sightseeing trip over Southwest Nebraska, parts of Kansas and Colorado and then north into Sandhills. Country that the three of us love best.

Several years ago a very special lady Ruth Sughroue asked me to fly her over all the reservoirs in this area and up over the Sandhills, too. I planned to do it on a spring morning when the countryside would be green, the wild flowers in bloom and the air smooth. Spring just kept slipping by year after year but then Nebraska fooled us with wonderful rains and the whole countryside stayed beautifully green all summer. So it was that the planets all aligned and off we went last month on our own magic carpet, my Piper Arrow.

Ruth proudly claims that she used to baby sit me. Well, almost, as it was her mom doing the sitting for my brother and me, age four years or so, while our folks went to the state fair.

Ruth is only 10 years older so I suspect her role was more in the line of entertainment. Ruth was born a Dutcher and grew up on a place her dad homesteaded some eight miles southwest of McCook. The Dutchers were close neighbors in a hard-bitten country especially during the dry thirties. Her siblings were eminently successful; Flora well known to anyone who attended McCook College and Lee a one-time hired man for my dad and then long-time petroleum engineer. There was an earlier family too, three half brothers who all went to World War I. The one I knew, Eph, was the grandfather of Jesse, McCook's water superintendent.

From Alma, where the stream crosses over into Kansas, up the Republican to circle and take pictures of her dream home on a Bartley sandpit. Nearby was the "85 footer," a place where Indians pushed bison over a cliff to slaughter. We detoured a bit to circle Strunk Lake on the Medicine and Butler on the Red Willow Creeks. Then once around Swanson Lake, near Trenton, where we climbed to altitude to take advantage of a tail wind and gain a more panoramic view. Near Benkelman the stream forks to a North and a South Republican branch, then a little further the Arikaree splits off from the north branch. On southwest along the Arikaree and over the site of the Battle of Beecher Island. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Beecher_Island.)

Then south to Bonny Dam, built for flood control and a never-completed irrigation system. The dams were of interest to Ruth and Becky, because their husband and dad, Kenny created a successful business of supplying water for the construction phase where supplemental moisture is essential to compacting the earthen dam itself. He helped build dams all over the western U.S. and also worked several years on the Central Arizona Project.

Leaving Colorado, we flew across the divide between the Republican drainage and to that of the South Platte River. The large earthen dam, largest in the world when built, now holding back the waters of Lake McConaughy on the North Platte River was one of Kenny's first projects. It is a big lake and most impressive is the huge plume of water below the dam that squirts high into the air to aerate the outflow from the electricity-producing turbines. From the air, we could easily trace the long blue tinted plume of oxygenated water below the dam that should make for excellent trout fishing.

Landed at North Platte for lunch and fuel, both kinds. Then it was on northeast across the Sandhills to fly over and marvel at the Comstock Music Festival then in progress. The crowd wasn't nearly as large as when Becky attended in its halcyon days of yore.

Luxuriantly green with patches of wildflower color, the Sandhills from low altitude are simply a visual treat. Except for the occasional fence and a rare windmill that country has to be just as it was when the Indians held sway and the first pioneers caught their first glimpses of that huge sea of grass. It is an awesome country where we live right here in Nebraska.

One of the real honors of my life as a retired officer is to be asked to commission and swear into military service young persons who have earned that right and privilege! Then I get to live vicariously watching them progress through successful careers in the military that I so loved. Recently I received notice that "one of my brood," Chris Forch of Stratton, Nebraska, has been promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Commander in the Navy. In Air Force talk that would be a Major. Chris is serving as a weapons officer on the modern, state-of-the art, destroyer USS Truxtun, DDG-103, which means that he gets to pull the trigger on some pretty serious guns and missiles.

But, then, what better job for a Southwestern Nebraska kid that was born (well almost) with a shotgun in his hand and grew up hunting the shores of Trenton Lake next door.

Chris is especially happy as now he outranks his sister, Kim Hightower, who served with distinction for 11 years in the U.S. Navy Nurse Corps. Actually it kind of runs in the family, as Christopher and Kimberly are the offspring of my cousin, Pat and Jamie Forch, longtime teacher at McCook High School.

That is the way I saw it.