OK, so I'm not exactly a San Francisco liberal, but I've been to the Bay Area twice in the last year. Work took me west across Nebraska over the weekend, I had some time to kill on Sunday, and I spent it roaming around with my camera near Alliance, Nebraska, in the heart of NE-03, where Scott Kleeb will win the house seat in 2008.
See, I wasn't kidding, I have been to San Francisco. The red railing is the Golden Gate and the Bay Bridge is visible at the right of the photo. Tall, dark, and handsome blue eyed guys who know something about cows are Nebraska's third largest export, and here are three kickin' up their heels in the world's most beautiful city :-)
Omaha, Nebraska hosts four of the Fortune Five Hundred. Kleeb's district hosts four of the unfortunate ten - these being the ten poorest counties in the country. People do all sorts of things to make ends meet; who knew that "used windmill dealer" was an actual job description?
There area has people of both faiths - Catholic and Protestant. The widget in the ground behind the cemetery sign is a cow proof gate - the bars are about 2/3rds the width of a hoof while the gaps are just a bit less than a hoof across. No cow will cross these things unless there is a wildfire right behind.
Here is a close up of the cow proof gate. The cemetery itself was half a mile south on top of a hill. A small fence protected the graves from the grazing cattle.
Alliance, Nebraska, is the Box Butte county seat. 10,600 people, 24 restaurants, and 24 churches. The 2000 census indicates the area is 91% white with the bulk of the rest being Hispanic. I believe the whole county only has a population of 12,000.
I tell people I'm from Nebraska, they get this slightly goofy look on their faces, and then they say "*snort* Lots of corn, huh?" I would like to gather them all together and drop them off in the middle of the sand dunes and yucca that cover a quarter of this state.
Many, many people have said just exactly that, so I'd need a large vehicle to transport them all. This cowboy limo seems to be just the ticket for that job.
You have all sorts of choices when you live in outstate Nebraska ... except for one particular one near and dear to many a Kossack's heart. We will never, ever send a pro choice candidate from any of the three Nebraska Congressional Districts, so you might as well get over it.
Nebraska's world famous Carhenge received $3,200,000 from Homeland Security to protect it from terrorist attacks. I'm not kidding even a little bit - use The Google and convince yourself this really happened.
I snapped this for its humor value, thinking the local paper was named the Progressive. This is not the case so this sign on main street Alliance is something of a mystery to me.
The population is graying and shrinking. You find abandoned general stores and restaurants scattered around the territory. This one is south of Alliance.
The county must have some sort of ordinance about abandoned trailer homes. I suspect they're being concentrated like this as isolated units would quickly get turned into meth labs. I think there are forty two in this row and there are another dozen hiding behind these.
Western Nebraska is beautiful and I don't think my slightly snarky photo essay really captures the subtle pleasures of visiting the place. This is Jail Rock as seen from the peak of Courthouse Rock. These famous landmarks were visible from the Oregon Trail and they serve as a clear marker to the end of the sand hills and the beginning of buttes, the most striking of which is Scott's Bluff, a massif rising 800' above the surrounding plain and showing eleven million years of strata in its 740' of exposed sedimentary layers.
If you want to get a sense of what the area is like both geographically and culturally I would suggest Brokeback Mountain or perhaps My Own Private Idaho. Curious thing, isn't it, that these are the sorts of films that feature this region and culture?