Concrete overpass on trip to Hafford for lunch. Part 2

  ''one could breathe that only on the bright edges of the world,

on the great grass plains or the sage brush desert.

That air would disappear from the whole earth in time, perhaps; but long

after his day. He did not know just when it had become so necessary to him, but

 he had come back to die in exile for the sake of it. Something soft and wild

and free, something that whispered to the ear on the pillow, lightened

the heart, softly, softly picked the lock, slid the bolts, and released the

prisoned spirit of man into the wind, into the blue and gold, into the morning,

into the morning!''

from Death Comes for the Archbishop

by Willa Cather

Concrete overpass on trip to Hafford for lunch. Part 1

  Tuesday we took Helen's mom to lunch at the great A&M Bistro in Hafford. Each time we take that hwy Helen is more and more intrigued by an old concrete overpass over the railroad. Both railroad and road are long abandoned but on the way home Helen wanted to see what was still there. The answer, beautiful views. Even the remaining concrete bridge is lovely, save for some callow  graffiti. The last two years Helen and I have climbed Memorial Hill in Shelllake for the view. But the Shell Lake area is the parkland and the views are restricted. South of Blaine Lake you are in the prairie and it shows with these rolling vistas. I will split the photos into two posts, because I cannot choose just one or two.

"He had seen the end of an era, the sunset of the pioneer. He had come upon

it when already its glory was nearly spent. So in the buffalo times a traveller

used to come upon the embers of a hunter's fire on the prairies, after the hunter

was up and gone; the coals would be trampled out, but the ground was warm,

and the flattened grass where he had slept and where his pony had grazed, told

the story.  This was the very end of the road-making West; the men who had put

plains and mountains under the iron harness were old; some were poor, and even

the successful ones were hunting for rest and a brief reprieve from death. It was

already gone, that age; nothing could ever bring it back. The taste and smell and

song of it, the visions those men had seen in the air and followed,—these he had

caught in a kind of afterglow in their own faces,—and this would always be his"

                                         from Lost Lady

                                                     Willa Cather