We had a full day today. We started by driving into the downtown of Ogallala which is about 4 blocks long with too many empty storefronts. After some notary and post office visits, we headed north out of town toward Arthur, where Peggy’s father spent his childhood. On the way, we passed over the Ogallala Dam which holds back Lake McConaghy and empties into Lake Ogallala below the dam. We had just driven off the far end of the massive earthen dam when we looked up into a nearby dead tree and spotted a gorgeous bald eagle gazing out over the lake.
We wanted a closer look so we went into the state park that stretches between the highway and the lake shore and were rewarded with some great views until we spooked him and he buggered off. We left and continued our trip toward Arthur. We drove through gently rolling sand hills covered with grass and flowers into Arthur County which has one town – Arthur. There are 165 townies in Arthur and about 300 folks living out of sight resulting in a county population of about 450. It is the fifth most sparsely populated county in the U.S. One of the counties with an even rarer house is on Hawaii and it is under a sheet of lava.
Arthur is a tiny little joint with a nice city park. In the park, visitors can find the old county jail which is a one-room wood building with bars on the windows and a garden gate hasp on the door. Arthur doesn’t seem to be a hotbed of crime. We putted around town for a few minutes on the mostly paved roads, admiring the sights, one of which is a church made out of hay bales. They plastered the outside but the plaster exhibits cracking defects that suggest the structure might not be entirely sound.
Peggy’s grandmother was buried here long ago but we were unable to find her grave despite quizzing a local cop, the elderly ladies that worked at the newspaper and the staff at the county courthouse. The graveyard is quite old but records are funky and even the county experts admitted that there are more decedents that monuments in the graveyard.
After our failed grave search, we headed back toward Ogallala passing lengths of fence where local farmers have capped their fence posts with what must be hundreds of pairs of worn boots, sole up. We have no explanation for this behavior but the tops of the fence posts don’t seem to rot where boots protect them. We continued back towards Ogallala, this time stopping at Lake Ogallala State Park which is below the dam. At the bottom of the dam and powerhouse, there is a discharge pipe emitting a truly impressive stream of water about 8 feet across and going about 200 feet per second that spills into Lake Ogallala. As we approached this discharge pipe, we noted what started out as merely a suspicion of a farting spouse but which became a truly extraordinary and putrid stench. It was after we checked out the discharge and drove away that we realized the source of this eye-watering miasma was the discharged water.
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