We traveled to Nebraska this spring to see the Sandhill crane migration. “I guess that’s a thing” said a friend. Is it ever. Half a million or more of this one species of bird channel their way through a fifty mile stretch of the Platte River on their way to northern Canada, Alaska and Siberia. They stop over at the Platte for a few weeks before the final push, for the corn, for the flocking sociability and because the river has open shores.
The birds are accustomed to the wide vistas afforded by what was formerly a natural flood plain and they gain an understandable sense of security in maintaining clear sight lines on potential predators headed their way on their nightly roost in the river. But the open river banks were made problematic by human priorities. Damning for both power generation and flood control ended the scouring effect of the seasonal rush of waters which removed the small plant starts from the shore every year.
The river shores in this one stretch of the Platte are now cleared by human action; bulldozing, bush hogging, chain sawing. This is done in the off season so that the birds are accommodated and put at ease upon their return. Seems only right since they were the ones who got first dibs here.
It’s an anxious time for the cranes since they are on a timeline to stock up and get north to reproduce during the tight window that is the arctic summer. The flocking behavior provides some vital function for them during this stopover. It must help to ease the anxiety. This safety in numbers thing and the natural comfort of being part of a large community puts me in mind of some kind of large summer music festival. On the Platte the birds provide their own soundtrack with their Sandhill burbling, their hoots and cackles.
This huge celebration of youth and music disbands after the reproduction cycle is completed. After a brief summer of mating, of nesting and nurturing their young up north they return south in relaxed fashion, in much smaller family knots.
On our way up there from western Kentucky we stopped in Kansas City and visited the Truman Presidential Library in Independence. It’s a shrine to a problematic individual. This mild mannered man with poor public speaking skills and a history as a failed businessman in the hat and oil trades also bears the responsibility of the decision to kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese. There’s a weird irony in that personality making that particular decision. And the decision itself seems incomprehensible even as part of a practical expediency. A bookish Missouri farm boy becomes a presidential decision maker involving the use of atomic weapons on a civilian population, all tied to his nation’s psychology brutalized by the sufferings of war.
From there the highway north passes right in front of Leavenworth Prison which is a massive monument to the power of evil sitting in the prettiest, more benign and lovely Kansas river valley you ever saw. The walls of Leavenworth extend forty feet each direction from the ground. Forty feet up and forty feet down. Machine Gun Kelly and Bugs Moran did time there. So did Tom Pendergast after riding high for many years atop his pyramid of corruption as the Kansas City political boss and Truman mentor. The problem of evil is not just about bad guys. Good guys sometimes get into trouble just migrating through the problematic.