Even from the interstate, darkness of the rural West swallows every hint of landscape. The world ends at highway signs and the explosive light clustered at exits, where hotels, gas stations and fast-food huts blot out the farms and tiny towns behind them. When we reached Sterling, an orange haze clung to the sky, projected from the giant prison complex south of the city. Other than hosting a Village Inn, we knew little of Sterling.
We dropped her parents at their hotel and in attempting to find ours, discovered the streets around downtown Sterling torn up for water main work. We found the motor court Nancy booked close to midnight, falling asleep minutes after we finished an unexpectedly late dinner.
In the morning, we faced the town for the first time, the biggest city in northeastern Colorado. Closer to Nebraska and Wyoming than to the Front Range, Sterling lies in farm country rimmed by farms of wind turbines. The South Platte River cuts several shallow streams through a wooded plain south of downtown, the same ribbon of blue that fills Denver’s reservoirs and originates in the mountains near Fairplay. From Sterling, the South Platte still had another 100 miles before meeting the North Platte.
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| My occasional photographic assistant |
The town followed a Western template, with railroad tracks cutting through town, a town square anchored by the courthouse and rows of two-story brick commercial buildings, some boarded but most still thriving. Despite some decaying houses near the tracks, well-kept mid-20th century houses lined the streets. I think of the many gutted small towns we’ve crossed or visited in recent vintage, and have no problem declaring that Sterling stands on far better footing than most.
Sterling had some flourishes to draw more than weary highway travelers. The town has a good variety of local restaurants (Chinese from Wonderful House is hard to beat) and some more upscale options like the Bistro.
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| I wonder why I liked the brewery's taproom. |
The brewery has an impressive taproom with sidewalk seating, a broad interior seating area with couches and tables. It’s the brewery I always favor, with space for anyone who wants to drink and no hint of exclusivity. We didn't have time to hang out at Parts & Labor (them closing on Monday did not help), but we got several small growlers to enjoy in the hotel room.
The city bustled with Saturday morning activity – youth athletics filled the fields of the middle and high school complex. A festival drummed to life in downtown (more on that later). Beyond the schools, farmland took over. A group of geese slept on the road apron. From telephone poles and irrigators, hawks patrolled for rodents and small game. Driving the farm rods we noticed colonies of prairie dogs behind the wire fences. Despite their nuisance, they endured on these plains.
Why Sterling? Seven months ago, I never knew Sterling existed. In August, Nancy’s sister, brother-in-law and their three girls moved to Sterling. Her parents plan to move there before year’s end (In case you wondered, we’re not moving there – too hard to find good jobs in our fields). Her sister and brother-in-law settled on a house with a one-acre plot among the vast farms east of the city, a place where you don’t count cars, but count the minutes between first hearing a car and finally seeing it. Wind turbines gleamed on the rumpled horizon.
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| Our favorite bales |
Only a few minutes of watching Nancy’s nieces and their dog Dallas run along the hay bales across the street convinced us to do the same. I climbed slowly at first, acclimating to the spongy tops of the bales, light plastic netting binding the hay together. Dallas easily traversed the bales, not fearing leaps between the rows as we did.
By night, my surgical repaired left arm would ache from climbing the long rows of rolled alfalfa. Having grown up far from farm life, I didn’t care. I no longer lacked that experience. Nancy’s nieces weaved and jumped across the bales as we carefully weighed where to jump, fearing the results if we estimated the distances wrong. As I developed a comfort with jumps and walking the long columns of hay. While we played on the bales, the fast-moving weather of the Colorado Plains delivered several storms clouds and patches of sun before settling on severe clear skies.
The most common wild creature seen around Sterling never grew tiring. Raptors were everywhere – red-tailed, red-shoulder, rough-legged as well as prairie falcons and kestrels. Hawks nested in the cottonwoods above their farmhouse. While rummaging across the bales, we found spines and the occasional detached arm of a frog or toad. After swooping down, the hawks often take their meals atop the bales, the girls told us.
The bales weren’t the only spot of intrigue for city folk. Electric fence lined their yard, and the neighboring pastures hid other western fauna. As Dallas skipped beyond the electric fence, several odd creatures broke from patches of tall grass. Their heads seemed to loll at the ends of skinny necks as they sped away from Dallas. Only later in a few zoomed-out pictures would I see the true appearance of the jackrabbits. What I saw as a skinny neck and tiny head was their giant ears extended as they fled. This was our first encounter with jackrabbits.
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| Jackrabbit at maximum zoom |
I walked the back fields with one of Nancy’s nieces, my pulse quickening every time another jackrabbit burst from the scrubby grasses. Dallas would never catch them, and he would never stop trying. While he engaged in futile pursuits, we found remnants of two slow jackrabbits, piles of tiny broken bones picked clean by predators. While Nancy and I did not hear their cries, coyotes are frequent nighttime visitors.
Sterling was in a festive mood on this Saturday, as the Sugar Beet Days Festival overtook the grounds of the Logan County Courthouse. We had lunch and cut through the rows of vendors selling homemade wares and a broad range of food items. The girls took a turn on the bungee swings while the rest of us enjoyed the shade. The sunshine caught me off-guard. While the day started in the 50s, the sun is brilliant and unrelenting on a clear day in Colorado.
We passed a display of sugar beets. Years ago Nancy and I saw piles of sugar beets at processing plants in north-central Wyoming. At their freakish size, one sugar beet could feed an entire family. But sugar beets don’t work that way – they are refined into sugar (sugar beet sugar is no different from cane sugar). Sugar beets excel in soil with warm days and cool nights, making Colorado and other spots in the Mountain West primary beet territory.
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| North Sterling Reservoir |
The rolling land folded in other surprises, such as North Sterling Reservoir, the lake critical for irrigation waters. From the overlook, birds flocked over a reservoir far removed from full pool. New peninsulas stretched into the lake, although fishermen still cast into waters known for walleye and wipers (hybrid striped bass). At the outlet creek below the dam, others cast into rushing currents. A day so defined by romping on hay bales could only end with an encore visit.
The bales grew especially photogenic at the golden hour, as the field blazed with the day’s best lighting. With a waxing crescent moon that would rise hours after midnight, the skies grew dark and clear.
Although Sterling’s core blossoms on light pollution maps due to a massive prison and its downtown railyard, the lights fade fast in the country. Aside from the house lights and wind turbines blinking like holiday lights, the darkness consumed the undulating farm fields. The faint band of the Milky Way, extirpated in the city, grew crisper than I ever remembered. That dense galactic haze extended to each horizon. As we drove darkened country roads back to the hotel, the band outshone everything else in the sky.
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| Nancy, Dallas and Ella running the bales at sunset. |
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