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Return to the Braided Prairie: A 2024 North Loup Photo Memory

When I returned to North Loup, Nebraska this summer to bury my mother, I realized I hadn’t been back to that beautiful village for 40 years! It seemed impossible that I’d been away from the braided prairie for two generations! I discovered the last time I visited North Loup was in 1984 when I published a photo memory. Today, 14,600 days later, I present a new photo memory of the North Loup that raised me, and that lifted all the hopes of my curious childhood in far away in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Continue reading → Return to the Braided Prairie: A 2024 North Loup Photo Memory

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Cathedrals of Chalk: Return to Happy Jack Mountain

There is a special place from my childhood called Happy Jack Mountain that I visit daily from New York City even though that Mountain resides more than 1,500 miles away near Scotia, Nebraska.

Afloat in the Flatlands
I travel to Happy Jack Mountain by closing my eyes and walking the winding trail of 234 railroad tie steps up to the 483 foot Peak that pinnacles 2,000 feet above sea-level.

This is the story of a time and place that will never change for me, for every time I visit Happy Jack Mountain, it is the Fall of 1969 when life was glittering and full of innocence and promise.

My existence was purely good and clean and I was four years old.

Nebraska is notorious for being flat.

In fact, “Nebraska” is the Oglala Plains Indian phrase for “Flatwater.”

The running joke is that Nebraska is 98% sky, 1% land and 1% manure.

Wind, Rain and Sunshine are the Holy Trinity that rule life upon Nebraska’s plains.

Nebraskans are known by some as “fly over folks” where people on either end of the nation only get to know us, our customs, and our dreams en passant as they arc over us in airplanes on their way to someplace bigger.

Continue reading → Cathedrals of Chalk: Return to Happy Jack Mountain