A while back I sent a picture of my
normal work environment to one of my friends who lives in the
Rockies. His first reaction was “How do you navigate without
landmarks?” Living near the Missouri river, we have flat plains
where the riverbed once was centuries ago, with low hills on
either side. Those flat plains are fertile cropland and can stretch
up to 30 miles between the hills, making for a landscape almost as
flat as a calm ocean. When you factor in the curvature of the Earth,
it is easy to find yourself in a sea of green with very few prominent
landmarks to orient yourself by. Add in 10 foot tall corn fields on
both sides of a road and getting lost can be an issue. Bugging out or
just traveling through this terrain wouldn't seem like much of a
hassle, but without knowing the landmarks it could be a challenge.
Roads
Roads are sometimes laid out in a
square grid, but with the reduction in funding for maintenance over
the last 40 years many of the roads have been abandoned or dropped to
Minimum Maintenance Road (MMR) status. MMR means they get no gravel
and the ruts will get scraped out as the maintenance crews have spare
time. The only thing that will save a road from being reclassified as
MMR is an occupied house on the road, and even then the county will only maintain
the road up to the house if it is the only one. Many of the
well-placed MMRs around here are known as good places for kids to
party, but it's been that way for decades.
Railroads
We have a few major railroad lines that
cut through the county. Constant maintenance and rail traffic makes
them a dependable route of travel, if not always the safest. Many of
the smaller companies have gone bankrupt and the lines abandoned,
creating “dead” rail that connect small towns. Some of these dead
lines have been repurposed as biking/hiking trails and depending on
the funding available may be paved and well-maintained. Bridges seem
to be the most costly feature to maintain, but even an old rail
bridge will hold more foot traffic than you can physically fit on it.
Several groups are combining their efforts to make an interconnected
system of paved bike trails stretching more than 100 miles through
the hills, which will create an easy path for foot traffic out of the
cities.
Waterways
I'm lucky in that I live in an area
with abundant water. It's hard to go more than a mile in any
direction without finding some form of river, stream, drainage ditch,
or well in my home county. Waterways and bridges are common landmarks
for giving directions and easy to find.
Traveling along a waterway is
usually easy because of the use of levees for flood control. Levees
tend to be wide enough to drive on, but you may encounter fences and
gates placed to keep normal traffic off of them. Unless there is
levee maintenance in progress, the tops of the levees don't get mowed
so expect tall grass and limited visibility near the edges. We lose a
drunk every couple of years when they try driving on a levee and get
too close to an edge.
Silos
The only real landmarks that we have
out here in farm country that can be seen for any distance is the
grain silos. Originally placed along the railroad lines as a way to
store grain for future shipment, every small town used to have an
“elevator” or Co-op with silos that stand between 50 and 120 feet
tall. Most of the wooden ones have been torn down recently, but the
concrete and steel silos can still be found scattered throughout the
Midwest. On the flatlands they're spaced out about 10 miles apart, so
if you're standing at one you can usually see the nest one up the
line on the horizon. When the small towns and elevators were
originally placed close to a century ago, 10 miles was about all the
further anyone wanted to haul their crop. About 20 years ago the
railroads stopped picking up grain from the small towns around here,
it wasn't cost-effective for them, so a lot of grain companies and
Co-ops have gone out of business.
Several large farming families have
built their own elevators. I've got a couple of private facilities
nearby that have more capacity than our smallest elevator, but they
tend to build larger diameter and shorter silos. These operations
tend to be close to major roads, whereas you'll see small clusters of
much smaller grain bins out in the fields. Small is relative when
talking about bulk storage- a bin that can “only” hold 10-20
semi-trailer loads of corn is small. You have to get into the 300-500
truck capacity range before they're considered large. For
perspective, a standard semi-trailer holds close to 1000 bushels
(55,000 pounds) of grain.
Even though we don't have mountain
peaks to navigate by, we still have local landmarks. Knowing your
local area is key to being able to travel safely through it, so get
out and explore a bit. Dust off the paper maps and see how much has
changed since it was printed, making notes for yourself as you go.
