U.S. Highway Twenty and the High Plains North Road

Somewhere north of the Sandhills, with the traffic thinned to almost nothing and the radio drifting in and out, you find one of the quietest stretches of federally designated highway in the country. United States Highway Twenty cuts across northern Nebraska through Cherry County, the largest county in Nebraska by area, through Valentine, through the heart of the Sandhills, and into a silence that most American roads have long since surrendered.

Cherry County is larger than the entire state of Connecticut. Its population is under six thousand people. The county seat, Valentine, sits on a bluff above the Niobrara River, a town known for its proximity to the river's canoe runs and for a post office that processes enormous quantities of Valentine's Day cards every February, sent from across the country to carry the Valentine postmark.

Highway Twenty was designated in nineteen twenty-six as part of the original United States numbered highway system. It runs from Newport, Oregon, on the Pacific coast to Boston, Massachusetts, on the Atlantic, making it one of the longest coast-to-coast routes in the system. The Nebraska section carries almost none of the commercial intensity of the interstate highways. What it carries instead is open ground.

The Sandhills through which it passes are a grassland ecosystem unique to the Great Plains: stabilized sand dunes covered in native grass, underlain by the Ogallala Aquifer, supporting one of the largest remaining unfragmented grassland habitats in North America. Cattle graze here on land that would turn to desert within a season if the grass cover were broken.

Driving this road on a clear day is one of those experiences that reminds you how much of the country is simply empty, beautifully and enormously empty, and that emptiness is itself a kind of fact.