DISTANCE

Gifted to the NU Foundation decades ago, two sprawling ranches in the remote Nebraska Sandhills, 300 miles west of campus, yield unparalleled resources for students and faculty alike.

Two and a half miles north of Whitman, hardly a whisper on Highway 2, the asphalt forks and the valley opens wide and October broods above a meadow thick with sedges and cordgrass. In the offing, a lone cottonwood pierces the fog, as if somehow left behind, bumped from the wagon train west. For miles in every direction, the uplands gasp for moisture, brittle and brown. But down here, following weathered signs for the Gudmundsen Sandhills Laboratory, I feel as though I’ve slipped into a German folktale. As if an elf might spill from the bulrush. As if a wolf might part the mist. Here the Ogallala Aquifer lies just beneath the surface. The wind stampedes. The silence gathers at your feet, trails behind.