During my lifetime I’ve seen the extremes of land usage from vast areas of spare space to what seems to be almost every square foot of soil being used for buildings, homes or to grow food.

Here in the Midwest we have quite a mix of farm fields, pastures, communities with vacant lots and empty buildings, a good variety of parks, and what I like to call just unoccupied acres.

Now, before anyone gets too excited, please allow me to do some further explaining. I grew up in northeast Oregon, where there was an amazing amount of empty acres. Or, to put it another way, those were rather lonely square miles of either sagebrush hills and flats or high mountains with plenty of trees and snowy vistas for a good part of the year above the timber lines.

Out in Nevada there’s a stretch of highway that is called the “loneliest road in the nation.” That label is deserved because there are very few homes, ranches or even dinky towns for all too many miles. There’s almost no traffic and lots of what soon becomes some rather boring scenery.

It’s a place where the younger generation can justifiably ask the whiny question, “Are we there yet?”

I’ve never been on this particular highway. However, I once traveled on a close contender for this lonely title. This particular roadway is U.S. Highway 95 from near Marsing, Idaho, to Winnemucca, Nev.

Marsing is a town south of Caldwell and Nampa, Idaho. Now, one of the odd facts is that people who live in the north part of Malheur County, Ore., have to travel on the best paved highway over into Idaho, then back into Oregon to reach the south part of this really large county in the state’s southeast corner.

After 48 miles of looking at sagebrush covered hills and flats, a few herds of sheep, some cattle, and maybe even wild critters, the next town is Jordan Valley, Ore., an isolated community of about 400 people. From here the highway eventually goes south for 123 miles to the Nevada state line. At this place there’s a town named McDermitt.

Like Emmons, McDermitt is somewhat in two states. To the east of this lonely town is the Fort McDermitt Indian Reservation, also in both states, where members of the Paiute and Shoshone tribes live.

All I can recall of the 74 miles from McDermitt to Winnemucca is an obscure midway locality named Orovada and a vista of desert hills and a line of utility poles way off in the distance.

By contrast, two of my impressions of both Korea and Japan is based on too many people and too little land.

These folks were growing food crops on every bit of available land. It’s like people having their gardens along the road shoulders and between the lanes on the freeways, for example.

My favorite memory of this type of intensive land usage is based on the horse racetrack once located in the south part of Seoul, Korea. Here in the U.S. the land in the center of the oblong raceway would he a grassy, parklike area. For this particular Korean track, the center area was a rice paddy.

One of Seoul’s main streets went right by this race track. We could drive by and see the people in the grandstand watching the horses run around the track. And right out in the middle of the track would be the Korean farmer working in his flooded paddy, oblivious to the excitement around him.

Northpark update

Now, to again update the article about Northpark in the April 12 issue, here’s a nice message from Kathy Langemo Dugdale (Albert Lea High School 1968), daughter of Bob and Elaine Langemo.

She confirmed that the soda fountain photo was based on the store’s original location on the north side of Bridge Avenue where the bank is now. Also, she wrote, “… before they added on the Sibley Shop there was a separate building in that location that was just toys and was open only during the Christmas holiday shopping season. I can’t recall the name, but it was something like ToyLand or SantaLand. That must have been in the late ’50s or early ’60s.”

Ed Shannon’s column has been appearing in the Tribune every Friday since December 1984.