“It’s just one of them things,” Mitch Glidden tells me. He’s smiling wide behind a thick horseshoe mustache. “You gotta get heads in beds.” When Glidden speaks, you listen; not only because he’s an inveterate storyteller, or because his eyes crackle like fireworks, or because he’s arguably the jolliest man in Hooker County, Nebraska, but also because he kneads together every syllable like a firm sourdough. You lean forward a little. You bend your ear. Come again?

It’s the night before the 14th annual Polar Bear Tank Race in the village of Mullen—a hiccup on Highway 2 in western Nebraska—and the community center is abuzz with volunteers. They’re stocking the bar. They’re shuffling papers. They’re stirring homemade soups in hand-me-down roasters. Behind us, a woman named Linda is wearing a dirndl and pigtails and carefully unpacking her landscape paintings: a rusty windmill, a snowy yucca, a preening egret. “Don’t forget me in your story,” she’ll later say, slipping me a brochure for as if it were a crisp Benjamin. (You’re welcome, Linda.)

For years now, I’ve maintained a cool distance from what Nebraskans call “tanking.” Not that I’m an especially seasoned paddler, but the notion of floating downriver in me as a little too on the nose. I’ve spent most of my career in journalism trying to complicate the popular perception of the Great Plains, especially my home state of Nebraska, and tanking seemed to reinforce just about every hayseed stereotype we’re associated with. Fill said cattle tank with six fat white dudes listening to Cornhusker football on a portable stereo while crushing a 30-pack of Busch Light and, bingo, we have ourselves a winner.

Regardless, no one has done more to popularize tanking than Glidden, and for good reason. He and his wife, Patty, now hunched beside him in a black jacket and blue jeans, bought the Sandhills Motel in 1993. Described by Google Maps as an “unassuming motel with a picnic area,” the Sandhills is the only lodge in Mullen, which is the only town in Hooker County, which boasts more than 23,000 cows but fewer than 750 people. Given the demographics, and the fact that Mullen—a dusty cow town settled in 1888—is at least four hours from the closest major airport, getting “heads in beds” requires more than clean sheets and satellite TV.

What it does have, however, is water. “The best water,” Patty interjects: the Middle Loup River, just two miles north, and its trickster tributary, the Dismal, 13 miles south. Both slither through the heart of the Nebraska Sandhills——and because they’re fed almost exclusively by springs discharged from the Ogallala Aquifer beneath it, rather than from surface runoff, they’re two of the cleanest and most uniformly flowing streams in the world.

“You can plan a trip here three years from now,” Glidden says. “The water’s gonna be there.”

The post Cattle-Tank Paddling: the Raucous Nebraska River Race Where Everybody Wins appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

It’s the night of our second anniversary, and I’m clearing sun-bleached cow pies from our tent site. My wife, Mel, sits in the canoe 30 feet away, arms crossed, wearing sunglasses in the shade. She could be watching anything: the sinking sherbet sun, the serpentine current, the cow-calf pair mulling the water’s edge—but I know she’s watching me, silently, in solidarity with the cackling magpies and looming canyon walls. And in truth, I’m failing even this: the crusty upper halves of the pies land with a pathetic whisper on the riverbank, the rest at my feet, now bruised and blood-smeared after a grueling day on the Dismal River.

I had overshot the campground. Now we’re boondocking in a cattle pasture on private property in the heart of the Nebraska Sandhills, at least 15 lonely miles from the nearest lonely town of Seneca, population 33. We’re tired. Sunburned. Hungry. Cell service is a cute hypothetical, and despite our utter remoteness, I feel exposed, as if someone or something is stalking us from the hills above: a mountain lion reclaiming its ancient territory, or worse, the landowner.

A silver moon bobs on the water as we finally crawl into the tent. We split a can of baked beans, cooked on a fire of cow chips and cedar bark, washing it down with a box of cabernet as the crickets begin their serenade. Mel curls up next to me, cocooned in her sleeping bag. Slowly, we begin to unwind. Hardly the fresh start we were looking for, but getting closer by the minute. Before we drift off to sleep, she reveals the silver lining, as if she’d been stowing it away all along, saving it for just the right moment.

“It’ll be great for the story,” she says.

It had been a long year. We’d left a comfortable existence in Omaha for the prospect of another one in Chicago. Mel had taken a shiny new PR job in a skyscraper near the Loop. The money was great unless you factored in the time, the night sweats, the slow death by open-office plan. I had sold my first book, , just before the move, and, not yet privy to the arbitrary nature of my publisher’s timeline, was now sprinting marathons to hit one deadline after another, as if the contract would burst into flames a minute past midnight. Our dog, hypersensitive to the train growling beneath the streets, spent most of his days hiding under our bed, yearning for the grassy backyards he knew in Nebraska. He would have loved everything about this stretch of the Dismal, not least the bouquet of manure and prairie decay.

My deadlines kept coming. First the rough draft. Then the final. Then the copy edits and the fact check and the legal review. Once the text was done, a different anxiety crept in: Would anyone read a nonfiction book about a roadside zoo in rural Nebraska? Did I want them to? What if Kirkus pans it? What if Publishers Weekly calls it “a desperate first attempt by a wannabe Krakauer?” Mel admonished me to relax, to celebrate the win, to recognize that after ten years of reporting, I finally had a book. Her advice was sound, and I knew it, but none of the milestones felt the way I had always imagined they would. I didn’t feel like an author. I felt like I was playing the role of one.

In other words, we needed to reset.

Canoeing the Dismal wasn’t a new idea. I grew up on the edge of the Sandhills—nearly 20,000 square miles of grass-covered sand dunes in north-central Nebraska—and still cherished arcadian memories of the river: the springs gurgling from the banks, the lush green valleys, the white cliffs above, the tiny falls swamping our portly Boy Scout leader’s canoe, the whole troop howling with laughter.Ìę

I hadn’t run it since I was a kid, but every few years the itch would return, and when the daily ho-hum threatened to drown us, I’d suggest to Mel that we undertake a Dismal adventure. Just me and her. An empty horizon. The sky.

But every time we discussed the trip, it would untether itself from reality. We would go to work instead. Recycle excuses. This time was different. Our lives were busier than ever, but the move to Chicago—despite our love for the city—seemed to trigger something in us both. If the stars wouldn’t align for a retreat on the Dismal, we would align them instead.

And so we found ourselves on the eve of our second anniversary in my parents’ tiny rental house in Broken Bow, Nebraska, two hours east of the put-in, stuffing our gear into drybags and debating how much alcohol was necessary for a two-day canoe trip. I recited a checklist out loud. “Water shoes?” Check. “Life jackets?” Check. “Tent?” Check. “Swimsuits?” Swimsuits? On that one, Mel raised both arms in protest.

“Our entire trip is predicated on water!” I said.

“You told me the water was cold! You said we wouldn’t be swimming!”

Fifteen minutes later, after everyone (especially my mother) agreed that I had failed to properly communicate the realities of the trip to my indubitably perfect wife, Mel and I found ourselves shuffling through the clearance rack outside Dollar General, the only store in town that maybe sold a swimsuit. Good news: it did. They were all the same style, a hot pink tankini with the phrase “Summer Vibes” splashed across the chest, the font so bold it offended us both. They were all too big. She bought one anyway.

By five the next morning, we were cruising west down Highway 2, our dented and decades-old aluminum canoe, a 16-foot , strapped to my father’s Suburban. Eager to help, my parents had agreed to drive us to our put-in. A steady rain peppered the headlights like television static, a reality each of us chose, independently, to ignore. Before cutting south for the last 12 miles, we stopped in Mullen, population 463, where the owners of the only campground on our planned route run a small motel. We rang the office doorbell three times before an older woman, torn from slumber, trudged to the door. She took our check. She trudged away.

The clouds parted as we continued south, the sun licking pools from the asphalt. A meadowlark resting on a mile marker recited a Ted Kooser poem from memory—Scout’s honor. The Sandhills beg for poetry. “It is without a doubt the most mysterious landscape in the United States,” the late Jim Harrison once wrote in The New York Times. “
 The vastness and waving of the hilly grasslands in the wind make you smell salt.” More cows than people. A loneliness endemic to this terrain, one of the largest grassland ecosystems in North America. Staring out the back window, I could feel the adventure creeping in, my chest tightening as the hills slalomed toward infinity. I hoped Mel, still groggy, could feel it, too.

Cresting a minor summit, we finally spotted the river, cedar trees crowding the valley, a latchkey willow tagging along. Long known to the Lakota and other tribes who utilized the Sandhills, the Dismal wasn’t truly explored by Euro-Americans until 1870, when Yale’s O.C. Marsh, the first paleontology professor in the country, led his students up the river on a fossil-hunting expedition. Before all that, poet Ron Block claims in Dismal River, his book-length narrative poem, there “came a frontier giant who / despaired at the sight and let his stick drag / got drunk on the distance and pissed himself a river.”

In reality, the Dismal—just 80 miles long—rises from the Ogallala Aquifer and flows east toward the village of Dunning, where it merges first with the Middle Loup, then the Loup, then into the Platte, and finally flushes into the Missouri. The entire stretch slithers through private ranchland, except for a short drag flanking the Nebraska National Forest, near Halsey. So while the water belongs to the people, the riverbed does not, and ranchers can, and frequently do, run barbwire across the water. Combined with a surfeit of natural strainers, mostly dead cedar trees, the Dismal has earned itself a nickname: Divorce River.

In the days leading up to our trip, I’d joined a Facebook group called , inquiring about the current state of the Dismal. I’d been warned that it was getting harder to navigate, that fallen trees were far more numerous, that landowners were less accommodating, that the river ran high this year. A local EMT wrote: “Believe me when I say we can’t easily get ourselves anywhere near you, even if you CAN notify us of an injury. It could be a long hike in and a long hike out to reach you.” Doing the river in full takes three days; most paddlers bow out after just one. The Facebook crew said day two was especially challenging, that few had tried it this year. One user called it a “flat out rodeo.” And yet enthusiasm for the experience ran high. All the good-natured exclamation points put me at ease.

“The Dismal will beat you up a little,” one user said, “but it’s a great adventure!”

We soon pulled off into a muddy cul-de-sac, unstrapped the canoe, and dragged it through the trees until the trail disappeared. Twenty feet below, a dead garter snake lie bloated in a mud bath, attracting flies in a macabre welcome.

Using a knotted rope that some Good Samaritan left behind, I rappelled down the cliff and sank knee-deep in mud. My dad lowered the canoe, and Mel joined me in the muck, arms loaded with gear. We waved goodbye, thrust ourselves into the current, and with the sun still ahead of us, got underway.

Not 30 yards from the start, we hit our first barbwire challenge. Some fences—like the one before us—hang so low that you can simply glide over the top, while others are so high that you can limbo beneath or so slack that you can raise them with a paddle. But many others force you out of the canoe entirely, one person parting the wires, the other guiding the boat between them.

Within an hour, we’d found our rhythm: Mel as bowman up front, scouting obstacles, barking commands (“Stay left,” she would shout. “Other left!”). Me as grunt man in the back, steering the canoe, playing tour guide on a river I barely remembered. We maneuvered our aluminum tank with aplomb, anticipating the oxbows, how the current seemed to rush and fold around every bend, where to expect strainers or sandbars. Confidence blooming, we began to appreciate our surroundings: sunflowers dappling the shore, secret brooks resounding across the water, cliffs sheared away like a museum exhibit, a perfect cross section, every sandy layer on display. Ducks and doves and red-tailed hawks. Blue jays and bitterns and black-billed magpies.

The campground at the Seneca Bridge was around 12 miles downstream from the put-in, a roughly six-hour float. Halfway there, we hit our first landmark: the boiling sand spring. Thanks to the small herd of black cattle we flushed from the banks, their awkward frenzy wafting a cloud of dust across the water, we nearly missed it. There are no markers. No informational placards. Just a paw-shaped hole eroded from the bank, maybe 20 feet wide, filled with a pool of shifting sand. We tied the canoe to a shock of bunchgrass and hopped out. A film of gin-clear water rides atop the sand, large bubbles burping to the top—a true Sandhills fountain. I tested the spring’s depth with my paddle, couldn’t hit bottom, let go, and watched it spring back into my arms.

How often does one experience a natural phenomenon like this? No rules for observation. No walkways or ropes. No crowds or selfie sticks or admission fees. It was a common refrain for us throughout the trip: How truly wild the Dismal still is. How rare the experience. Back in Chicago, our river literally runs backward, the whole thing reengineered to flush sewage away from the lake. But the Dismal is virtually untouched: no levees, no dams, no electric skyline, no million-dollar condos peering down from above. How petty it seemed to protest a little barbwire, when you get all this in return.

Twenty minutes past the spring, we pulled the canoe up to a grassy island. We reclined on our life jackets, split a Shiner, popped some blueberries, forgot about the book, the job, the city, our stupid millennial expectations. I turned to Mel, her arms spread wide to catch the sun. She was smiling.

“Summer vibes,” I said.

“Summer vibes,” she agreed.

Less than an hour later, we spotted a weathered stop sign littered with buckshot and nailed to a tree on the bank. This meant little to us until we hit some mild rapids and noticed the falls up ahead. To call them “falls” is perhaps a stretch, though everyone out here does: the river narrows, churns into a frenzy, drops several feet from a sandstone ledge, and rushes forth through a long chute. But if you don’t hit it right, if you approach it crooked or careless or blind, it can easily flip a canoe. Many simply portage around it.

We forged ahead. Adrenaline pumping now, we hit the falls perfectly, barely dropping in the canoe, then quickly lost the streamline and lodged ourselves in the chute. A minor hiccup, all things considered. We were still upright. Our gear was dry.

I swung my legs from the canoe, ready to stand on the bottom and push us free, but my feet never landed. I sank like a brick, all the way under, then burst to the surface, coughing and gasping for air. The cold shocked me, a spring-fed 68 degrees at the tail end of summer. My glasses bobbed in the water. I put them back on, aligned us parallel to the chute, and hopped in. I acted casual about the misstep, laughed it away, but for a minute my heart raced, my jaw locked. It was my first reminder of the Dismal’s trickster ways.

Nebraska boasts nearly 80,000 river miles, and the majority are shallow and sandy and fit for the laziest among us. I don’t condone getting drunk on a river, but if it happens, Nebraska is an ideal place to be. The Elkhorn, the Platte, the Republican, the Loup, the Calamus, most of the Niobrara—they’re all considered easy on the , Class I, lethargic as a retired cow dog. It’s why you’re more likely to find a Nebraskan riding an inner tube or—God save us—a cattle tank: for the most part, paddles are more accessory than necessity here.

But the Dismal is something else. Wide and slow one minute, narrow and perilously swift the next. It cuts left when you’re veering right, pivots instantly from sand to stone. The bed plummets when you need the footing. It pulls the rug out beneath you. Block’s poem reinforces the river’s menace at every turn, couched deceptively in the Sandhills’ mellow curves:

For one hundred years, the Dismal clawed
at the cedar-bluffs like a man half-buried,
his heart quick with panic, digging with
the dull knife lightning lost in the water.

The valley deepened like an open grave,
and now the river searches back and forth
like a blood dog with its nose to the ground,
the moon pumping up, swollen, panting in the heat.

The water relaxed again after the falls, but soon we hit another fence, not barbwire this time but a wall of steel mesh ten feet high. A sign said: “WARNING. State regulated fence. Please do not vandalize. Violators will be prosecuted.” Somewhere out here, I’d been told, a former NFL player had established a big-game ranch: bison, elk, deer. Surely this was it. A single rusty staircase rose up and over the barrier. Below it, a warped wooden box and another sign that read: “For Portage.” We climbed the stairs, shoved the canoe through the box and continued on our way. No problem.

Two miles later, we hit another fence. Same style. Same ladder. But the portage flap wouldn’t budge, and even if it had, the box was too narrow. We finally succeeded in lifting the canoe up and over the staircase, but not before two failed attempts that left us panting in the grass—two jaded Sisyphuses and our boulder of a canoe. Had either of us been alone, we’d have spent the rest of the trip backpacking to the nearest ranch house, our canoe marooned on the banks.

When we finally passed beneath the Seneca Bridge a few hours later, we scanned the banks for a pullout, a sign, something to indicate we’d hit the campground. “It must be around the bend,” I told Mel. Then, ten minutes later: “It must be around the bend.” And before we knew it, we had floated another two miles downstream.

“You said there’d be signs,” she said.

“I thought there’d be signs.”

Now I lie awake beside her, the walls of our nylon tent aglow with moonlight. I feel guilty, will for days, though I know she’s quick to forgive. A lone coyote yips in the distance. Now another, and another, and soon the whole valley is a primal symphony. Mel sleeps right through it, her breathing deep and slow. Tomorrow she’ll tell me it was the best sleep she’s had in months.

The next morning we’re on the water by 7:45, the grass still heavy with dew. Our first day had been challenging, but aside from the fencing, the lost campground, and the trespassing, it mostly aligned with my expectations. Abundant wildlife. A quick thrill at the falls. Plenty of sun and sand.

Day two feels different already. Dangerous somehow.

Rounding the first bend, the hills shoot up around us, dark and densely forested, casting a shadow across the water, more Black Hills than Sandhills. We put on our rainjackets for the warmth; we keep them on for the protection, the obstacles multiplying with every turn, the room to maneuver quickly disappearing, the canoe plowing through fallen cedars, sticks and spiders raining down from above, orb weavers and daddy longlegs scurrying around in the canoe, beneath our collars, our hats, our shoes.

The next three hours grow worse with every stroke. We can’t outwit the current. Our communication fails. The flow quickens as the banks squeeze in. Soon we’re pinballing back and forth, ramming through one skeleton cedar after another. Mel tries to hold the branches for me as we pass, but they rifle back twice as hard, pummeling me over and over again.

Unbeknownst to us, we’ve entered a section that regulars call the chutes.ÌęTrees stitch out the sky. The shore disappears. The riverbed sinks and turns to stone, and a motley beard of roots shrouds the banks. Suddenly, we’re yelling over the current, so strong now it’s drowning heavy logs, trees bobbing and struggling for breath.

“From now on,” I shout, “the question isn’t, can we make it, but should we even try? I’d rather jump out and guide us than swamp the canoe.”

Over the next two hours, I jump from the canoe at least a dozen times, slamming my legs and feet against invisible sandstone, trying my best not to wince. I’m soaked and freezing, which helps numb my swollen knees but does little to calm our nerves. We keep pushing forward, but slower now, cautiously, zigzagging through the labyrinth, using our paddles to shield the blows. The chute grows darker; up ahead, a quick succession of downed trees hang over the water, first to the right, then the left. “We can’t make it!” Mel shouts, and even from the stern, I can tell she’s right. The physics don’t play. The river’s too narrow, our canoe too long, the current too swift.

I roll out, slam my knee on the rocks. I can’t find bottom but somehow manage to wrestle us around the first tree. Mel shoots forward, grabs a mess of roots, and pulls the canoe tight against the left bank. I float past, still unmoored, but catch an overhanging branch and reel myself in. A narrow sandstone shelf lies at the foot of the bank, just below water. I climb on top, my left knee throbbing. I pivot toward Mel, still in the canoe ten yards upstream. She steps out, shivering, and at my command sends the canoe my way. I tie it to a branch overhead and shuffle back to join her.

There’s another wall of trees ahead, a tight window on the far side, beyond which everything is obscured, a rat’s nest of clacking timber. If I can make it to the other side, I think, testing the current. It kicks my legs out, sweeping me downstream and pinning me against the canoe, my chin locked on the gunwale, my feet bouncing like a rag doll beneath the hull. It takes all my strength to scale back to solid ground. Shadows flitter across the water. For the first time in a long while, I’m genuinely scared. This isn’t the Dismal I remember. I have no fucking clue what’s ahead, and the EMT’s warning comes rushing back: “We can’t easily get ourselves anywhere near you.” We’re utterly alone.

I boost Mel up into the trees to get a better look. I boost Mel into the woods above. She hikes downriver; I can’t hear a thing.ÌęI can’t hear a thing. My mind races. She’s been gone only minutes, but it feels like an hour. When she finally returns, she brings good news: the river is clear ahead. If there’s any way to push through, we’ll have an easy run. I ask her to wait for me downstream, to call my name every 30 seconds. I tell her I have a plan. I don’t have a plan.

She trudges off, then returns seconds later.

“I love you,” she says. She’s crying.

When she disappears again, I plant my feet, aim for the window, and send the canoe ahead, holding tight to the rope. The keel lodges in the crook of a gnarled cedar trunk. Mel shouts: “Carson!” I reel it back, try it again, but I can’t find the strength, or the angle, or the leverage. “Carson!” Finally, I test the trunk itself. From a distance, it looked like it was floating, but it hardly moves when I step on top. I inch my way out across the river, ass in the air, feeling the water rush beneath me. “Carson!” I crouch down, kick the boat loose, and slowly redirect it through the window. I jump back in to ride the rest of the way out, my body locked, as if I’ve been flinching for hours.

When I hit the clearing, I return the call. “Mel!” She’s standing in the sun, high atop the hill, her legs feathered in bluestem. She waves and yells my name, and though we’ve only been separated a few minutes, I’ve never been so glad to see her.

We still have hours to go before the end of our journey, but we’ve cleared the chutes at last. The river widens and the trees thin and the hills return to the soft, hogback moguls I’ve always known. We stop in a lush, green inlet a few miles downstream, split another beer, spread our gear out to dry. A blue heron lifts from the water’s edge, its pale belly gliding overhead, wings outstretched. Soon enough we’ll be complaining about the heat and the wind—now we’re too exposed—the shallow water, the sandbars, the telephone poles and county roads teasing us with civilization long before we’ve made it. But for the moment, we’re content to sit here in the sun, our bodies slowly unwinding from a flat-out rodeo.

“Summer vibes?” I try again.

She’s trying not to smile.

“Let’s finish this,” I say.

We follow the heron.

The post An Anniversary Canoe Trip Down “Divorce River” appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

For nine years, a small army of Nebraska landowners has defended its homeland against TransCanada, the Calgary-based company intent on running its $8 billion Keystone XL oil pipeline through Nebraska so it can deliver oil from northern Alberta to refineries along the Gulf Coast of Texas. At times, KXL has been the national environmental issue; other times, like now, it’s lucky to make the local news, a worry only for those whose land might soon be interrupted by a 36-inch pipeline carrying heavy, viscous tar sands oil (mixed with undisclosed chemical diluents) just beneath the surface and directly atop their primary water source: the Ogallala Aquifer.

Landowners and other opposition groups have quietly gathered in courthouses and prairie churches, protested on capitol grounds and on cable TV. They’ve memorized the fact sheets: the mileage (1,179); the barrels per day (); the likely number of full-time jobs in Nebraska (); the fact that TransCanada has spent more money lobbying for this pipeline than any other utility company in Nebraska’s history (). Some landowners have given up retirement plans to fight the pipeline full-time. More than a few have lost friends along the way.

From a national perspective, President Donald Trump’s pro-industry stance has drastically changed the optics on the pipeline battle. Barack Obama twice rejected the pipeline, while Trump campaigned on a pledge to approve it, along with the similarly controversial Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota. Opponents nationwide considered both projects a bellwether for the next era of America’s environmental policy: if approved, they would signal a renewed commitment to fossil fuels and a direct threat to one of the world’s largest underground freshwater sources. So when Trump approved the Keystone XL last March, claiming it would be “,” the battle seemed to be over.

But for pipeline opponents in the Cornhusker State, the view from the ground is far from hopeless. Last November, , the Nebraska Public Service Commission (NPSC) rejected TransCanada’s preferred route. Instead the commission okayed the company’s alternate choice, a path that differs from the original 63 miles in northeast Nebraska. Those 63 miles could make all the difference: a new route means new easements and likely a host of pricey new lawsuits.

The decision was such a blow that the company requested the NPSC modify the wording of its decision. But the commission unanimously rejected the motion, a ruling that landowner attorney Brian Jorde called the “worst decision possible for TransCanada.”

What this means is that the Keystone XL—after nine years and two presidents—might finally be felled by legal technicalities and groups of well-organized farmers. To gauge the project’s momentum, I attended landowner meetings hosted by both TransCanada and the Nebraska Easement Action Team, a legal defense nonprofit representing landowners affected by the pipeline. Or rather, I tried to.

Despite the legal ambiguities, TransCanada continues to push forward. In early December, the company announced a slew of landowner meet-and-greets at what it called Landowner Engagement Centers in communities along the new alternate route. One was held in a small conference room at the Cobblestone Hotel in Seward, Nebraska, a county seat of 7,200 people surrounded by the stubble of empty cornfields.

When I arrived at the hotel, hoping to meet some landowners and gauge their feelings on the risks and rewards of the pipeline, the ice machine gurgled and the Weather Channel was playing on mute in an empty lobby. A large welcome sign stood next to the conference room door, which TransCanada spokesperson Robynn Tysver immediately closed when I introduced myself as a journalist.

“Seriously, they deserve privacy,” she said.

Less than a minute later, as I waited in the lobby, jotting a few useless notes about the Weather Channel and the ice machine, Tysver returned.

“You know, I have to tell you, I’m uncomfortable having you even here.”

I turned to the receptionist.

“Do you mind me sitting in your lobby?”

“Nope,” she said.

During the 2.5 hours I sat there, fewer than ten people entered the room, and those who did were hardly willing to talk. Each time I stood from the table to follow them out, another TransCanada representative rose and followed close behind. Tysver had never heard of șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, so perhaps I sounded fishy. Tysver had a hunch.

“You’re not here on behalf of ?” Tysver asked, referring to a nonprofit environmental advocacy group that has dogged TransCanada from the start.

I left soon after, but not before catching a pair on their way out who agreed to answer a few questions. Both Sam Ferguson and his mother live in Seward, though they don’t own land in the path of the alternate route. As they talked to me, neither smiled.

“Whether or not I’m a landowner, this does affect me,” Linda said. “A pipeline does affect me and my children and his children.”

“I don’t even have an opinion on this thing yet,” Sam added. “I don’t know shit about the pipeline. My concern was if there’s a danger of it leaking, that trumps anything positive.”

There’s plenty of reason to be concerned about leaks. Just weeks before, the existing Keystone pipeline had spilled more than 210,000 gallons near Amherst, South Dakota, and barely a fifth was recovered. This was TransCanada’s third major spill in the Dakotas since the pipeline began operation in 2010.

The original Keystone was installed just west of Seward, and the newer, larger XL pipeline would also run west of town, though residents here negotiated to steer it away from the local reservoir. Save for this notch around the town, the southern half of the alternate route in Nebraska would run parallel to the existing Keystone pipeline, all the way to its southern terminus in Steele City.

It’s this slight deviation that could ruin the pipeline’s future, because while TransCanada insists that the Keystone XL “remains a viable project with strong commercial support,” some energy analysts say it’s become a risky gamble.

requires mining and separation, a much more complex and costly process than extraction from conventional oil shales, where bitumen can be pumped in its natural state directly from the ground. In other words, the profit margin is inherently lower. But TransCanada first conceptualized the pipeline about a decade ago, when oil prices peaked at nearly $150 per barrel and producers rushed to siphon every last drop. Since then, prices have crashed.

The pipeline faces another problem: oil companies are selling off their Canadian assets, signaling a shift to less expensive and cleaner products. This math gets worse for TransCanada the longer the fight drags out.

In September 2014, after six years in regulatory limbo, TransCanada acknowledged that legal delays had already driven up the cost of the pipeline by nearly half, . Had the NPSC approved the preferred route, TransCanada could have started construction immediately. But now it has two options: build along the alternate route and face what is likely to be an onslaught of new lawsuits from previously unaffected and unnotified landowners, or fight the commission’s decision in the Nebraska Court of Appeals, a process that would likely take years and add millions, if not billions, to the tab.

One night after the Cobblestone event, the (NEAT)—a legal defense nonprofit representing landowners affected by the pipeline—hosted a gathering of its own, the first of several up and down the length of the alternate route. Unlike TransCanada’s Landowner Engagement Centers, the NEAT meetings functioned as de facto public events. This one was held in the Olde Glory Theatre, a repurposed church just a few blocks off the town square, and the seats were filled with about 75 area residents, some of whom, presumably, recently learned that the pipeline’s new path would now cross their land.

NEAT was established by Brian Jorde and Dave Domina, the same attorneys currently fighting TransCanada. Weeks before, Domina had told the NPSC that if it accepted TransCanada’s request to amend its application, it would destroy the commission’s reputation. “That would make a mockery of you,” he’d said. “It would make a mockery of the judiciary.” Though an outgrowth of Bold Nebraska, NEAT emphasizes that it is not an anti-pipeline group, but rather a pro-landowner group, and the landowners were finally enjoying the upper hand.

Landowners who currently welcome the pipeline are lured either by the money—which includes a signing bonus as high as $80,000, NEAT says, in addition to a one-time easement payment—or the politics. In a deeply conservative state, claims of American energy independence have convinced many that supporting the pipeline is an act of patriotism. On the other hand, those who oppose the project see a loss of private property rights and an environmental cancer: not just increased greenhouse gases and a threat to the aquifer, but also soils compacted beneath heavy machinery, reduced crop yields, and negative impacts on surrounding wildlife. Nevertheless, should TransCanada clear the remaining legal hurdles, landowners of every political stripe will share at least one desire: to have the upper hand in negotiating with a multibillion-dollar corporation.

“Imagine if Ted Turner, one landowner, happened to have all the holdings that stretched 280 miles along the length of this pipeline,” Jorde told the crowd in the theater, employing an oft-used analogy. “Do you think one person with all that land would have more leverage than one of you, who might just have a small piece? So how can we empower each of you to be Ted Turner? By grouping together.”

Most landowners at the meeting seemed to oppose the pipeline, asking questions about tar sands oil, the county’s responsibility in the event of a spill, and whether or not TransCanada can sell the easement to a third party. (It can.) One woman, clutching a newspaper clipping with a map of the alternate route, stood and said simply, “I cannot tell exactly where the route is,” to which the majority of the room laughed and nodded in agreement.

At least one man stood to support Keystone XL and said he owned land already crossed by TransCanada’s first pipeline. His name was Roy Cast, and he argued that extracting oil “is in fact cleaning up the environment in Canada” and that opponents should remember that American blood has been spilled “to protect our right to have oil shipped into this country.” He spoke forcefully while those around him shook their heads or stared at the table.

In the foyer after the meeting ended, I spoke with Tad Warm, a farmer who lives ten miles northwest in the small town of Staplehurst. Not long ago, Warm received a letter from TransCanada, but he already knew his land would be crossed. When the alternate route was first published, he dove into the plat maps. The pipeline would pass within 100 yards of the house he lives in with his wife and two kids and would cross farmland that’s been in his family for nearly 70 years. He told me he’d been at the TransCanada meeting in the Cobblestone Hotel the day before and was frustrated with the way TransCanada sidestepped his concern.

“I brought up the South Dakota spill, and they said, ‘Oh, we’ll replace the land,’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, how long? And will you replace it like it used to be?’ They didn’t answer the question.”

I asked him about the money, the signing bonuses.

“It could never be enough.”

After watching the pipeline battle rage on for nearly nine years, those who left the Olde Glory Theatre and shuffled out into the night already held a better hand. The last time TransCanada barreled through, some had been wooed by big checks. But they were wiser this time, their questions were more specific, their rebuttals more pointed, their concerns hardened by what they’d already seen.

This time, they were ready for a fight.

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