Dennis Lenhart is mayor of Lamar, NE. Population: 24 people counting the kids.
Once, Lamar was "quite a little town" Dennis said as he sat, wearing his overalls and John Deere suspenders, in the town's community center, a former bank.
 Dennis Lanheart the Mayor of Lamar, NE stands in front of the vacant town grocery store. Along with the bank, gas station, and post office many stores have closed in downtown Lamar, now with a total population of 24 people.
When Route 6 went right through Lamar, the town had a store, a post office, a gas station and the bank. Older folks remember when there were two grocery stores. Travelers would stop for gas and farmers would come to town for supplies.
But the state moved Route 6. Now Lamar is two miles, on a dirt road, away from the highway and there are just a handful of farms left. The school, which has eight students, will probably close next year, Dennis said.
There are a lot of towns like Lamar in western Nebraska and eastern Colorado. Even much larger communities have been shrinking for more than a half-century. They've seen families move out in the dust bowl years of the 1930s. They watched young men leave during World War II and move elsewhere after the war. They saw Route 6 decline after I-80 was built.
The farmers who went to town for groceries and entertainment are gone. Small family farms have been consolidated into 2,000 and 3,000 acre spreads - and they're struggling
"There used to be a farmstead on every quarter," Dennis said. "Now there are bigger farms with bigger equipment that takes less people."
The first farms around here were homesteads on quarter sections (160 acres). More than a century ago, the Homestead Act offered free quarters to anyone who lived on them for two years. Farming towns, each with their own grain elevator and railroad station, grew up overnight. Today the elevators, some of them 200 feet high with dozens of attached silos, dominate the landscape.
 The Grain Elevators in Amherst, CO are one of the biggest county elevators in the surrounding area. Grain elevators are used for local farmers to store and sell their harvest.
"Everybody around here depends on agriculture in some way - everybody, not just the farmers," said Larry Wilson of Haxtun, Colorado, a town of 1,000 people that's managed to keep its population fairly even in recent years. Other communities, like Cambridge, Nebraska, Holyoke, Colorado, and Fleming, Colorado, have leveled off after a decline.
Back in it's day Fleming (population 500) had two theaters, two hotels, four creameries, three grocery stores, and five filling stations. There were boxing matches in the theater and people came from all around for amateur hours on Saturdays.
Then came the dust. The 1930s drought and the constant winds covered everything with dust. Many farmers went to California. Others went broke.
Those who stayed suffered.
"My mother would get up in the morning and wipe the dust of the table just so we'd have a place to eat," said Don Langdon, a Fleming native.
People hung wet blankets over their doors to keep the dust out, but nothing worked. Lowell Heath Fleming came home from school one day to find his living room covered with two inches of dust.
"It was the one time I saw my mother cry," he said.
In Nebraska, Hamlet's store, the post office, the gas stations, the one-room jailhouse are all gone. And most of the 50 or so Hamlet residents are old-timers.
There's nothing to keep the kids here," said Clark McMinn a Hamlet native.
But some people like the small communities. They enjoy the quiet and the safety. Some move here to escape cities. It's an ideal area to raise children, they say.
"If you like to be more or less isolated, this is a good place," said Dennis, the Mayor of Lamar. "Some people come here from Denver or California, they think they they've stolen the house."
Lamar residents are divided. Some want to attract newcomers. Others want to leave things alone. A few years ago, they started a fund to pave the road to town, but the road costs went up faster than their savings account.
Towns like Cambridge and Arapahoe, NE (both about 1,000 people) are courting newcomers.
"Tell them we have a lot to offer," a group of Arapaho residents told us. And they do. There are two modern homes for senior citizens and you can't beat their movie theater's prices - $1.
The cross-country high-speed digital underground cable runs along this stretch of Route 6 and most every library has a least a few Internet stations.
Local investors are building a new bowling alley and entertainment center in Cambridge and a new ethanol plant is moving into town.
In Holyoke, CO the town built its own theater and community center when the movie house closed.
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"There was nothing for the kids to do but get drunk and have babies," said one of the community center's organizers. The center includes a swimming pool, a basketball court and other activity areas. Resident Cherrie Brown said, volunteers work at the theater to keep the prices down.
 A calf gets washed up during the Chase County Fair held in Imperial, NE. Many young kids show off their animals for different 4-H events held during the fair.
Over in Palisade, NE residents formed their own credit union when the bank moved out of town. When the only restaurant in town closed, a group of local people bought it started doing the cooking themselves. Now folks come from other towns for the nightly dinner specials.
With 2,000 residents, Imperial is the largest city on the 150-mile stretch between McCook, Nebraska and Sterling, Colorado. But it remains a country town at heart. Come to Imperial during the county fair and you'll find many of the businesses - including the newspaper, the library and the movie theater - closed. Everyone's at the fair.
MIGHTY OGALLALA
When you hit Nebraska, you're above the massive Ogallala Aquifer, a 174,000 square-mile underground lake that stretches from South Dakota to Texas. Farmers knew the water was there long before the great drought, but they had no way to bring it to the surface in large amounts.
The landscape changed in the 1950s when mechanical pumps drew the water swiftly enough for large-scale irrigation. Center pivots began dotting the fields and yields quickly doubled.
But the aquifer refills slowly on the edges and regulations limit the amount of aquifer water western Nebraska farmers can use. In eastern Colorado between the aquifer and the South Platte River, it's mostly dry farming - no irrigation. They plant winter wheat, millet and even some corn. They graze cattle. They pray for rain.
It's odd: Farmers are people of steady, conservative habits. But they're in one of the riskiest businesses on earth. To survive these days, they need large spreads and machines that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. New farmers start out in debt and can be wiped out by drought, a hailstorm, a frost or an infestation.
"I'd move out, but I owe everybody in town, so I can't," quipped Lowell Heath, who probably never, ever, thought of leaving Fleming.
His neighbor, Wanda West, wrote a poem about God taking a nap before finishing this part of the world. He awoke to find a hard-crusted, good-for-nothing patch of land.
Instead of undoing the mistake, God decided to create people who love this land the way it is.
"That's us," she said.
TWO FINGER SALUTE
You can argue about whether the folks in Plains are really as friendly as they seem, but you've got to admit they'll offer a wave at the drop of a ten-gallon hat.
 Dried out boots atop of fence post... a scene you may come across in some parts of western Nebraska. The reason behind the boot is simply to keep moisture from seeping into the wooden posts and eventually rotting them out.
Wave at just about anybody on the road - bikers, truck drivers, teens, little old ladies, farmers driving combines along the highway - and they'll all wave back as though you were their neighbor.
Heck, they've turned waving into an art form. Traveling through Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and now Colorado, I've seen them all.
There's the popular one-finger wave (index finger raised off the steering wheel.) A few individualists offer various two-finger salutes. Some raise all five digits.
There's the old-fashioned L-shaped arm with palm up there's and the waving hand as though it were on a bobble doll. I even saw one driver offer a two-handed wave - really!
Then there are the cool guys (its always guys) who give you the pointing finger, the gunslinger (pointing finger with raised thumb), and the wagging finger, like a schoolmarm chastising a student.
Motorcyclists often offer an arm outstretched in a "gimme five" gesture. That's my favorite, too. It's take less energy. When you're waving hundreds of times a day, that's important.
 A feedlot near Milford, NE where cattle are raised to be shipped to markets in cities like Omaha. There are many feedlots in Western Nebraska, some of them much larger than this one.
This waving thing can become automatic. I absentmindedly waved at a mile marker once. Well, when you're on foot - mile markers are big events.
One guy told me his sister waved at a cow as they were driving by. My question is: Did the cow wave back?
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