Lewis and Clark Landing gets the lead out

Welcome to another in our series of Omaha travelogues. This week, it's Lewis and Clark Landing on the downtown riverfront.

Here we have a magnificent plaza and boardwalk perfectly suited for a leisurely alfresco lunch . . . or for a summer music festival. Mostly, though, people just like to chill and watch the muddy Missouri roll past River City.

Lewis and Clark Landing lies between the riverfront's Heartland of America Park to the south and, to the north, the Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge across the Missouri River (shown here). Did I mention this is an excellent spot to chill on a summer evening?

THE LANDING also has a large monument to organized labor, centered on a water sculpture simply entitled "Labor." That's fitting.

Omaha has a rich past as a meat-and-potatoes, blue-collar, union-labor kind of Midwestern city once home to several breweries, some of the largest packing plants in the United States and a massive Western Electric works. And the plot of land where the sculpture sits -- indeed, where all of Lewis and Clark Landing sits -- once was home to this (right).

The ASARCO lead smelter operated on the Omaha riverfront for more than a century until it shut down in 1997 as the company faced numerous lead-pollution lawsuits. All in all, I think we'll take the cool plaza over a bunch of lead-belching smokestacks.

We're funny that way here.

It's an interesting dilemma, isn't it? Nobody wants a poison-belching lead smelter in the middle of their downtown, but getting rid of the bad -- pollution and an ugly industrial wart on your riverfront -- also can mean getting rid of the good as well.

IN THIS CASE, the good was relatively well-paying jobs for the working class. A generation before the ASARCO plant bit the lead-tainted dust, Omaha lost its big meatpacking plants on the south side of town -- thus dealing a devastating economic (and, by extension, social) blow to, for one, the city's African-American population.

What was one of the country's more prosperous minority communities now is one of America's poorest. I wonder what happened to the folks who used to work at ASARCO.

Obviously, we're better off with Lewis and Clark Landing . . . better off in countless ways. But you can be sure there's been a cost as well. Ironically, it's been at the expense of labor.

Speaking of "Labor" -- the sculpture, that is -- the piece actually suggests more of a foundry than a lead smelter -- and the real thing still sits a couple of miles or so to the east, in midtown Omaha.

It's not a huge foundry, but it'll do.

AS FOR OUR relatively new Lewis and Clark Landing, it will more than do. "Our." What do you know -- after a couple of decades in exile from the Deep South, I naturally say "our" when talking about all things Omaha.

Which suggests that if I were to -- as Louisianians would undoubtedly say to me from their perspective -- "come home," I wouldn't be. I'd be exiling myself all over again . . . from home.

The cliché tells us "home is where the heart is." Well, it is. And Omaha -- for that matter, the whole of this exotic, diverse place called Nebraska -- has a way of worming its way into one's heart. Of becoming home.

Or, more precisely, Homaha.

Honk if you heart Omaha

When I moved to Omaha in 1988, the first thing you saw driving across the Missouri River into downtown was a lead smelter.

That and some mostly abandoned historic warehouses.

That's not today's Omaha riverfront.

Today's downtown Omaha riverfront is a state-of-the-art arena. And a pedestrian suspension bridge.

And the Lewis and Clark Landing where the lead smelter used to be.

Today's Omaha riverfront also is the Heartland of America Park -- featuring walking trails, boating on a lake, picnic areas, a river overlook . . . and geese. Lots and lots of geese. (And a lonely mink I spotted.)

It really is amazing the aesthetic -- and economic -- progress a city can make when you have the basics for a strong community in place, then add a solid master plan and the civic will to make it happen.

So, I hope you enjoy these photos I shot last Sunday while the missus and I spent a picture-perfect summer evening in one of the city's picture-perfect green spaces.

OK, so I'm a sucker for skyline shots at sunset. And, yes, it's a pretty big lake.

Likewise, I'm a sucker for pictures of kids feeding waterfowl.

And the Deep South is not the only place you'll find cypress trees . . . and cypress knees.

Honk!

The Bob

What I love about Omaha is that if you can't find something to do on a nice summer Sunday evening, you just aren't trying very hard.

Yesterday, a picture perfect day just cried out for taking a leisurely stroll to Iowa. So the missus and I did . . . brand-new Nikon Coolpix camera in hand.

And thanks to the new Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge across the Missouri River, you now can walk from downtown Omaha to Council Bluffs, Iowa, without the hassle of drowning in the Muddy Mo or dodging big rigs on the I-480 bridge.

Plus, you have the extra, added advantage of some really nice views of the Omaha skyline from the Iowa side of the bridge. I've been told this is what Council Bluffs wants to be when it grows up.

Of course, some refuse to focus on the advantages of a peaceful walk to our neighboring state, as opposed to a hair-raising, traffic-dodging, legally questionable scamper across the river on the Interstate.

Or the whole sinking and drowning thing on the river, sans boat.

And I think I really like the new digital camera.

They built The Bob already. Deal with it.

The Omaha World-Herald, as it sheds employees and cuts back its circulation area, actually paid a pollster to see whether Omahans think the footbridge across the Missouri River is oh, so good or oh, sooey much budgetary lard.

I AM NOT making this up. And neither, unfortunately, are they:

The Bob Kerrey Pedestrian Bridge, financed mainly with a $19 million federal earmark, has been controversial from it inception. Now it is a popular gathering point for families, bikers, runners and tourists.

But what do Omahans really think about the bridge linking Omaha and Council Bluffs?

See the results of The World-Herald Poll in Monday's newspaper. And watch for other poll results on the important issues facing Omaha in The World-Herald all this week.

TO BE FAIR, the pollster also was checking on important things, like the upcoming mayoral election. But you have to figure adding such stupidity to the poll effort didn't exactly make it any cheaper to conduct.

And what if Omahans don't like "The Bob"? What are we gonna do? Spend a few million more to tear it down?

File this poll under "Don't know. Don't care." And if you're the World-Herald, save the money it cost for this bit of pointless polling and buy an extra case of pencils or something.

Living on the Death Star

Hey, Louisiana, how are you doing?

Fading fast, you say?

Yeah, I know how that goes. See, I'm from Omaha (by God) Nebraska, and we're the folks who are killing your ass. Not to mention the rest of you, too.

WE'RE THE FOLKS who brought you coastal erosion. And the Dead Zone in Gulf of Mexico, which has crippled your sport- and commercial-fishing industries.

And that little unpleasantness in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina? That was us, too.

We may look like a bunch of corn-fed hicks and earnest upper-Midwestern professionals right out of a Norman Rockwell painting, but that's just to disguise who we really are. To pull the wool over the eyes of the rustic likes of your own backward-ass selves.

But I'll let you in on a secret. I can do this because, frankly, you can't act on your newly acquired knowledge. You're economically stunted, abnormally poorly educated, unusually poverty-stricken and unhealthy as all get-out.

We can piss on your erstwhile largest city, and we can crap on your seafood industry with the tons and tons of chemical fertilizers we dump into the watershed to grow more corn that will go not into hungry people's stomachs but, instead, into more ethanol that will go into our SUVs' gas tanks.

Who are we? We are the Death Star.

Bye, suckas.

WE NORMALLY AREN'T so forthright about any of this. It's bad for bidness. But since your John M. Barry unfortunately divulged our proprietary information on the op-ed page of the Los Angeles Times, secrecy doesn't matter anymore.

And, as I noted, what are you bunch of dumb rednecks and coonasses going to do about it, anyway?

See, here's how it works, in a nutshell, as explained by that Barry fella:

To understand the link between the High Plains and Louisiana, one has to understand the Mississippi River system -- which stretches from New York to Idaho and drains 31 states -- and the sediment load the system carries. This sediment load was so great that it changed the nation's geography. Sixty million years ago, the ocean reached north to Cape Girardeau, Mo., but as the sea level fell, the river dropped enough mud into what geologists call the Mississippi Embayment to create all the land from Cape Girardeau to the sea, a total of 35,000 square miles in seven states.

That land-building process created Louisiana's coast, along with barrier islands that provided a buffer protecting populated areas in Louisiana and part of Mississippi's coast.

Human engineering has reversed that process, causing the loss of roughly 2,000 square miles of land since World War II. If this buffer -- equivalent to the state of Delaware -- had not been destroyed, New Orleans would need little other hurricane protection.

Numerous man-made actions have caused the land loss, but the most important, yet least recognized, may be the decline of sediment in the river. Dams built to provide electricity, irrigation and flood protection in the Upper Midwest and High Plains are largely responsible for the decline; sediment level is now only 30% to 40% of the natural amount. A particular problem has been a series of dams on the upper Missouri River beginning above Bismarck, N.D., and ending above Yankton, S.D. Historically, roughly half of the total sediment load in the Mississippi River came from the upper Missouri, but the dams trapped that sediment upstream. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, since the dams' construction in the 1950s, "the discharge of sediment from the upper Missouri River basin virtually was stopped."

Without this sediment, Louisiana began losing land. Other contributors to the land loss include energy production. About 30% of the nation's domestic oil and gas production comes from Louisiana, which has benefited the entire country. But the industry dredged 10,000 miles of canals through Louisiana's marsh, bringing in saltwater, which killed it. Another factor is the manipulation of sediment for shipping; this too has benefited the national economy by turning cities such as Tulsa and Pittsburgh into ports with direct access to the ocean.

IN SHORT, because of the Missouri River dams, we get cheap electricity and Omaha doesn't have to worry about catastrophic floods on the Not-So-Muddy-Anymore Mo . . . like the one we oh-so-narrowly staved off in 1952 with miles of sandbags and the blood, sweat and tears of thousands. Likewise, we get water for irrigation to grow the corn that goes in our gas tanks and to help wash that fertilizer down the watershed to the Gulf -- to kill your fish.

We also get great fishing and watersports on all those reservoirs up here, and lots of fine camping around them. Just check out the outdoors pages of our newspapers if you don't believe me. All in all, the damming of the Missouri River -- and its sediment flow -- has been a pretty good deal for us, which is why Congress authorized it during World War II.

SO . . . what has Louisiana gotten out of the deal? Besides screwed, that is.

Bueller? Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?

Sucks to be you. In, oh, so many ways.Too bad, so sad. We're doing fine here on the Death Star, though. "Bobby JIN-dalllll . . . come to the Dark Side, Bobby Jindal!"

OK, I keed, I keed. Seriously, though . . . don't send us any of those hoardes of refugees running north when their towns start to go under the waves, one by one. We can't comprende their lingo, and they're just not that well suited for our info-tech economy, capiche?

We do like your colorful musicians and baseball fans, however. They're quaint and interesting, in an anthropological kind of way.

Well, it's late and I really must run. Every day is a busy day on the Death Star, and we're not even half done blowing your state to Kingdom Come. I can't say "See you later," because -- well -- we won't.

In that light, I'll just close by wishing you well wherever you end up -- so long as it's not here -- and will simply say . . . "So long, it's been good to know 'ya!"