Happy days are sometimes the hardest to write about. After too much time spent on the Lincoln Highway in recent days, it was a delight to spend the morning on the Keystone supply canal. Perhaps 20 feet wide and flanked by a dirt access road, the close proximity to water brought a steady, gentle breeze, and the hill separating me from the highway and railroad allowed for the most sustained peace and quiet in a week. Even when I returned to pavement, I soon reached first Lake Ogallala and then McConaughy Lake. The latter, with its soft, white sand beaches, was particularly surprising, though I found the former to be charming and an amazing spot for a long break. What else is there to say? It was the prettiest walk I’ve had in Nebraska
Painful days are sometimes the hardest to write about. It’s walking. I’m not climbing a glacier with ice axes, or something exciting like that. And besides, I’m doing this by choice. What could be more self-indulgent than choosing to do something for fun and then making other people read about your noble suffering? On a day like this, I probably took 70,000 steps. OK, so maybe 35,000 of them were painful. The new shoes I got in Kearney, which I didn’t wear for a couple days, aren’t a perfect fit. My right foot is a little snug, and that’s resulting in some chafing on the toes and heel. I’m not going to have to get something amputated or anything, but it stings. It’s annoying. I’ll try to work out a solution. Today, though, it sucked. What else is there to say? I chose to keep going, after all.
And sometimes, you almost walk right past the most interesting part of the day. My route bypassed the village of Keystone on the way to Lake Ogallala. Maybe if there had been a mini-mart it could have piqued my interest, but it likely would have been a two-mile detour, and the day was long enough already. As I climbed the embankment from the lake to the dam overlooking McConaughy Lake, though, I paused and looked backward, discovering a sign for the Little Church in Keystone. And that sign was well warranted!
Keystone’s population today is 22. I don’t know what it was in the early 1900s, but it wasn’t much bigger. And that was the problem. Keystone was too small to support the construction of both a Catholic church and a Protestant church. It took the special effort of a group of eleven teenage girls to raise the funds for one church, along with additional support from Georgia Paxton, the wife of the founder of Paxton, where I spent the previous night.
Given that they only had a single church, but needed to accommodate Protestants and Catholics, they got creative. On one side of the church, they installed a Protestant altar. On the other side, a Catholic altar. And the pews were cleverly designed with reversible backs to allow attendees to face in either direction. I don’t think they were holding simultaneous services or anything, but still–Protestants and Catholics (thanks to a special dispensation from Pope Leo XIII), brought together again under this one very small roof!
