The further through the interior you drive, the more you understand that the seldom seen constituencies which make up the fabled “heartland” to which generations of American politicians plead fealty is a quiet place.
US Route 50, a century old this year, is a thin ribbon that connects Atlantic to Pacific: 3,000 miles of two-lane America running through the former Appalachian mining towns, through prairie towns and across the more remote sections of the Nevada desert. If nothing like as lauded as Route 66, also 100 years old this year, “50” has modelled itself as the ‘backbone of America’, leaving the other landmark trail to pleasure-cruising retirees and the last of the Deadheads.
Its line through Kansas runs through the stark, unromantic eastern plains of Colorado and a series of small farming towns which seldom make national news. On a Sunday lunchtime, I passed through Lamar (pop 7,000), which was busy with trucks and pickups and scarce of people apart from a small, three-person protest at a junction near the traffic lights. It was, in the deeply Republican centre of Prower County, an anti-Ice (Immigrations and Customs Enforcement) protest.
“It’s more of a national thing,” Nico Flores tells me brightly, when I park up and ask her if there had been a recent local clampdown on immigrants in the area.
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“A lot of people here in this town are immigrants. And they work real hard for what they do. So we are protesting because a lot of the actions that the Ice actions are taking against civilians are insane. And nobody is really speaking about it here who should be speaking.”
As Ice placards go, Flores’s design could hardly have been less inflammatory: a brightly coloured crayon drawing of a boot above ice and the slogan, “I Like My Ice Crushed.” But still, her weekly protest grabs the attention of passersby. On some Sundays, she explains, she stands on this corner alone. This time, she has recruited a couple of friends for company.
“A lot of people blow exhausts at us and the horns of their trucks. That is the most common negative reaction. Head shakes. People yelling at us sometimes. Stuff like, ‘Go home! Trump’s still your president.’ I’ve gotten two Nazi salutes! But I think consistency is key to this.”
Just a fortnight earlier I had been in Minneapolis, where big blocks of winter ice capped the footpaths around the memorial where Alex Pretti was shot dead. Here in Lamar, on February 15th, it was close to 90 degrees Fahrenheit and a warm, lively wind was gusting through the street. The deaths of Pretti and Renee Good acquired a national resonance. In Minneapolis, thousands protested weekly. There is a certain safety in numbers. For the few minutes we stood speaking, a series of truck horns blared and needless car revving broke through the Sunday lunchtime torpor, and with immaculate timing, from the open window of a pick-up a male voice hollered: “F***k Youuuu!”
One of Flores’s companions shouted, “No, thank you,” after the truck. Their protest feels like a thankless task but Flores believes that her perspective, as a liberal in a deeply conservative farming town, can play a role.
“I voted for Harris, yes. But I am an independent and more of a leftist. It is kind of difficult because people around me, I feel, are not really educated on the issues that are going on here in America. And there is no questioning of authority regardless of whether authority is doing good or not.
“I was raised on the internet and spent a lot of time researching. I feel a lot of people are afraid of change and remain incurious, you know. They only know because of their parents or what they see on social media. And the thing is that social media becomes an echo chamber of what you already believe. So it’s just important to expand out and try and get the full picture.”
Flores’s family goes back generations in this arable corner of southeastern Colorado. Her great-grandfather was a Mexican immigrant. Her great-great maternal grandparents were German immigrants. She nods at the suggestion that it must be intimidating to stand here with no real crowd or official support against a constant stream of mostly hostile traffic.
“It is. It’s very scary. Especially when you do this alone. Which I have done. Even going back to the Charlie Kirk killing, we had a protest that was cancelled around then because of the fear of people using what is their second amendment right, but in the wrong way.”
The breeze is pleasant but loud enough to drown out her voice on the recorder at times. It’s a constant feature of the landscape. In 2013, Lamar was smothered in a sudden cloud of dust so severe that it trapped some residents in their homes for 15 hours.
“You hear sand and dirt pounding against the window,” Jillane Hixson told Colleen O’Connor of The Denver Post. “You know that it’s your crop that’s hitting the windows and blowing away and it’s not just affecting you, but also everyone else. You can’t stand to look at it. It’s like a train wreck, looking a disaster full in the face.”
O’Connor described a countryside that had become unrecognisable after three successive years of drought. “Miles on either side of US 287 between Kit Carson and Lamar, the earth is brown and bare during a season that should be bursting with green native grasses and wheat. Even weeds aren’t growing.”
There have been similar dust devils since. Although the Dust Bowl of the 1930s is most commonly associated with Oklahoma and California through song and word and the piercing Dorothea Lange portraits, southeastern Colorado was considered the epicentre of what remains the worst human-caused ecological disaster in US history.
The simple cause of the dust storms was overproduction of wheat, with farmers stripping fields of its grassland top to chase wheat yields, sucking nutrients from soil – which turned dry, and fatally dangerous when carried by seasonal windstorms. Black Sunday, April 14th, 1935, remains a notorious date in the local histories of Lamar and other towns in Prowers and neighbouring Baca County. A terrifying volume of earth transformed the skies into a black tempest that day – more dirt flew through the air than was displaced during the seven-year construction of the Panama Canal. The consequences and fear of those clouds passed through the generations.
About 7,000 people lost their lives to “dust pneumonia”, with young children particularly vulnerable. A quarter of a million people left their homes. Stories of Americans eating Russian thistle to survive became part of the lore. Entire towns were left empty. Among the plethora of contemporary photographs is the stunning image of a monstrous dust cloud looming behind a solitary truck on highway 59, outside Lamar, in 1936. The easier thing was to leave. And yet in Lamar and many towns like it, the majority elected to tough it out.
Not far from where we are chatting is Lamar’s most celebrated architectural relic: the “Petrified Wood Gas Station”, built in 1932 by a local lumber merchant, William Brown, entirely from fossilised wood – which allowed him to label it, with technical accuracy, as the oldest gas station in the world.
The building has survived and now operates as an office for a car dealership and as a link to Lamar in the Dirty Thirties, when the town was a wasteland.
It’s hard to imagine anything like a dust storm on this wonderfully clear day. But it’s a resilient, unforgiving countryside where everything changes slowly, including attitudes.
In high school, Nico Flores was aware that many of her classmates absorbed political affiliations and a worldview which felt to her inherited and unquestioning. Lamar County voted Franklin Roosevelt to the White House in 1932 and 1936, but since the Dust Bowl voted Republican in every presidential election bar two, with Jimmy Carter in 1976 the most recent. Donald Trump drew 74 per cent of the vote in 2024.
When Flores graduates from Lamar Community College, she will become the first person in her family to achieve a third-level qualification. Although it’s a small institution, there are, she says, students from “all over the world” in attendance and it has furthered her curiosity for what is out there. But for now, she’s determined to do her bit by holding up a placard in her hometown and facing down the blizzard.
“I think it is important that we are seen and heard, more than anything. Whether it is good or bad, people will read our signs and see us and know what we stand for. I think it is very important that we focus on our actual freedoms and what this country was founded on rather than trying to shut out certain parts of say, the First Amendment, because they want you to believe what they want you to believe.
“And I think silence is compliance. So, I feel it’s important that we stand for our country. And this right here is very American to me. Standing for what you believe in and to be on the right side of history, the correct side of history.”
