Wind
Content
WIND, WATER & HOME BY: KELSEA NORE
I’ve long suspected that it’s the people who belong to places, not the other way around. I also think that some people can belong to a few different places, but there’s only one way a person can figure that out, so they have to move around a lot. And you can never be sure until you can tell the stories of the place; the local legends, the haunts, schools and homes. When you know the right names for the all the different parts of a place. When you know the history of the older houses and buildings and where rumors started. If you asked, I could tell you about the Tailraces. It’s the park that hovers around the edges of the power company, over by part of the canal. On bright days, you can see the thick, dark shapes of the catfish and carp that grow and eat enormously in the warmed, thrashing waters near the dam. I know my way along those roads south of town, and what the packing plants look like at night. If we get lost, we can always follow the train tracks back into town. I'll tell you about the street where Buffalo Bill Cody performed his Wild West Show. I can show where they camped because it’s my backyard and we found their bones and their trash when we dug our basement. We can go downtown and I’ll take you to the courthouse and we’ll find the sepia photographs of the county’s original settlers, and then later we can go to the cemetery to see the last piece of land they ever owned. Their plots have sunken over time and a commemorative wroughtiron fence surrounds a few of the graves. In the fourth grade, my class took a field trip to the cemetery to do charcoal gravestone rubbings. I found the marker of an old woman who died the same day that I was born and considered, for perhaps the first time in my short existence, that I would die someday but honestly, the thought of dying didn’t scare me until I turned sixteen. From there, it’s not too far to the old movie theatre with the white marble relief sculpture of Christopher Columbus and his famous ships coming ashore. It hangs above the old-fashioned marquee. I’ll tell you how I remember a line of people curving all the way around the block when my dad took me to see ‘The Little Mermaid.’ I was young enough to think that
the entire town had turned out because there were so many people on the sidewalks. We can go to Scotus, the Catholic High School. It’s on this side of town though closer to what used to be the center. For me, everything south of Highway 30 and east of 81 could be described as ‘the streets with tall trees’. The other side of town doesn’t have near as much foliage. More parks, but less shade. We can look for the infamous Scotus ghost while we’re there. No one’s really sure if it’s a nun, a student or a little boy who haunts the main building but the lights in the Old Gym turn on at night and I’ve heard stories about desks turning over on their own accord. Remind me about the tunnels underneath the school that supposedly run all way across town to the basement of Trinity Lutheran Church, where I took my first communion, and my last one as well. Directly across the street from that church is where I went to high school. It’s the public school but not Lakeview, the country school, if anyone asks you later. You know, the entire building has been remodeled since I graduated in 2003. It doesn’t look the same as it did when I went to school there. The off-white linoleum floors are now carpeted. The noisy, maroon lockers were torn out and replaced and everything—the carpets, walls and staircases—is now a soothing beige or timid pastel color. And yet it’s all astonishingly bright. I toured the renovations a while back and I found myself missing the bright green tile in the bathrooms, the polished brass doorknobs, and the shadowy hallways near the auditorium The halls were dark enough and near enough to the principal’s office to inspire a number of rebellious make-out sessions between hormonal teenagers, myself included. Of course, the sunny new library is a huge improvement; much better than the cavernous room I knew; the library I knew was built or repurposed to sit in the center of the school. The old library had no windows, dark wood paneling and burnt orange metal shelving and artwork and it was lit by buzzing florescent lights whose once-clear plastic panes had yellowed with age.
Overall, the school certainly looks better, more modern and clean, but I couldn’t help but notice that there was a lack of something. Even the decorations were subdued—no more glittery, rah-rah banners on every other locker. The quiet in the hallways between periods was unfamiliar. There were voices, but not the familiar echo and squeak of a sneakers and flip-flops. Everything felt softened or gauzy to me. Maybe my old high school has a ghost as well? Around here, I can show you where things used to be; how the Burger King was once a lonely motel with red neon lights and next door to it, there was a Happy Chef restaurant with a huge pot-bellied statue in the parking lot. I used to order grits whenever we came here for breakfast and I’d watch people leave the motel and think about where they were going. Over time, this same bit of land became a bagel shop and an insurance office. Those places closed and a paycheck advance operation moved in, which is a pretty profitable business in a blue-collar factory town like this. Eventually, though, the whole thing was torn down and they built a new Walgreens. If we keep driving east, we’ll drive by the 'new' Hy-Vee grocery store and I’ll point out the 'new' movie theatre, which is now more than fifteen years old. I saw 'Titanic' there 4 times when I was in seventh grade. A long movie is a good excuse for a later curfew when you’re at that age. Look around; this is what a lot of people think of as the center of town. I’m not sure if the greaser kids still cruise up and down these streets but it was prime territory for those slow-rolling teenagers who came in from the little towns in the county, like Humphrey or Monroe. Which is not to say that aimless driving wasn’t a part of my formative years, because it was. My group of friends just preferred the empty gravel roads up north to the main drag of town. More privacy up there, I guess. We’ll go past the little strip-mall shop that sells adult toys and movies out of the back, and has a display of glittery prom dresses in the front window. I’ll show you where my mom used to work and if I think you can keep a secret, I’ll tell you why she quit. It’s next to one of the many gas stations, the main office of a pig farm, and a laundromat. It’s right across the street from the ‘Family Planning’ building, where the office is always full but the parking lot remains empty, except for the nurse’s cars. Funny how that works.
A back road by will spit us out by the parking lots of the 'old' Walmart, which are near the 'old' Hy-Vee, the ‘old’ Walgreens and the ‘old’ Menards. These buildings stand empty and I think they’re ugly but either the corporate owners won’t sell them or probably, no one knows what to do with them, so they’ll just rot here. They say that the new buildings are signs of progress. I’m not sure what the old buildings—the broken concrete and boarded windows—are signs of probably that the center of town is moving west. No sense in over-thinking it. We’ll head down 27th street, by Gerrard Park. My old babysitter lived across the street and I remember when a little girl named Theresa fell off the top of the Tornado Slide in the park. She was okay, it just scared her. Scared me, too. They took that slide down, I don’t know when, but the park looks flat without it. I mean, the playground equipment that was once here was old, even when I was a kid. It was made of wood that splintered despite the multiple layers of colorful paint and of cast iron bars that burned your skin in the summertime and made your hands smell like blood or pennies. I learned all the good cuss words by reading the park benches and the sides of the metal drums that doubled as garbage cans. The park was also home to the softball complex. Almost every night in the spring and summer, there were a few games going on, so I picked up few good curses there, too. They’ve replaced the rusty seesaws and the oft-broken merrygo-round with one of those plastic playground castles, brightly colored, safe and boring. My old neighborhood is directly behind that tree line. My parents built that house over twenty-five years ago. It started out a pale yellow but we painted it a deep turquoise, with white shutters and the front door was the same color as the terra cotta planters in the garden. I love that our house was so vivid, so different from the muted blues and standard beige houses that surrounded us. When we sold it, the new owners were quick to paint it a sandy color, with dark red shutters. My brother and I wrote our names in the cement by the backdoor, so no matter what, it’s still our house. I won’t tell you the secrets of my old neighborhood, not yet anyway, but I will tell you that both the seventh and tenth commandments were
broken, people spent more money than they had, and that I know some kids were afraid of their fathers. I know who furtively drank in their garages and who came home too late at night. None of the walls were thick enough. They never are though, are they? Yeah, I mean, I know all this now but when I was a little girl, I just knew that the cornfields were an excellent place to play hide and seek and that the Greene’s annual Fourth of July party was the best part of summer. I knew that the Mausbachs always had a cup of miniature marshmallows waiting for me when I would visit them. Mr. Mausbach wore railroad coveralls every day and hade a huge stained-glass window in his garage, which was salvaged from a church outside of town. He would always show us the beautiful collage of glass and color whenever we asked. Our next-door neighbor’s house was as open to me as my own and I could walk into my house and or theirs and Bev and my mother would be sitting at her kitchen table or on our back porch, smoking cigarettes and telling stories. I think that’s when my parents started talking about moving or building a new house, after Bev and Bob moved. I know this part of town. I walked it before I could drive. You know, we walked just about everywhere growing up. In junior high, ‘just walking around’ was the actual activity we based our summer afternoon and evenings upon, walking from someone’s house, to a park or a bowling alley and back again. We didn’t have a mall to wander through and besides, our parents never worried too loudly, so we never had a reason to be scared. So, we loitered for fun and stayed out of trouble. ‘Use your head’ was the general rule of thumb. I was always home by six for dinner. That was another one of the rules. If we were late or dinner was on the table early, my dad would stand on the front porch, put his thumb and finger on his bottom lip and whistle. I sometimes wonder if other neighborhood families used Dad’s whistle as their ‘time to come home’ signal as well. We could hear that whistle over half a mile away (hand to God, it was loud). I think that even if I heard it now, I’d stop whatever I was doing and head toward home. Speaking of dinner, I bet you’re probably pretty hungry by now, so let’s head up Howard Boulevard, past my dad’s office. We’ll head back toward downtown so we can eat at Duster’s, this town’s premier ‘fancy’
restaurant. The building was once a car factor. You can see by the ornate wheels carved into the front of the building. They used to build Model-T’s here, a long time ago. The man who owns Dorothy Lynch Salad Dressing owns this restaurant, too. I worked here as a hostess in high school and when I wore the uniform, middle-aged women and teenagers ran the restaurant. I actually know quite a few dishwashers who ended up as pretty decent sous chefs on account of working here. It was a great job for a high school kid. A nice enough place to look respectable on resumes, but we managed to have our fun, too. Food fights are that much more entertaining when you’re wearing an oversized tuxedo shirt, bowtie, a high-waisted skirt and pantyhose. There’s a mural in the big dining room that’s supposed to tell the story of the area and the only part I really like is the sad expression of the Indian on his horse, looking out and seeing trains, covered wagons and a big plume of black smoke. A herd of bison crosses over the train tracks, narrowly avoiding an old car rumbling down an unpaved road. They brew their own beer here, but if you want to have a drink, we ought to go to Glur’s Tavern. Glur’s is certifiably the oldest bar west of the Mississippi River. It’s one of those bits of history that come with a plaque on the wall. The light that shines out of the dirty windows always attracts college students, home on winter break, to come inside where high school rivalries and relationships will never end. The girls suck in their stomachs while they drink Captain and Diet Coke, and the boys slosh their warm tap beer on themselves and everyone wonders who’s looking at them and why. Every year, fewer people from your class show up. They’ve moved on, stayed home or don’t have a reason to come back anymore. It happens. It’s sort of strange drinking in an actual bar, to be honest. In high school, someone would get his or her hands on a twelve-pack or a handle of cheap rum and we’d park on the roadside or in a pasture and we’d drink. Mostly though, parties were held in someone’s basement the weekend their parents were out of town, or at the family’s summer cabin. I know, I know—we were stupid. And ever worse is the fact that we knew better than to drink and drive. We played the odds and didn’t always win.
My friends and I experienced mortality often and early. It’s sad (and really, it’s so strange) to tell you this but I learned that a classmate’s funeral was about as regular as the prom while I was growing up. Car accidents and the like took about three kids each year, routinely. More often they were Columbus High or Scotus kids, but Lakeview wasn’t immune either. Some of our losses were easily blamed on booze or drugs but just as many were those incomprehensibly random accidents that resulted in empty desks on Monday mornings. It’s not easy to explain what that many funerals will do to you as a kid and I think there’s a threat in speaking too plainly about lost friends. I know a lot of people who’ll only speak in low tones when they reminisce, as if they’re afraid of reminding fate what it’s capable of doing. Anyway, I guess we’ll head up 18th Avenue before sundown and pass by the small airport and Ketter Soccer Fields; it’ll give us time to talk about what you’ve seen, and what you haven’t seen yet. Like Lake North and those country roads I mentioned earlier, where my friends and I passed the time as teenagers. We’d listened to our stereos and talk about things that our parents couldn’t overhear. We smoked filched cigarettes, among other things. We called it ‘up North’ because it was and because it felt like we were detached from ‘down there.’ It’s the only explanation anyone can agree upon. We can cut back into town down 48th Avenue, the road that lies in between the new hospital and my parent’s new house. The house looks like it was built backwards but someday, they’ll put a road to the north, and then people will stop asking why the front porch faces a little patch of wild prairie. We have a big yard, which my dad spends a lot of time mowing in the spring and summer. My mom has it decorated with a strange variety of lawn ornaments—there’s a ceramic giraffe that peeks out the trees and a six-foot-tall Statue of Liberty statue that stands quietly by the daffodils. There are gargoyles at every gutter drain and a few cement pixies in the lawn. There’s a few cornfields near our property line and if you wake up very early in the morning, you can catch a glimpse of the whitetail deer warily eyeing the small garden lanterns that make ring like bells whenever the wind blows. And the wind is always blowing here.
This is central Nebraska, where you can feel even a small breeze for about ten miles after it comes from…well, wherever wind comes from. There are small, noisy creeks and crickets that chirp in time with the rustle of the leaves on the cottonwood trees, which can grow to incredible heights, even during a dry season. There are the cornfields and other crops, soybeans I guess. Children staring out of car windows are hypnotized by the flickering repetition of the carefully planted rows and I think they dream about water. Why water? I’m not sure. When I think about growing up here, in Columbus, for some reason I’m struck by the sensation of being parched. Like I was always thirsty and had cracked lips and a dry throat, all that. It’s like my memories are looking at all the small lakes and the ponds and the Platte and the Loup Rivers and I know that I could never drink that water, ‘cause drinking that water would make me sick. But it could also cool me down on a hot summer day, or clean me off if I was dirty. Which reminds me, there’s one more place I want to show you, down by the river. Some people call it the Black Bridge, but I’ve always called it the Train Bridge. You won’t see it from the either highway and it didn’t buckle or break in the flood of 1947 or when the waters rose again in 1993. The bridge is pretty hidden and it’s fairly small on anyone’s scale. From what I understand, it was built in 1913 and that cast-iron bridge must bear the weight of over twenty trains a day, probably more. There’s graffiti all over the cement pillars embedded into the sandy riverbank. In bright green paint, someone has declared that he will love Sara 4EVER, and hardly an inch away, in blue, is what I think is Sara’s reply: U BROKE MY ♥. UR A DICK! Beneath the bridge, there are more honest tributes to love (R.I.P. MARTY) and we’ll also find an odd mixture of emotion and philosophy, of pride (NATE WAS HERE) and apathy (I DON”T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH MY LIFE…AND I DON’T CARE). I think it all forms a rather incredible mural when you stand back and look at it. The smeared remnants of small fires, the beer cans, the litter and cigarette butts and the footprints blend into with the colorful graffiti and make for a nice contrast against the dark geometric patterns on the bridge. That’s what I see, anyway.
If you’re quick, and I promise you, we won’t get hurt, we can hide beneath the tracks and wait for train to come. Don’t look at me that way— I promise, it’s safe. Sort of. We’ll run down the workman’s walk and down the trestles. We’ll have to jump onto a concrete ledge and then duck through a small opening. That’s it. We’ll be beneath the train tracks. You can look up and see the sunlight falling through the wooden railroad ties. There’s enough room down there to stretch out if you want to, or even to run around. I’ll point out the perfectly round pebbles that are thrown through the trestles. It must be gravel or even bits of coal, carved and smooth by the high pressure of the trains. You’ll hear the train before it comes and it will make your heart speed up. This is what happens: The bridge starts to shake, just a small vibration at first, and then the whistle shrieks again. Dust and soot fall on your shoulders and shakes into your eyes. Right before you can think of something to say, the train is overhead. The noise is just incredible. You look up and you can see the wheels churning. You might even think about touching them—they’re that close—but you won’t; you can’t move. You’ll laugh out loud so you can rival the sound above your head and you’ll grab my arm. You’ll scream because for the first time in your life you can make a big, terrible noise and no one will hear it. If the train is long enough, the rhythm will start to make sense, and you’ll see the pattern in the flickering light of the ties and between the railcars but right before you figure it out, the train will be gone. In those few seconds after the train is gone there’s a silence and it’s the most perfect example of quiet that you’ll ever know. It’s like the insects don’t dare to move, the birds are still, and that town I just showed you doesn’t exist anymore. The industrial authority of the train has stunned even the sheer, angry force of nature. But it won’t last very long—this hush—only a few seconds and then the world will burst open with its noise again. I’ll leave you alone for a few seconds to make sure there’s not again train coming. Is it what you expected? Is there anything more I can tell you? Did you come here with me expecting statistics or museum placards? I can’t claim any ownership to such things, and frankly they’re nothing but footnotes in my story.
I know that I belong to this place, despite my adolescent desire to cut ties. I've moved away but I often stop and wonder how much of me was created back there and how much I really know; how much I’ve merely imagined. Please know that I accept my midwestern naiveté, but that this seemingly innocent glance is not without nuance, or even jest. Don’t ever think that I’ve been crippled by my upbringing and ignore the fact that one foot drags. Give me the benefit of my doubts; I know the world is taller than three stories. I know that there’s clean water to drink. But let me be immersed and lost in this flat and rich expanse. I’ve traveled beyond these plains and I have seen wonderful things but you must understand that this is where I learned to see the world. I will trust my perceptions. I will carry them with me.
I’ve long suspected that it’s the people who belong to places, not the other way around. I also think that some people can belong to a few different places, but there’s only one way a person can figure that out, so they have to move around a lot. And you can never be sure until you can tell the stories of the place; the local legends, the haunts, schools and homes. When you know the right names for the all the different parts of a place. When you know the history of the older houses and buildings and where rumors started. If you asked, I could tell you about the Tailraces. It’s the park that hovers around the edges of the power company, over by part of the canal. On bright days, you can see the thick, dark shapes of the catfish and carp that grow and eat enormously in the warmed, thrashing waters near the dam. I know my way along those roads south of town, and what the packing plants look like at night. If we get lost, we can always follow the train tracks back into town. I'll tell you about the street where Buffalo Bill Cody performed his Wild West Show. I can show where they camped because it’s my backyard and we found their bones and their trash when we dug our basement. We can go downtown and I’ll take you to the courthouse and we’ll find the sepia photographs of the county’s original settlers, and then later we can go to the cemetery to see the last piece of land they ever owned. Their plots have sunken over time and a commemorative wroughtiron fence surrounds a few of the graves. In the fourth grade, my class took a field trip to the cemetery to do charcoal gravestone rubbings. I found the marker of an old woman who died the same day that I was born and considered, for perhaps the first time in my short existence, that I would die someday but honestly, the thought of dying didn’t scare me until I turned sixteen. From there, it’s not too far to the old movie theatre with the white marble relief sculpture of Christopher Columbus and his famous ships coming ashore. It hangs above the old-fashioned marquee. I’ll tell you how I remember a line of people curving all the way around the block when my dad took me to see ‘The Little Mermaid.’ I was young enough to think that
the entire town had turned out because there were so many people on the sidewalks. We can go to Scotus, the Catholic High School. It’s on this side of town though closer to what used to be the center. For me, everything south of Highway 30 and east of 81 could be described as ‘the streets with tall trees’. The other side of town doesn’t have near as much foliage. More parks, but less shade. We can look for the infamous Scotus ghost while we’re there. No one’s really sure if it’s a nun, a student or a little boy who haunts the main building but the lights in the Old Gym turn on at night and I’ve heard stories about desks turning over on their own accord. Remind me about the tunnels underneath the school that supposedly run all way across town to the basement of Trinity Lutheran Church, where I took my first communion, and my last one as well. Directly across the street from that church is where I went to high school. It’s the public school but not Lakeview, the country school, if anyone asks you later. You know, the entire building has been remodeled since I graduated in 2003. It doesn’t look the same as it did when I went to school there. The off-white linoleum floors are now carpeted. The noisy, maroon lockers were torn out and replaced and everything—the carpets, walls and staircases—is now a soothing beige or timid pastel color. And yet it’s all astonishingly bright. I toured the renovations a while back and I found myself missing the bright green tile in the bathrooms, the polished brass doorknobs, and the shadowy hallways near the auditorium The halls were dark enough and near enough to the principal’s office to inspire a number of rebellious make-out sessions between hormonal teenagers, myself included. Of course, the sunny new library is a huge improvement; much better than the cavernous room I knew; the library I knew was built or repurposed to sit in the center of the school. The old library had no windows, dark wood paneling and burnt orange metal shelving and artwork and it was lit by buzzing florescent lights whose once-clear plastic panes had yellowed with age.
Overall, the school certainly looks better, more modern and clean, but I couldn’t help but notice that there was a lack of something. Even the decorations were subdued—no more glittery, rah-rah banners on every other locker. The quiet in the hallways between periods was unfamiliar. There were voices, but not the familiar echo and squeak of a sneakers and flip-flops. Everything felt softened or gauzy to me. Maybe my old high school has a ghost as well? Around here, I can show you where things used to be; how the Burger King was once a lonely motel with red neon lights and next door to it, there was a Happy Chef restaurant with a huge pot-bellied statue in the parking lot. I used to order grits whenever we came here for breakfast and I’d watch people leave the motel and think about where they were going. Over time, this same bit of land became a bagel shop and an insurance office. Those places closed and a paycheck advance operation moved in, which is a pretty profitable business in a blue-collar factory town like this. Eventually, though, the whole thing was torn down and they built a new Walgreens. If we keep driving east, we’ll drive by the 'new' Hy-Vee grocery store and I’ll point out the 'new' movie theatre, which is now more than fifteen years old. I saw 'Titanic' there 4 times when I was in seventh grade. A long movie is a good excuse for a later curfew when you’re at that age. Look around; this is what a lot of people think of as the center of town. I’m not sure if the greaser kids still cruise up and down these streets but it was prime territory for those slow-rolling teenagers who came in from the little towns in the county, like Humphrey or Monroe. Which is not to say that aimless driving wasn’t a part of my formative years, because it was. My group of friends just preferred the empty gravel roads up north to the main drag of town. More privacy up there, I guess. We’ll go past the little strip-mall shop that sells adult toys and movies out of the back, and has a display of glittery prom dresses in the front window. I’ll show you where my mom used to work and if I think you can keep a secret, I’ll tell you why she quit. It’s next to one of the many gas stations, the main office of a pig farm, and a laundromat. It’s right across the street from the ‘Family Planning’ building, where the office is always full but the parking lot remains empty, except for the nurse’s cars. Funny how that works.
A back road by will spit us out by the parking lots of the 'old' Walmart, which are near the 'old' Hy-Vee, the ‘old’ Walgreens and the ‘old’ Menards. These buildings stand empty and I think they’re ugly but either the corporate owners won’t sell them or probably, no one knows what to do with them, so they’ll just rot here. They say that the new buildings are signs of progress. I’m not sure what the old buildings—the broken concrete and boarded windows—are signs of probably that the center of town is moving west. No sense in over-thinking it. We’ll head down 27th street, by Gerrard Park. My old babysitter lived across the street and I remember when a little girl named Theresa fell off the top of the Tornado Slide in the park. She was okay, it just scared her. Scared me, too. They took that slide down, I don’t know when, but the park looks flat without it. I mean, the playground equipment that was once here was old, even when I was a kid. It was made of wood that splintered despite the multiple layers of colorful paint and of cast iron bars that burned your skin in the summertime and made your hands smell like blood or pennies. I learned all the good cuss words by reading the park benches and the sides of the metal drums that doubled as garbage cans. The park was also home to the softball complex. Almost every night in the spring and summer, there were a few games going on, so I picked up few good curses there, too. They’ve replaced the rusty seesaws and the oft-broken merrygo-round with one of those plastic playground castles, brightly colored, safe and boring. My old neighborhood is directly behind that tree line. My parents built that house over twenty-five years ago. It started out a pale yellow but we painted it a deep turquoise, with white shutters and the front door was the same color as the terra cotta planters in the garden. I love that our house was so vivid, so different from the muted blues and standard beige houses that surrounded us. When we sold it, the new owners were quick to paint it a sandy color, with dark red shutters. My brother and I wrote our names in the cement by the backdoor, so no matter what, it’s still our house. I won’t tell you the secrets of my old neighborhood, not yet anyway, but I will tell you that both the seventh and tenth commandments were
broken, people spent more money than they had, and that I know some kids were afraid of their fathers. I know who furtively drank in their garages and who came home too late at night. None of the walls were thick enough. They never are though, are they? Yeah, I mean, I know all this now but when I was a little girl, I just knew that the cornfields were an excellent place to play hide and seek and that the Greene’s annual Fourth of July party was the best part of summer. I knew that the Mausbachs always had a cup of miniature marshmallows waiting for me when I would visit them. Mr. Mausbach wore railroad coveralls every day and hade a huge stained-glass window in his garage, which was salvaged from a church outside of town. He would always show us the beautiful collage of glass and color whenever we asked. Our next-door neighbor’s house was as open to me as my own and I could walk into my house and or theirs and Bev and my mother would be sitting at her kitchen table or on our back porch, smoking cigarettes and telling stories. I think that’s when my parents started talking about moving or building a new house, after Bev and Bob moved. I know this part of town. I walked it before I could drive. You know, we walked just about everywhere growing up. In junior high, ‘just walking around’ was the actual activity we based our summer afternoon and evenings upon, walking from someone’s house, to a park or a bowling alley and back again. We didn’t have a mall to wander through and besides, our parents never worried too loudly, so we never had a reason to be scared. So, we loitered for fun and stayed out of trouble. ‘Use your head’ was the general rule of thumb. I was always home by six for dinner. That was another one of the rules. If we were late or dinner was on the table early, my dad would stand on the front porch, put his thumb and finger on his bottom lip and whistle. I sometimes wonder if other neighborhood families used Dad’s whistle as their ‘time to come home’ signal as well. We could hear that whistle over half a mile away (hand to God, it was loud). I think that even if I heard it now, I’d stop whatever I was doing and head toward home. Speaking of dinner, I bet you’re probably pretty hungry by now, so let’s head up Howard Boulevard, past my dad’s office. We’ll head back toward downtown so we can eat at Duster’s, this town’s premier ‘fancy’
restaurant. The building was once a car factor. You can see by the ornate wheels carved into the front of the building. They used to build Model-T’s here, a long time ago. The man who owns Dorothy Lynch Salad Dressing owns this restaurant, too. I worked here as a hostess in high school and when I wore the uniform, middle-aged women and teenagers ran the restaurant. I actually know quite a few dishwashers who ended up as pretty decent sous chefs on account of working here. It was a great job for a high school kid. A nice enough place to look respectable on resumes, but we managed to have our fun, too. Food fights are that much more entertaining when you’re wearing an oversized tuxedo shirt, bowtie, a high-waisted skirt and pantyhose. There’s a mural in the big dining room that’s supposed to tell the story of the area and the only part I really like is the sad expression of the Indian on his horse, looking out and seeing trains, covered wagons and a big plume of black smoke. A herd of bison crosses over the train tracks, narrowly avoiding an old car rumbling down an unpaved road. They brew their own beer here, but if you want to have a drink, we ought to go to Glur’s Tavern. Glur’s is certifiably the oldest bar west of the Mississippi River. It’s one of those bits of history that come with a plaque on the wall. The light that shines out of the dirty windows always attracts college students, home on winter break, to come inside where high school rivalries and relationships will never end. The girls suck in their stomachs while they drink Captain and Diet Coke, and the boys slosh their warm tap beer on themselves and everyone wonders who’s looking at them and why. Every year, fewer people from your class show up. They’ve moved on, stayed home or don’t have a reason to come back anymore. It happens. It’s sort of strange drinking in an actual bar, to be honest. In high school, someone would get his or her hands on a twelve-pack or a handle of cheap rum and we’d park on the roadside or in a pasture and we’d drink. Mostly though, parties were held in someone’s basement the weekend their parents were out of town, or at the family’s summer cabin. I know, I know—we were stupid. And ever worse is the fact that we knew better than to drink and drive. We played the odds and didn’t always win.
My friends and I experienced mortality often and early. It’s sad (and really, it’s so strange) to tell you this but I learned that a classmate’s funeral was about as regular as the prom while I was growing up. Car accidents and the like took about three kids each year, routinely. More often they were Columbus High or Scotus kids, but Lakeview wasn’t immune either. Some of our losses were easily blamed on booze or drugs but just as many were those incomprehensibly random accidents that resulted in empty desks on Monday mornings. It’s not easy to explain what that many funerals will do to you as a kid and I think there’s a threat in speaking too plainly about lost friends. I know a lot of people who’ll only speak in low tones when they reminisce, as if they’re afraid of reminding fate what it’s capable of doing. Anyway, I guess we’ll head up 18th Avenue before sundown and pass by the small airport and Ketter Soccer Fields; it’ll give us time to talk about what you’ve seen, and what you haven’t seen yet. Like Lake North and those country roads I mentioned earlier, where my friends and I passed the time as teenagers. We’d listened to our stereos and talk about things that our parents couldn’t overhear. We smoked filched cigarettes, among other things. We called it ‘up North’ because it was and because it felt like we were detached from ‘down there.’ It’s the only explanation anyone can agree upon. We can cut back into town down 48th Avenue, the road that lies in between the new hospital and my parent’s new house. The house looks like it was built backwards but someday, they’ll put a road to the north, and then people will stop asking why the front porch faces a little patch of wild prairie. We have a big yard, which my dad spends a lot of time mowing in the spring and summer. My mom has it decorated with a strange variety of lawn ornaments—there’s a ceramic giraffe that peeks out the trees and a six-foot-tall Statue of Liberty statue that stands quietly by the daffodils. There are gargoyles at every gutter drain and a few cement pixies in the lawn. There’s a few cornfields near our property line and if you wake up very early in the morning, you can catch a glimpse of the whitetail deer warily eyeing the small garden lanterns that make ring like bells whenever the wind blows. And the wind is always blowing here.
This is central Nebraska, where you can feel even a small breeze for about ten miles after it comes from…well, wherever wind comes from. There are small, noisy creeks and crickets that chirp in time with the rustle of the leaves on the cottonwood trees, which can grow to incredible heights, even during a dry season. There are the cornfields and other crops, soybeans I guess. Children staring out of car windows are hypnotized by the flickering repetition of the carefully planted rows and I think they dream about water. Why water? I’m not sure. When I think about growing up here, in Columbus, for some reason I’m struck by the sensation of being parched. Like I was always thirsty and had cracked lips and a dry throat, all that. It’s like my memories are looking at all the small lakes and the ponds and the Platte and the Loup Rivers and I know that I could never drink that water, ‘cause drinking that water would make me sick. But it could also cool me down on a hot summer day, or clean me off if I was dirty. Which reminds me, there’s one more place I want to show you, down by the river. Some people call it the Black Bridge, but I’ve always called it the Train Bridge. You won’t see it from the either highway and it didn’t buckle or break in the flood of 1947 or when the waters rose again in 1993. The bridge is pretty hidden and it’s fairly small on anyone’s scale. From what I understand, it was built in 1913 and that cast-iron bridge must bear the weight of over twenty trains a day, probably more. There’s graffiti all over the cement pillars embedded into the sandy riverbank. In bright green paint, someone has declared that he will love Sara 4EVER, and hardly an inch away, in blue, is what I think is Sara’s reply: U BROKE MY ♥. UR A DICK! Beneath the bridge, there are more honest tributes to love (R.I.P. MARTY) and we’ll also find an odd mixture of emotion and philosophy, of pride (NATE WAS HERE) and apathy (I DON”T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH MY LIFE…AND I DON’T CARE). I think it all forms a rather incredible mural when you stand back and look at it. The smeared remnants of small fires, the beer cans, the litter and cigarette butts and the footprints blend into with the colorful graffiti and make for a nice contrast against the dark geometric patterns on the bridge. That’s what I see, anyway.
If you’re quick, and I promise you, we won’t get hurt, we can hide beneath the tracks and wait for train to come. Don’t look at me that way— I promise, it’s safe. Sort of. We’ll run down the workman’s walk and down the trestles. We’ll have to jump onto a concrete ledge and then duck through a small opening. That’s it. We’ll be beneath the train tracks. You can look up and see the sunlight falling through the wooden railroad ties. There’s enough room down there to stretch out if you want to, or even to run around. I’ll point out the perfectly round pebbles that are thrown through the trestles. It must be gravel or even bits of coal, carved and smooth by the high pressure of the trains. You’ll hear the train before it comes and it will make your heart speed up. This is what happens: The bridge starts to shake, just a small vibration at first, and then the whistle shrieks again. Dust and soot fall on your shoulders and shakes into your eyes. Right before you can think of something to say, the train is overhead. The noise is just incredible. You look up and you can see the wheels churning. You might even think about touching them—they’re that close—but you won’t; you can’t move. You’ll laugh out loud so you can rival the sound above your head and you’ll grab my arm. You’ll scream because for the first time in your life you can make a big, terrible noise and no one will hear it. If the train is long enough, the rhythm will start to make sense, and you’ll see the pattern in the flickering light of the ties and between the railcars but right before you figure it out, the train will be gone. In those few seconds after the train is gone there’s a silence and it’s the most perfect example of quiet that you’ll ever know. It’s like the insects don’t dare to move, the birds are still, and that town I just showed you doesn’t exist anymore. The industrial authority of the train has stunned even the sheer, angry force of nature. But it won’t last very long—this hush—only a few seconds and then the world will burst open with its noise again. I’ll leave you alone for a few seconds to make sure there’s not again train coming. Is it what you expected? Is there anything more I can tell you? Did you come here with me expecting statistics or museum placards? I can’t claim any ownership to such things, and frankly they’re nothing but footnotes in my story.
I know that I belong to this place, despite my adolescent desire to cut ties. I've moved away but I often stop and wonder how much of me was created back there and how much I really know; how much I’ve merely imagined. Please know that I accept my midwestern naiveté, but that this seemingly innocent glance is not without nuance, or even jest. Don’t ever think that I’ve been crippled by my upbringing and ignore the fact that one foot drags. Give me the benefit of my doubts; I know the world is taller than three stories. I know that there’s clean water to drink. But let me be immersed and lost in this flat and rich expanse. I’ve traveled beyond these plains and I have seen wonderful things but you must understand that this is where I learned to see the world. I will trust my perceptions. I will carry them with me.
