Chris Hernstrom moved to Valentine, sight unseen, because he believed in the vision of a new brewery in a beautiful location in the middle of the country supported by its community. I tried some of Chris’s test brews… delicious. Payback was helping Chris and Kyle collect wild plums from around the area so Chris could experiment with a new beer. While we did so, Chris talked about how he came to Valentine, beer and the nature of brewing.
There were many wonderful and warm aspects to Wayne Mills, though this vignette focuses on his experiences as a veteran. Wayne told me, “… They called for us to go down into central France, down south of Strasbourg, it would be in eastern France. And we got into combat down there. And I got wounded the first day. Well, I got shot with a machine gun, which several of us did at the time. And I spent about a month in the hospital, then went back up into Germany after that. I was up in Germany when the war ended.”
This project is about our stories, histories, sense of place and the nature of our conversational reflections. Over the coming weeks I shall be sharing some of the Nebraskan voices I encountered. I hope that we may hear and recognize Nebraska, discerning familiar themes and making surprising discoveries. Please listen out for those coming out on this site, social media and in collaboration with KIOS. Among many intimate and moving narratives was that of Edison Red Nest III in Alliance. In this tiny snippet, a teaser really, from our 90 minute conversation, Edison calls upon his Native American heritage to inspire Native Futures.
If you missed the latest broadcast on Omaha’s NPR affiliate KIOS FM, presented by Michael Lyon, the Local Anchor – Morning Edition, listen and enjoy it here.
Making my way from Chadron to Alliance and Scottsbluff on the western fringes of the state, I visited Tom and Aleisha at a large ranch in the middle of the Sandhills. Their ranch is along Highway 27 amid the landscape and its people famously and notoriously rendered in the writings of Mari Sandoz. Despite comprising over a quarter of Nebraska and being designated a National Natural Landmark in 1984, Tom said that many Nebraskans know little about the Sandhills. Out east, we are unaware of this vast expanse and its place in our social, economic and historic narrative.
The ranch house was several miles west of the highway along a track acceptable for trucks though somewhat less comfortable in an RV. With people and animals so dispersed, I asked Tom what community means to him. He observed, “You can live in Omaha and hardly know your neighbors at all, and when you live out here there is a whole lot more opportunity to get to know and work with your neighbors. Your neighbors are miles away but you get to know them.”
Tom and Aleisha were welcoming hosts that appeared at ease in this pastoral location, yet sophisticated too in their appreciation and experience of the world. After lunching with them, I left the ranch and kept on down highway 27. The impression of an ocean of grass washed over me. Marking this route, Mari Sandoz lived and is buried among these rolling grasslands.There is a calming solitude to this forever green, though I wondered how I might endure this limitless landscape if I worked within it, especially with weather less serene. I had asked Tom and Aleisha if this lifestyle was lonely, but they said simply that you adapt to your circumstances and come to appreciate the environment. I savored it while I could.
Listen here to dispatch three from the road, broadcast by KIOS, Omaha’s NPR affiliate, with Morning Edition Local Anchor Michael Lyon.
Andrea “Andie” Rising, the proprietor of the Bean Broker Coffee Shop and Pub in Chadron, is a lovely contradiction. A ranching child, she relishes the rural life, riding horses and wrangling cattle. “I love to hear the curlews and to smell the meadow. I could be alone for months,” she said. And yet Andie is one of the most gregarious people I have met. “I think it’s so important to be able to talk to people that have had other experiences.”
She relishes not just the activities within the building, but the Mildred Block Building itself, which Andie acquired over 15 years ago. Built in 1912, it started life as the New Citizen State Bank and has been many things since, such as a Non-Commissioned Officer Club and an armory. Now, the ground floor contains the coffee shop and pub, as well as Andie’s flat. Upstairs are more than a dozen rooms that are being restored for use by local entrepreneurial tenants. Some of the design features include the original tin ceiling, mosaic tiled floor and Frank Lloyd Wright designed window glass. The building also hosts Andie’s custom framing business, Circa 1916.
The Bean Broker is a spirited venue. Vibrancy in the town at large also can be felt emanating from the state college. I love college towns, with the urgency of thought and emphasis on inquiry brought by studious minds. I live now near the UNO campus. However, rather like Wayne in the opposite eastern corner of the state, where the warmly urbane professor JV Brummels referenced a subtle separation between community and campus affiliations as “town and gown,” in Chadron that detachment is referenced as the “10th Street divide.”
Andie and some of her patrons seemed surprised that there were not more college students and employees at the Bean Broker, although they are not entirely absent, of course. The college president “Comes here and buys coffee every single morning,” noted Andie. I spoke with four of Andie’s employees who are students at the college. They were delightful, expressive and engaged. Kyle, originally from Columbus, Ohio, chose Chadron State College as “another adventure.” He too noted something of the 10th Street divide, but also said that, “A majority of people in this town do back the college.” By way of example, he referenced the Big Event, a community day he helped organize where students took part in volunteer community efforts. The day required and received sponsorship and support from across the community. I heard similar sentiments from Don, my barber that day, who observed that, “We’re an agricultural driven community, but the hub of our existence is the college.”
Perhaps that is why the Bean Broker feels not only a natural part of the local environment but as an embodiment and ideal expression of it. Andie established the Bean Broker as a community, she said, so that “Maybe sometimes you can experience something you wouldn’t experience someplace else. Where you look at each other and don’t judge, and you say we’re all part of this.”
When you are with Andie, her irrepressible personality is shown in a giggle accompanied by an ebullient double hand clap. “I don’t know why. And I don’t know how,” she said, “There’s just so much beauty.” To say she loves everything about the world around her is an understatement. Her commitment to community in Chadron is admirable. “People are what make the world…” she said, with a beaming smile and hands poised to clap. People like Andie.
The natural beauty of the Sandhills area was one of the highlights I was told to expect. Indeed, as I spoke with people in the Valentine area, one of the factors in its success as a small rural town is the natural environment and outdoor opportunities that Mother Nature has bestowed uniquely in this region. Anyone that enjoys the outdoor life, from hunters to hikers, and those that appreciate its visual wonder, from authors to artists, find inspiration and excitement here.
Traveling between Valentine and Chadron, I decided to make an overnight RV stop at Merritt Reservoir SRA. I hadn’t expected it to be as delightful. Just three miles north of the recreation area is Snake River Falls. While Smith Falls are the highest waterfall in Nebraska, Snake River Falls are the largest by water volume. Invisible from the road, the pounding noise of water tumbling onto rock greets you first as you walk towards them, before you clamber down into the river’s ravine and see them head on. They are quite a surprise in a landscape so expansive with sand and grass, yet they are emblematic of the wonder that is the Sandhills.
At the reservoir, the Sunday afternoon pleasure seekers on the lake had dwindled in number. The buzz of boat engines and the hooting and hollering of those at leisure became faint. One of my indulgences for this trip (gifted insightfully to me by Craig and Emily Moody as I departed) is Hendricks gin with some tonic and a slice of cucumber. And so I sat, looking out over the lake with cocktail in hand and the sun melting like butter into the cliffs the other side of this horizontal vista.
I felt suspended between planes, neither here nor there, without chronology or geography. My iPhone had flipped into Mountain Time and my laptop had stayed in Central Time. I lay somewhere between and happily so. The lake itself bent life to its pace. Boats became ghosts known only by their wake rolling onto shore; waves breaking upon the sand and scattered rocks long after the boat disappeared.
The morning was no less sublime. The lake was still save for fish gulping air with noisy muscularity. Cows lowed in the far distance. Woodpeckers hammered at trees while gulls skimmed the water. Agile swifts chased each other among scented pines and the sun doubled brightly upon the water.
I am collaborating with Michael Lyon the Local Anchor, Morning Edition at KIOS, Omaha’s NPR affiliate. I shall be submitting dispatches from the road which KIOS shall play on the air. The first one was broadcast this week and you can listen again on the project web page at KIOS here. Click on the Neligh post to listen.
I had felt the responsibility before I departed upon this project to give it my all and that anticipation has only magnified. It isn’t just my duty to be fully committed and to honor the personal and fiscal support the project has received. Rather, it is that I am inviting people to talk with me in a mutually open, vulnerable and candid manner. Listening attentively is only one feature of this arrangement. More noticeably we are actively committing to each other emotionally and psychologically. On occasion this has been viscerally moving.
In discussing her work in community, Lisa in Hastings asserted that “Everyone has a voice.” That reminded me of John in Dannebrog who did not have a physical voice because of an ailment, yet he was expressive in so many ways. It also painfully reminded me of Owen in St. Paul who recounted that, “I kinda felt like I might have had some brain damage when I almost drowned. That that’s part of the reason why I’m an introvert. That there are just certain people I can talk to that, you know, you have to kinda trust them. Like share your feelings with them. It might be stupid for me to share my thoughts with a stranger like you, but you know at some point in your life you have to try to figure out is there somebody in the world that you can trust.” Owen has been one of the most giving people who chose to speak with me. When I asked him about community, he observed that, “Everyone wants to feel appreciated.”
Then there is the one that got away. Let’s call her “Dee.” Not wishing to be recorded or to have her photo taken, Dee is that conversational encounter I get to keep for myself. An 83-year-old local to the Broken Bow area, Dee asked if I’d like to see a photo of the barn her father had built. I agreed, so she popped home to retrieve it. Dee returned 15 minutes later – with a box. For three hours I sat there with Dee as she told me an array of stories prompted by the images and papers in that box. We looked at everything in there, and it was wonderful. Several times Dee would say, “I probably shouldn’t tell you this… but,” and she’d proceed. Several times Dee also would say, “Oh, you don’t want to see this,” yet I encouraged her to continue.
I confess it was exhausting. It was also, however, exhilarating. We invested ourselves sincerely in our shared conversation. Pointing at one photo, Dee exclaimed, “Oh! I remember! Perhaps it is a good thing you are here.” Then she told me her story.
a couple of 830 mile long conversations 